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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