Armanino Marketing Playbook

Objective: To have an agreed upon terminology, processes and practices guide for the marketing team.

Goals:

A document that gives an overview of Armanino’s marketing philosophy.

An agreed upon set of terminology often used in the Armanino marketing world.

Can be shared as a PDF outside of Help Juice as well as reside inside that repository.

Table of Contents:

Armanino’s GTM Philosophy

Common Marketing Terminology

Campaign Management

Measuring campaigns

Strategic Marketing Planning

Budgeting  

Internal Marketing Communication

Collaboration List

 

Armanino’s GTM Marketing Philosophy

 
Armanino’s marketing philosophy is to lead with thought leadership content that is educational, innovative, strategic, industry-focused and on brand.
 
When building your marketing content, assets, events etc., ensure you have thought through the 4 key areas of marketing for Armanino.

Watch the presentation of marketing themes and segmentations by Rob DeMartini, VP of Marketing to help align to the firm’s marketing strategy.

 

Common Marketing Terminology  

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
A potential customer who has expressed an interest in your product or services. An MQL is past the awareness stage at the top of the marketing funnel. Stage zero opportunities in Armanino’s CRM system are considered MQLs. It indicates the marketing pipeline for a product or service that should be nurtured to SQL. An MQL will be opened in Armanino’s CRM system as a stage zero opportunity to be worked on by either Sales or a member of our SDR team. (See Stage Zero Opportunity for more details)

Qualified Lead (SQL)
Sales Qualified Lead. A prospective customer that has progressed past the engagement stage has been thoroughly vetted by sales and considered ready for the next stage in the sales process.

BANT
Stands for budget, authority, need and timing. When a lead moves into the SQL category, the sales team will determine if BANT is met to continue working the opportunity.

Stage Zero Opportunity
A stage zero opportunity is an Armanino term for identifying a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) in our Dynamics CRM system that should be prospected by the SDR, Sales team or assigned owner. Stage Zero opportunities indicate the health of the marketing pipeline for a product or service that should be nurtured/prospected to become a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) / Opportunity with a stage greater than or equal to 1. (See Stage Zero Opportunity Process)

Opportunity (Stage 1+)
A qualified sales lead identified as someone in potential need of a product or service. Typically, an opportunity  

Nurture Campaign
An email behavior-based campaign where educational information is shared at crucial points in the sales cycle. The campaign encourages engagement and triggers the next message. It is a nurture relationship with leads.

Dynamic Email Content  
Dynamic email content is content within an email that changes depending on who receives the message. It allows you to send a single email with content tailored to each recipient's needs, interests, and segmentation characteristics rather than sending multiple emails.  

Drip Campaign
An automated time-based campaign where emails are scheduled for specific dates and times. The campaign has consistent touches to stay top of mind with a targeted buyer segment. The messages can stand alone and build on prior messages. It is designed to determine lead’s needs.
 
Content Syndication
Republishing content with a third-party vendor to generate traffic to website/leads. Please work with the Armanino Inbound Team to build out the strategy for content syndication. Especially before signing vendor contracts.

Inbound Marketing
Attracts (pulls in) potential customers through creating engaging and relevant content that addresses prospect’s interests and needs.  

Outbound Marketing
Find the customer where they are by pushing out ads or messaging to targets, typically in a place where they are engaging in another activity.  

Pay Per Click (PPC)
Advertiser pays a third-party vendor to promote content/ad and advertiser pays every time an ad link is clicked on.  

Demand Generation
Methodologies to drive awareness and interest of services; includes lead capture, lead nurture and pipeline acceleration.  

Digital Marketing
A channel of marketing to promote and sell services on the internet. Digital marketing is also called online marketing, and is the promotion of the firm brand to connect with potential clients using the internet and other channels like search engines, social media networks, video marketing, email marketing, etc.  

Brand Awareness
Extent to which consumers are familiar with brand and services.

Top of the Funnel (ToFu)
The first stage of a buyer's journey. Focuses on strategies that are concentrated on the awareness of service and helps attract leads that may become clients.  

Middle of the Funnel (MoFu)
The middle stage of a buyer's journey. Marketing activities that help solve the buyer’s problem.  

Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu)
The last stage of the buyer’s journey where the conversion of the potential client/lead purchases the firm’s service.  

Buyer’s Journey
The path to purchase. The process buyers go through to become aware of, consider, evaluate, and decide to purchase a new service.  

Go-to-Market Strategy
A plan that details how a firm can engage with customers to convince them to buy their service and to gain a competitive advantage. A plan that defines target audience, coordinates messaging, and positions the service. A comprehensive plan that outlines the approach and strategy steps to attract pipeline.

