Beyond Marketing Automation: Building a Complete Marketing Infrastructure

This started as a post about Empathy Logic, a company that merges data from marketing automation, CRM, Web tracking, order processing, social monitoring, and other systems; lets marketers segment and select from this more complete set of data; and sends the resulting lists back to message delivery systems such as email and Web sites.You might think that Empathy Logic isn’t needed because a marketing automation system is supposed to build that integrated...

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Influitive Helps Marketers Build an Army of Advocates

Marketers recognize the potential reach of social media, but are rightly frightened that they can’t control the message. Most social marketing applications sidestep the issue by focusing on creating communities (Jive, Lithium), monitoring conversations (Radian6, Trackur) and running promotions (CrowdFactory, Nextbee). Marketing automation vendors have mostly worked on making it easy to post and share messages and to capture social data. (See my December 8 post for details.) Influitive tackles the control issue head on.  It applies game-based...

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Marketing Automation Interface Should Focus on Customers, Not Campaigns

Several vendors have shown me their new campaign management interfaces recently. All were refined, attractive, and thoughtful. Each had subtle features that appeal to a connoisseur: floating tool pallets! Fly-over icon labels! Dynamic menus! Curved lines!  But they’re all still basically the same flow charts that Frank Gilbreth (of Cheaper by the Dozen fame) introduced in 1921 and we've seen in marketing systems for more than 20 years.Now,...

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Marketing Automation Skills are Scarce: Vendor Strategies to Close the Gap

The marketing automation industry continues to grow quickly, with many vendors announcing their client bases have more than doubled in 2011. But there’s also a growing realization that many marketing automation systems are used for only simple tasks – often no more than email, landing pages, and CRM integration. For example, LoopFuse found that nearly twice as many used email and web landing pages as lead scoring.Even more worrisome are increasing...

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Social Media Features in Marketing Automation Systems: Who Does What?

Social media is arguably overhyped as a marketing trend: it gets well under 10% of marketing budgets (different surveys have figures from 3% to 8%) and results are questionable (it was rated the least effective content marketing tactic in a recent MarketingProfs study).  But social is clearly growing fast and has great potential. So marketing automation vendors are understandably eager to support it in their systems.I recently took a quick tour...

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LeadLife Bundles Services with Marketing Automation

LeadLife released a completely rebuild version of its marketing automation system last month.The new system features a cleaner interface and revised capabilities that reflect what LeadLife has learned about the needs of small to mid-size companies since its original product launch in 2008. This involves a careful balance between complexity and power.The best example of this balance, and the most notable change in the system, is campaign design. ...

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SDL Buys Marketing Automation Vendor Alterian for $107 Million

So, it turns out that while I’ve been obsessing over vendor selection workbooks, our friends at marketing automation vendor Alterian up and got bought last week by language technology vendor SDL for about $107 million. Why didn't somebody tell me?I’m most familiar with SDL as a Web content management vendor, although their financial statements show that just over 75% of their revenue comes from manual and automated language translation. The company had more than $300 million revenue last year and is nicely profitable.Alterian hasn’t been...

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Assess Marketing Automation Vendor Services Before You Buy - Another New Workbook

I wrote yesterday about our new workbook for marketing automation cost estimates. Today I’ll describe the other one: evaluating vendor services.  Both are available free at the Raab Guide Web site.The problem with services is simple: you won’t use them until you’ve already bought the product. So the trick to evaluating them is to ask lots of questions in advance to understand whether they’ll meet your needs. Of course, there are two parts to that mission: building a clear picture and knowing what you need. In terms of what you need, vendors...

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New Workbook: Estimating the Cost of Marketing Automation

We released two more vendor selection workbooks last week, both sponsored by Eloqua and available for free on the RaabGuide Web site. One is about estimating the cost of a marketing automation system and the other is about evaluating vendor services.The cost workbook was a particular challenge because the subject is so complex. After much thought, I came up with four cost categories:direct system costs: the actual price paid for the marketing automation...

