How I Used Marketing Automation to Drive Demos

Josh Studzinski is Vice President of Marketing at Caremerge, a Chicago-based provider of resident engagement, family communication, and EHR/eMAR solutions for the senior living industry.

Read on for a transcript of his presentation from our November 15, 2018, Here’s How Startup Marketing Conference, where Josh describes how he used marketing automation to drive 80% of traffic to their demos.

What’s up, everybody? I'm the other Josh, VP of Marketing at Caremerge, and what I'm going to talk about today is how we use marketing automation to drive our demos.

We use marketing automation on our SDR [Sales Development Representative] team. We use marketing automation across our sales team. This is the foundation that we use to really drive our business forward.

So, who is Caremerge? What do we do? Caremerge is actually a technology provider for senior living communities. I can throw a bunch of jargon at you, but at the base line that's what we do. We try to improve residents lives and the families that have residents at senior living communities.

We're a top ten Smart Health Company. We were, for the first time this year, on the Inc 5000 – actually, Number 1489 – and one of 59 healthcare companies on there, which is very exciting for our team. We have about 20 million in funding from Echo Ventures, Insight Ventures, and a bunch of big names in senior living and healthcare.

I have about ten years of marketing experience and I consider myself a full-stack marketer. When I look at all the different ways that you're able to go to market and drive business from digital to traditional to events – everything in between. I have a little bit of experience in everything.

Situation

So what we're going to talk about in the steps after I highlight the situation. And what happened when I joined Caremerge in July of 2017 is there was a team there. They had just started with HubSpot and got Salesforce going, but nothing was talking to each other.

We had all these silo systems in place. We had just signed big multi-year contracts. And everyone's like, "This is the best thing since sliced bread," but nothing was really working. Everything was there, but nobody was utilizing this technology.

So I sat down and I looked at this, saying, “Okay, we can't move forward like this.” If we're really going to operate as a successful start-up and start to grow this business, we need everything talking to each other and build that foundation of marketing automation.

Steps

1: I built a lead-scoring system

Some steps that I did: the first thing I did was really simplified our lead scoring system. This is something that you should be building out as you start to get your marketing processes in places.

How do we qualify leads that are coming into our website that are coming from our emails and build it based off of the popularity or the impact to the business that that page would have or that email would have?

We have a scoring system of 25 points. And when a lead comes to our website and generates over 25 points, it becomes a marketing qualified lead. That means that it needs more qualification to become a sales accepted lead.

All of these different activities that happen whether they're coming to our website and doing a Demo page, the About Us page, getting an email, seeing an ad. We have all of that with a point qualification and when they hit that, they become an MQL. Our SDR team, which is here, starts to work on those leads to further qualify to generate a sales accepted lead, like I said.

Some other things that I did is we got a video system which is Wistia, which is a great platform for videos. We looked at HubSpot Sales, which is actually an email tracking platform, which is great for tracking opens, tracking what people do within your emails, and then we started running some ads.

2: I integrated everything: Wistia, HubSpot Sales, Advertising

I started to look at all these systems that we're using in different platforms, and so that everything had to integrate with our marketing automation system, which was HubSpot. 

Whenever you're looking at purchasing a system, look at your marketing automation kind of as your foundation, and this is where you're trying to build off of, and all of the data needs to sync on into that marketing automation system and then sync back out to the other ones.

3: I optimized our lead-scoring process

You're not going into multiple systems and looking at different data sets because could be confusing. You want to have one source of truth.

After I integrated everything, I look at our lead scoring process again because now we're using multiple systems, how do we add scoring into those systems?

If somebody is watching our video for, say, 75 percent of the time, or filled out a form or did an action within that video, can we qualify and quantify that person into our lead scoring system?

Using Wistia, we have a bunch of videos on our website. We have customer testimonials. We have little demo videos. I associated points to each action within that video.

So if somebody clicks something or does something that goes to their point score and then ultimately boosts them up to hopefully become an MQL, our team can reach out and say: "Hey, you're highly engaged with Caremerge. How do we get you even more engaged and see a demo because we think you're excited and want to see more about our product?"

4: I automated our workflows and sales / marketing outreach

I used automation and workflows to really start to propel our sales and marketing team forward.

Within HubSpot there's the automation workflow builder that could get pretty complex, but you could use this for lead routing. You could use this for your lead nurturing programs, which is really beneficial, and that's how we started to automate a lot of resources.

Especially as startups, we’re always strapped for cash and we're strapped for resources, right? So how do we automate different things within our system to grow our business?

And that's one simple piece you could use is really sit down and think about your automation workflows, and how they could impact your sales and marketing team.

5: I drove everyone to demo

Another thing we leverage within HubSpot is sequences. Our SDR team does a lot of automated sequences.

This is more sales automation, but also very important to the business because you want to have cross-channel marketing, as well have sequences tied up that are not just email workflows, but are also tasks associated with those workflows.

It might be an email, a call, a LinkedIn message, send a handwritten note. So, we could automate our process on the sales and marketing team to make sure we're most efficient in our role.

And everything that we do, we want to drive people to demo. We have a demo request page. We’ve got to get the technology in front of them, so everything we're doing is driving to that.

6: I iterated and reviewed where and how much is driving into our pipeline

And then last thing I did was I iterated a review to how much is driving into our pipeline because leads are really our leading indicator, but you want to focus in on how much pipeline are we driving in for our sales team to work. And that's really kind of the critical and success KPI that I focus on when I'm driving and really working on our marketing automation.

Results

If I look at what happened over when I first got to Caremerge, is we started to generate – well, 80 percent plus of our demos that were actually coming in were generated from our workflows. We generated over 200 MQLs that our SDR team and our sales team can begin working.

Over the last 90 days, from our marketing and sales automation, we've driven over $2 million in pipeline for our sales team to start working on qualifying, which has been fantastic when you're starting to see the fruits of that labor of really getting down into the nitty-gritty of our automation that we built.

So that's what I've done. This is where we're at right now, and hoping to keep automating iterate off of that. So I'll take any questions now, thank you.