Yesterday's acquisition of AssetLink by SAS has prompted me to finally write about MarketingPilot, a vendor I've been following since its launch nearly ten years ago.MarketingPilot started as an operations management tool for mid-size direct marketers, with features for project management, list and media buying, source code tracking, expense capture, and vendor management. Since then it has expanded steadily to encompass the full range of marketing resource management and then gone ahead to add marketing database management and campaign execution....
Wednesday, 23 February 2011
Tuesday, 22 February 2011
Summary: SAS's purchase of AssetLink ensures it's a viable alternative to IBM/Unica and Teradata/Aprimo for integrated marketing management. The real question is whether mid-size firms will be able to afford those systems.SAS today announced its acquisition of marketing resource management vendor AssetLink. The move makes perfect sense: the other big MRM vendor was Aprimo, and once they were acquired by Teradata, SAS and AssetLink had no alternative partners in the enterprise marketing space.Let me make clear that when I say “enterprise”, I...
Thursday, 17 February 2011
Small-business email provider Constant Contact yesterday announced the acquisition of "social CRM"* vendor Bantam Live. This is a major expansion for Constant Contact, placing it more squarely into competition with CRM and marketing automation vendors. As I've noted previously, small businesses are particularly likely to adopt a single platform for all of their marketing and customer management needs because the inefficiencies of multiple platforms are so obvious and painful in a small organization. Email vendors like Constant Contact are especially...
Monday, 14 February 2011
Now that I’m more or less finished launching the B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST), I can start catching up on the other topics. Let’s start with ClickDimensions, a system I explored last September but never wrote about. ClickDimensions does pretty much the standard marketing automation activities: email, landing pages, Web visitor tracking, drip marketing campaigns, and lead scoring. What’s missing from the list is CRM integration. That's no accident: ClickDimensions doesn’t integrate with CRM in the regular sense of synchronizing...
Thursday, 10 February 2011
Summary: A close look at which vendors have the least common features finds some are widely distributed, while others are concentrated among products for big companies. As always, you need to look at the details to see which products have what you need.Last week’s post used data from our B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) to identify leading vendors in categories such as lead generation, campaign management, and technology. The...
Thursday, 3 February 2011
Summary: Our new B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) has been carefully crafted to help marketers at every step of the selection process. I think it’s worth walking through the main components to explain why they’re there.Here's a screen-by-screen look at the components of the VEST. For more information or to order, please click here.ExplanationsWhat It Is: This is basic information for people who are just starting to explore...
Tuesday, 1 February 2011
Summary: Vendor scores from our new B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool offer new proof of an old truth: there's no one best system for everyone.The one point I make every time I discuss software selection is that you have to find a vendor that matches your own business needs. No one ever denies this, of course, but the typical next question is still, Who are industry leaders? – with the unstated but obvious intention of limiting consideration...
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