Campaign ROI
The return on investment (ROI) marketing quantifies to justify how marketing campaigns generate revenue for the firm.  

Cost Per Lead (CPL)
Cost per lead is the total cost of the campaign divided by the number of leads generated to calculate the cost per lead. It is the amount of money it takes a firm to generate one lead.  
 
Business Development (BD)  
A BD at Armanino is responsible for driving business growth within the organization. They develop a network of contacts to attract new clients, research new market opportunities and growth projects.

Outside Sales Rep (OSR)  
In Armanino’s CRM system, there is a custom field called “Date to OSR.” This field represents the date a Stage Zero opportunity was converted to Stage 1 and assigned to an Armanino Outside Sales Rep to work.

Campaign Management

Campaign management is how you identify the strategies you will use to support your goals, objectives, identify your ideal client, outline a budget, monitor and track progress as well as analyze the results. Below is an outline for successful campaign management from the tools we use to tracking and measurements.

1. WorkFront
   Armanino utilizes WorkFront to manage marketing campaigns and events. Project Managers are responsible for driving their campaigns forward. Refer to the articles below to understand naming conventions, project types, timeframes and best practices.
   1. WorkFront 101
   2. Naming Convention
   3. Project Types and Times
   4. Best Practices
      
      
2. Start with a Goal, Objective and Budget
   When starting your event or campaign, the first step is identifying your goal, objective and budget you have to influence the desired outcome. You will also want to know what success looks like and how it can be measured.
   Tip: Run your strategy through the Marketing Decision Framework. It will help ensure you are on track with a well thought out strategy for your event or campaign from start to finish.
   Examples of marketing campaign goals:
    -Build brand awareness
    -Increase website traffic
    -Establish industry authority
    -Acquire new customers or increase sales
    Tip: Read more about marketing campaign goals in thisarticle by Hubspot.
   
   
3. Identify Target Audience & Persona
   Understanding your ideal customer profile (ICP). Build out an ICP for your role, industry, product, or service line that you want to include. Review the ICP with the subject matter experts for the service line to ensure alignment.
   Additionally, consider the geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavior of the primary target audience.
   Research your ICP inside the firm’s CRM system. Is the target audience large enough for your campaign. If it is inadequate, work with the Data & Analytics team to build up the target audience.
   
   
4. Selecting Marketing Channel or Medium
   Once your goal, objective and audience are identified, consider the marketing channel or medium strategy you will use. Some common examples are articles, blogs, infographics, white papers, eBooks, webinars, videos, and paid advertising. Your marketing channel/medium should align with the desired outcome of your campaign and place in the marketing funnel. See below Graphic 1 which outlines the best approaches by stage in the marketing funnel
   
   Tip: Here is an article with more advice and information on selecting the right asset(s) for your campaign goal.
   
   
5. Theme & Messaging
   Aligning your campaign to both the firm’s industry holistic offerings and marketing themes is crucial. If your campaign is not aligning to either an industry theme or strategic firm theme, evaluate the need before proceeding. Not all campaigns/events will align, but most of them should. If you are unsure of the themes to align with refer to marketing themes and segmentations video.
   Tip: From imagery to presenters, incorporate Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) into your campaigns. It creates an inviting environment to the audience and gives the opportunity to contribute and participate.t
   
   
6. Follow-Up Strategy
   Keep the end goal in mind. Stay involved throughout with Team of Teams approach. Follow-up strategies from your campaign or event includes the following:
   1. Identify MQLs
   2. Creation of Stage Zero Opportunities
   3. Engage the SDR Team
      The SDRs will be assigned to the stage zero opportunities to prospect. Refer to the stage zero opportunity best practices guide for more information.
   4. Optional- Continue to Nurture through the Marketing Funnel: If the leads are at the top of the funnel, continue to nurture and bring down through the marketing funnel. (See Graphic 1)
      1. Example: Run the leads through a re-marketing campaign with content to bring them through the buyer’s journey.
   5. Optional- Review leads with the BDs and/or Sales Team: Meet with the BDs or Sales Teams for the services or solutions of the campaign to discuss next steps for reaching out. Recommended for smaller industry or target accounts.
      Tip: Refer to the Sales Strategy Best Practices document to further understand the follow up approach followed by the SDRs.
      
