Summary: Hubspot offers a bundle of Web traffic generation and lead management features in one low-cost package. Small businesses willing to invest some effort should be pleased with the results. Yesterday’s post described one strategy to sell marketing automation to small businesses: provide a specific, turnkey service that requires virtually no skill or effort from the user. But I don’t think that can scale: companies require many different services and will not want to buy and run each one separately. So I believe the future lies with integrated...
Thursday, 30 July 2009
Wednesday, 29 July 2009
Helmsman Shows How To Serve Small Business Marketers
Posted on 15:27 by Unknown
Summary: Helmsman Marketing offers turnkey marketing campaigns for small business. It's a great way to meet their needs, but probably not the model that will ultimately prevail in small business marketing automation.I’ve spent a lot of time recently talking to marketing automation vendors hoping to sell to small businesses. They all seem to think this market is under-served and therefore open for them to dominate. In one sense they're right: there are millions of small businesses, few of which use serious marketing technology today. But the very...
Tuesday, 28 July 2009
Entiera Offers Consumer Marketing Automation Software as a Service
Posted on 18:51 by Unknown
Summary: Entiera is a sophisticated consumer marketing automation system, offered as a service and at a lower price than conventional competitors.Entiera Insight is a marketing automation system primarily for companies that sell to consumers. I’m highlighting this because most of my recent posts have been about B2B marketing automation (demand generation) systems, and the two types of systems are quite different. This means I apply different standards to evaluate them.My template for demand generation systems includes outbound email, landing...
Monday, 27 July 2009
Genius.com Adds Short URLs to Capture Social Media Replies
Posted on 15:59 by Unknown
Summary: Genius.com is adding a URL shortener that will tie social media responses into the regular flow of demand generation and lead management. It’s a small but important step towards making social media a standard business tool.I saw a quick demonstration today of a new social media feature that Genius.com will release at the end of September. It generates short URLs that directly connect social media responses with Genius.com’s standard marketing and sales support features. Here’s the press release.As I wrote in my February post on Genius,...
Saturday, 25 July 2009
Why Most Consumer Marketing Automation Systems Are Not Software-as-a-Service, And When That Will Change
Posted on 07:51 by Unknown
Summary: Consumer-oriented marketing automation systems have been slower to adopt the Software-as-a-Service model than business marketing (demand generation) systems. But this will soon change, bringing lower prices and better systems as a result.Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is now the standard model for business-to-business marketing automation (a.k.a. demand generation) systems. Any vendor who didn’t sell that way would be an oddity. But consumer-oriented marketing automation products from vendors like Unica, SAS and Teradata are still commonly...
Thursday, 23 July 2009
Simple Usability Studies Are Still Worthwhile
Posted on 06:48 by Unknown
Summary: Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen has proven that simple usability tests are highly effective. Marketing automation vendors should take heed. Come to think of it, so should marketers.A vendor very proudly showed me their new Adobe Flex-based user interface the other day. Flex is a “rich Internet application” technology, meaning it gives you drag-and-drop, pop-up windows, and other features of a desktop graphical user interface. I found the new interface a bit confusing, so I asked whether the vendor had done any usability testing....
Tuesday, 21 July 2009
Jesubi Doubles Sales Prospecting Efficiency
Posted on 15:25 by Unknown
Summary: Jesubi is designed to make sales prospecting as efficient as possible. It shows how specialized software can be much better at one function than general purpose systems. You may not want to replace your CRM system with Jesubi, but dedicated prospecting teams should take a close look.The latest stop on my little tour of not-really-demand-generation systems is Jesubi. The flash show when you enter the company’s Web site could easily be mistaken for a demand generation product – it lists campaign workflow, list segmentation, email templates,...
Monday, 20 July 2009
Active Conversion Offers Strong Lead Management and Leaves Out the Rest
Posted on 14:34 by Unknown
Summary: Active Conversion helps marketing and sales departments make the best use of leads they’ve generated outside the system. That's fewer functions than traditional demand generation, but if those are the functions you need, who cares?The classic demand generation cycle starts with an outbound email campaign, captures replies on a landing page, scores the responses, and then sends qualified leads to a sales automation system and keeps the others for more nurturing. These functions, plus supporting features for database management, content...
