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...
Tuesday, 18 October 2011
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
Marketo today announced the launch of Spark, a new brand aimed at small and mid-size business. Functionally, Spark is pretty much identical to the standard Marketo system. Exceptions are advanced features including revenue cycle reporting, email deliverability assistance, API access, fine-grained user rights management, and the Sales Insight salesperson application. Most of these aren’t of interest to small business, and several involve additional charges even for Marketo’s regular packages.So the news here is price. Spark starts at $750 per...
Monday, 10 October 2011
Exploring a new marketing automation system is like biting into a bonbon: part of the fun is you never know what you’ll find inside.Thinking in those terms, Beanstalk Data is a tasty morsel. It provides all the basic B2B marketing automation functions: mass email, landing pages and surveys, behavior tracking, lead scoring, nurture campaigns, and CRM integration. And it adds just enough spice to leave a pleasingly distinctive flavor.Regarding...
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
I spent yesterday prowling the exhibit hall at the Direct Marketing Association annual conference in Boston. This uncovered several additional candidates for mid-tier business-to-consumer marketing automation. I’ll list them here and also add them to my previous list of mid-tier marketing automation systems so that future visitors will find the complete set in one place.This products below are a somewhat arbitrary selection, since pretty much every printer, service bureau, and email provider has a list selection tool. I’ve tried to include only...
Sunday, 2 October 2011
Back on September 20, I posted various tips from the Inbound Marketing Summit and HubSpot User Group. Naturally, the conference also included public and private discussions of HubSpot itself, but I thought those were best shared in a separate post. Here goes.The conference yielded a clear picture of HubSpot’s business strategy for the coming year. This strategy has two main elements, which were set out by CEO Brian Halligan in his keynote: - expansion to “middle of funnel” marketing. HubSpot originally focused on “top of funnel” or “inbound”...
Saturday, 1 October 2011
My colleague Michael Darviche covered the LEAD Marketing Conference in Chicago last week. Here’s his report.One fascinating area for the past few years has been the coupon and offers space. In a traditionally a paper-based medium, Groupon (and its controversial IPO) have stimulated the question of whether digital couponing can take hold, and in what form. The Shopper Technology Institute's LEAD Marketing Conference offered telling insights to where it all goes next. Coupons are a $4 billion industry and daily (local) deals are another $2 to...
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