      
7. Measuring Campaigns
   1. Eloqua
      Our marketing automation platform. All email campaigns, webinars, and event invites are sent from this platform. We also use the platform to build non-evergreen landing pages on the learn.armaninollp.com domain.
           Important Assets:
           - Email and invite canvasest
           - Contact database
           - Email and campaign statistics and analysis reports
           - Segmentation data
           Important metrics:
           - Total email sends
           - Bounce rate (hard and soft)
           - Open rate (total and unique) - less relevant due to changes in email applications
           - Click through rate (total and unique)
           - Lead scores
           - Engagement scores
   2. Sitecore
      The CMS platform for our main website www.armanino.com. All our solution pages and thought leadership is hosted on this platform. We also gather user activity data on this platform to help personalize content and track user journey on the website.
      We do not use Sitecore analytics in depth but rather rely on Google Analytics (GA) for website performance.
      Sitecore analytics is useful when personalizing content or when reviewing and optimizing pages where we can get comparative data on user behavior in addition to GA.
   3. Marketing 360 Dashboard/Power BI
      When it comes to Power BI dashboards, there are two areas that are important to a PM.
      - Marketing 360 is a dashboard containing information on email campaigns with data from Eloqua. Use this dashboard to get information specific to email campaigns, including open rate contact activity. There are many filters that you can use to drill down to specific information, including year/month, campaign name, project group, project name, industry, and market.
      - Sales Performance are various dashboards where you can see how your industry and/or service area is performing for the year in terms of bookings. There are several views for sales performance, including analysis, win/loss, open pipeline and new pipeline. Again, there are many filters you can use to drill down to specific information. If you do not have access to Power BI, please reach out to Drea Jordan.
   4. Google Analytics & Ad Words (Google Data Studio)
      1. Google Analytics provide insights on user activities on our web properties. The data is anonymous – it does not collect usernames and emails. Access on https://analytics.google.com/ reach out to Daniel Botha to get access to our properties.
         Important metrics:
         - Page views
         - Type of traffic (channel) e.g. organic, paid, referrals, email
         - Campaign performance and conversions
      2. Google Ads: To see more detailed information on Google paid advertising campaign performance. You do not need to access Google Ads to see ad performance, the information is available on Google Analytics.
         Important Assets
         - Ad campaigns
         - Ads
         - Ad keywords
         - Audience
         - Ad spend
      3. Looker Studio (Google Data Studio): Dashboard overview of performance on specific service or industries supported by business line marketers. It uses data from Google Analytics, Google Ads and Google Search Console. We are busy setting up dashboards on Power BI for marketing reporting. When we have that setup, we will no longer need to use Looker Studio dashboards.
         Important metrics:
         - Page traffic: users, sessions, pageviews
         - Conversions: goal completions
         - Top traffic pages
         - Campaign performance: campaign page visits, goal conversions
         - Site use: previous and next page path
         - Channels
         - Device
         - Search traffic
         
         
   5. Hotjar
      Page heatmaps to help us understand user behavior on specific pages and site usage. A good tool to use when updating solution pages to review user behavior. Also, a useful tool to perform quick user surveys specific to the service on the page.
      
      
   6. CRM
      Elevate Learn has a course module titled ‘Introduction to Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM’ that includes a section pertaining directly to marketing.
      
      
   7. Bizzabo
      Armanino’s events platform. It’s used to host events and webinar registrations. Registration pages are in the events.armaninollp.com domain. Event registration pages are temporary and after the event is complete these registration pages are redirected to related pages on our main website.
      
      
   8. Inbound Team's Campaign Performance report
      Inbound Marketing team will deliver a campaign report for most nurture, drip, and other email campaigns. (Exclusions include winwires and partner announcements.) Reports will be shared monthly.
      In the PPT report you will find:
      - List of asset(s) used in campaign
      - Breakdown of stats by email – Open/clickthrough rate percentages, total sends, total opens, unique opens and unique clickthroughs
      - Contacts’ fatigue level and engagement score (if available) information
      - Clickmap of your email(s) – The map highlights the percentages of what links contacts clicked on
      - Website analytics (Pending featured assets) – Unique pageviews, average time on page, exit percentage
      - Inbound team’s general observations and recommendations on future campaign steps
      Additional information will be included in nurture campaign reports including benchmark comparisons and map of nurture path. If you have report questions, reach out to Sarah Cheeda.
      
      
   9. Webinar Performance report
      An Inbound Marketing team member will deliver a post webinar report a week after a PM’s webinar date. In the PPT report, you will find:
      - Registration information - Email invite, social posting, email forwards, webinar attendees
      - Website Analytics - Pageviews, unique pageviews, average time on page, clicks to PDF slides, entrances, source/medium, clicks to other links on event page, views of webinar recording, additional insights
      - YouTube Analytics - Video views, average view duration, impressions