Today, Mediacurrent is extremely proud to announce that we have been named the 2014 Best Overall Small Business by Salesforce. The award celebrates the best overall marketing and sales story at the SMB level (1-100 employees). Over 100,000 companies use Salesforce, and hundreds of nominations were submitted for the Salesforce Surfboard awards, so saying “we’re honored” to, not only be nominated, but win this award would be an understatement.
We want to congratulate Mediacurrent on its Salesforce.com Best Overall SMB Award. This recognition is a testament to Mediacurrent's success and innovation in the areas of marketing automation and lead generation. Mediacurrent has proven to be a thought leader in the Salesforce.com product suite and is transforming their business in entirely new ways.
Matthew Sweezey, Marketing Evangelist | Salesforce.com
The Back Story
Our journey began over two years ago when Mediacurrent shifted how we implement, strategize, and work with marketing campaigns.
We began partnering with Pardot, a Salesforce Company, back in 2011 and although our marketing campaigns were moderately successful, we had no formal process in place for attracting and following-up with leads in a timely manner.
To manage our leads, we were using Excel and shared documents that were organized by color coding, so members of the marketing and sales teams could all have access to the same information. This manual process was time consuming and didn't provide enough solid data to further Mediacurrent's marketing efforts. Our team believed heavily in inbound marketing but needed to create a scalable, repeatable process for our strategy.
The Hard Work
Formalizing our Content Strategy– In order to achieve our long-term goals, Mediacurrent needed to produce and present the right educational resources to the appropriate audience exactly when they needed it. We took the first few weeks to define our buyer personas, audit our content, and reorganize everything around the questions, concerns, and interests of our target personas. This process showed us where we had gaps in our content strategy, and what direction we should pursue going forward.
From there, we set out to produce the best content in the industry. Setting yearly goals for blogs, gated content, webinars, eBooks, etc. helped us stay on track. We also got buy-in from the organization to participate. In fact, I’m proud to say 100% of our teammates and every single department contribute to content generation each year. At Mediacurrent, marketing is truly a team-based effort.
Aligning Sales/Marketing – Aligning our Marketing and Sales team has been critical to our success. We created a system of lead grading and scoring to help fastrack sales-ready leads. With our new marketing automation tracking capabilities, we could now follow their behavior on our website—with full details of the pages they were visiting as they performed their due diligence and target our messaging to them accordingly.
Weekly Sales/Marketing Meetings, Salesforce Reports, and a sense of urgency (both from marketing to generate leads and sales to follow-up with them) became our lifeblood.
Winning the Best Overall SMB Award from Salesforce is tremendous validation to our team's incredible amount of hard work over the last few years in this subject matter. We wanted to create a more inbound marketing driven culture and it is extremely humbling to win such prestigious recognition from an industry giant like Salesforce.
Dave Terry, Partner, Client Services | Mediacurrent
The Results
Since implementing Pardot/Salesforce, defining our content strategy, and creating a lead scoring/grading model Mediacurrent has experienced:
- 53% increase in organic searching through a computer, which meant more whitepaper and eBook downloads
- 40% increase in our regular e-mail subscribers
- 23% increase in leads assigned to the sales team
- 129% year-over-year growth in content conversions
- Closing on 55% of our viable leads
You can read more about our Marketing Automation Case Study here.
Additional Resources
5 Ways Your Business Should Be Using Marketing Automation
Things to Consider before Purchasing Marketing Automation