Friday, 17 July 2009
Right On Interactive's 5Buckets Simplifies Multi-Channel Messaging
Posted on 06:08 by Unknown
Summary: Right On Interactive's 5Buckets connects lists from external customer management systems with many types of output vendors (email, print, fax, text message, automated voice). It's a low-cost, easy-to-use alternative to more powerful marketing automation systems for companies who don't need other marketing automation features.Last Wednesday’s revised ranking of demand generation vendors by Web traffic reminded me that I never published notes from a conversation I had several months ago with Right On Interactive, developer of the 5Buckets...
Thursday, 16 July 2009
Alterian Pushes Into Social Media Management with Techrigy Acquisition
Posted on 11:15 by Unknown
Summary: Alterian's purchase of Techrigy marks the first integration of serious social media management with marketing automation. Others are sure to follow. Marketing automation vendor Alterian yesterday announced its acquisition of social media monitoring company Techrigy. Even though the Techgrity deal is the first direct acquisition I recall of a social media monitoring system by a marketing automation vendor, it strikes me as an obvious step. Marketers have been scratching their collective heads for years over how to integrate social...
Wednesday, 15 July 2009
More on Web Traffic Rankings for Demand Generation Vendors
Posted on 08:59 by Unknown
Last week’s post on Web traffic rankings of demand generation vendors generated a couple of private responses from vendors, pointing out that the Alexa statistics include traffic to operational subdomains for client landing pages and user log-in. In itself, this doesn’t bother me, since it provides data on actual use of the systems. But different products work differently*, so figures for some vendors include landing page traffic while figures for other vendors do not. This makes the rankings even less accurate than they seemed before (which wasn’t...
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
SiteCore Adds Analytics and Marketing To Web Content Management
Posted on 08:03 by Unknown
Summary: SiteCore has added extensive analytical and marketing features to its Web content management system. The integrated analytics should save considerable effort for marketers. Channel-specific marketing automation is less appealing but should help to keep marketing automation vendors on their toes.I commented last month that more Web content management system (CMS) vendors are adding marketing automation features. One of my examples was SiteCore, so I can’t point to them again as further proof of that assertion. But I did have a good...
Thursday, 9 July 2009
ParAccel Toots Its Horn and Revs Its Database Engine
Posted on 11:42 by Unknown
Summary: Over the past year, columnar analytical database vendor ParAccel has methodically proven its claims about speed, scalability and easy deployment. Now it's looking to grow fast.When I first wrote about analytical database vendor ParAccel in a February 2008 post, it was one of several barely distinguishable vendors offering massively parallel, SQL-compatible columnar databases. Their main claim to fame was a record-setting performance on the TPC-H benchmark, but even the significance of that was unclear since few vendors bother with the...
Posted in analytical database, column data store, database technology, paraccel, vertica
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Lyzasoft White Paper Looks at Coordinating Business Analysts and IT
Posted on 10:43 by Unknown
Summary: a new white paper says business analysts gather data with little help from IT. I'm not so sure, but agree that collaboration tools like Lyza Commons can help both groups cooperate.Analytical software vendor Lyzasoft has just published a white paper by data warehouse guru Dr. Barry Devlin on how business analysts and IT can work together. (Click to download Collaborative Analytics: Sharing and Harvesting Analytic Insights across the Business.) Since I’ve spent much time pondering this very issue, I was quite curious to see his perspective.The...
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
Demand Generation Vendor Traffic Rankings
Posted on 14:40 by Unknown
Summary: Based on Web traffic rankings, new demand generation vendors with low prices are gaining market presence. Pardot and (perhaps) Genius.com look particularly strong. But Eloqua, Silverpop and Marketo remain industry leaders.Last November, after much consideration of alternatives, I settled on Alexa three-month Web traffic rankings as a reasonable way to measure the relative market presence of demand generation vendors. You can see that post here. I revisited that data today, adding a few new vendors and dropping some of the very minor ones....
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