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Fabulicious Workbook Helps Assess CRM Integration Features of Marketing Automation Systems

CRM integration is a fundamental feature of marketing automation.  Pretty much every system can send leads to Salesforce.com, but capabilities vary significantly once you start looking for more.   Sadly, most marketers pay little attention to these nuances until they've already selected a product.  Then they learn they hard way what they should have asked.In hopes of avoiding these mistakes, Raab Associates has just published a workbook on assessing integration capabilities before you buy.  The workbook lays out the types...

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Marketing Automation Vendor Selection: Summing Up

It’s time to wrap up this series of posts on marketing automation vendor selection, which were based on my November 10 Webinar with Neolane  (replay available here).  I’ve summarized them in three commandments.Forget the Past. Marketers have been doing such a bad job of selecting systems that they should forget their old approach and start from scratch. I described the old methods in the first two posts of the series, The Seven Deadly...

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Marketing Vendor Selection: Trends You'll Need to Support

As I wrote yesterday, no one knows exactly what we’ll want from our marketing automation systems in the future. But it's still worth taking a guess at what looks likely.  Here are some trends I expect will be important.Social Media. The first wave of marketing automation features for social media is now several years old.  These included making it easier to share emails and Web pages, tracking shares through embedded URLs, and monitoring...

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Marketing Automation Selection: Finding a Future-Safe Vendor

Marketers can do a better job of picking their marketing automation vendors if they roll up their sleeves and try. I wrote yesterday about building a requirements document to define the features you'll look for.  But you also need a company that supports your long-term success. Here's how to identify a “future-safe” vendor.Past innovations: a history of advanced thinking shows the vendor understands marketers’ needs and suggests they'll...

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Vendor Selection: Writing a Good Requirements Document

My last two posts (not counting this morning’s detour into Marketo-land) described common errors marketers make when selecting marketing automation systems. How did we come to this?I see two reasons:Marketers are like everybody else. Remember all that yammering about how today’s buyers do their own research, don’t talk to sales until late in the process, and get their information from social media rather than experts? Today’s marketers buy that...

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Marketo Raises Another $50 Million: Where Does the Money Go?

Marketo this morning announced a new $50 million funding round, almost exactly one year to the day after raising $25 million in November 2010.  In accompanying commentary, the company also revealed its 2010 revenue was $14 million, that it expects 140% revenue growth in 2011 (meaning about $34 million), and that it has about $70 million remaining of its total $107 million raised to date.All this new information begs for an update of the analysis...

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Marketers Do a Bad Job Selecting Marketing Automation Systems

I presented my Seven Deadly Sins of Marketing Automation Software Selection during last week’s Webinar with Neolane. (To replay the Webinar, click here.)  If you’re wondering how many companies actually commit those sins, the sad answer is: a lot. Here are some statistics. About half of buyers consider only one system, I’m told by various vendors. Some may have known exactly what they needed in advance, but most are just buying the first...

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The Seven Deadly Sins of Marketing Automation System Selection

I’ll be giving a Webinar this Thursday on evaluating marketing automation software, sponsored by Neolane. Part of the content will be a list of Seven Deadly Sins of Marketing System Selection.  I thought that was worth a blog post of its own. So here goes.1. Ignoring Users. Selection teams often don’t take the the time to understand how future users of the system do their jobs today. The justification may be that everything will change anyway,...

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B2B and B2C Marketing Automation: Understanding the Differences

As you might have guessed from my recent list of B2C marketing automation systems, I’ve recently been spending some time helping consumer marketers to select vendors. This is more a return than a departure: although I’ve written mostly about B2B systems for the past few years, my earlier work was largely in consumer marketing. Like any traveler, I’ve returned home with some new perspectives. Here are some observations- consumer marketers have to build databases; B2B marketers don’t. You can file this under “things so obvious that it feels...

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