Microsoft Buys Marketing Automation Vendor MarketingPilot: Start of Something Big?

Microsoft today announced the acquisition of marketing management system vendor MarketingPilot, which will become part of its Dynamics CRM group. Financial terms were not disclosed.

MarketingPilot is best described as integrated marketing management for mid-tier companies. It has a pretty low profile in the B2B marketing automation world, partly because it serves a mix of B2C and B2B clients but mostly because it started as a marketing operations management system. It only recently added standard B2B marketing automation features including a customer-level marketing database, outbound email, landing pages, lead scoring, Web behavior tracking, reporting, and Salesforce.com integration. Still, with more than 500 clients, including many ad agencies, MarketingPilot is a significant player in the larger marketing software universe. (I profiled them in a February 2011 post.)

The acquisition is significant on several levels. Most obviously, it’s another example of an adjacent vendor finding the marketing automation attractive: following Pardot’s acquisition last week by email vendor ExactTarget, and earlier acquisitions of Leadformix by CallidusCloud (sales effectiveness), Alterian by SDL (Web content), SmartFocus by Emailvision (email), and Demandforce by Intuit (small business accounting). More specifically, it’s a major acquisition by a CRM vendor, helping to fulfill everyone's favorite prophecy that marketing automation and CRM will eventually merge. I still doubt Salesforce.com will get the message any time soon, but maybe they'll listen a little more closely.

But the real significance may be greater. It’s no coincidence that MarketingPilot, like three of the five other deals I just listed, involves a B2C rather than B2B marketing automation product. The B2C products are generally built on a more powerful foundation than B2B systems, in terms of having a more flexible database structure, deeper marketing operations support, and more powerful analytics. B2B systems strengths are concentrated in execution capabilities like email design, landing pages, multi-step campaigns, and social messaging.

The stronger foundations of the B2C systems make them easier to extend throughout the marketing department, which would benefit from tightly integrated collaboration, planning, analytics, and database management. There’s less value to sharing B2B strengths in execution, since each group builds and deploys programs independently. (In other words: acquisition and nurture campaigns are built by separate groups that create their own emails and landing pages, but do want common planning systems, customer data, and analytics.)

This foundation technology matters because it’s pretty clear that the future of marketing systems is to have a shared platform – think Salesforce.com AppExchange, or the similar marts created by Eloqua, Marketo, HubSpot, and indeed Microsoft Dynamics itself – supporting a variety of plug-and-play applications. B2B marketing automation systems are built for lead nurturing and provide a foundation adequate for that purpose. But marketing departments also need acquisition (or, if you prefer, inbound marketing) and customer support (or whatever comes after a lead is handed off to sales). A B2C platform can support those other functions. Even a good B2B platform might not.

I’m not saying that a B2C platform could extend all the way to running CRM. This might be possible but so far it seems that marketing and sales still need separate physical databases for adequate performance. But I can imagine a marketing platform that provides some services to a CRM system, such as predictive modeling, data enhancement, and reporting. Like users throughout marketing,  users in both sales and marketing would benefit from sharing them. So, at least for now, that is the degree of marketing automation / CRM consolidation I expect.

Fulfilling even this somewhat limited vision will take a lot of resources. B2B marketing automation vendors will need to rearchitect their systems on the more sophisticated platform. They’ll also need to significantly enhance their execution layer to take advantage of the platform’s greater power. I discussed some of this in last month’s post on ways to dominate the marketing automation industry: my preferred strategy, of radically easier execution, specifically depends on better analytics to make the systems automatically do more of the work in campaign design, execution, and optimization. That Microsoft of all companies will create a revolutionary advance in simplicity is a bit hard to imagine (snark alert!), but they do have the resources.  Even the potential for that result may encourage other deep-pocketed vendors to try the same thing. That could be the greatest significance of all.

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Three Ways to Dominate the Marketing Automation Industry

I wrote last August that it’s still possible for new B2B marketing automation vendors to challenge the industry leaders. This was based on the observation that several of the smaller vendors have quickly reached the 1,000 client benchmark. But it didn’t answer the more interesting question of what it would take for a new vendor to really bypass the current leaders.

That particular question came up repeatedly during Dreamforce last week. The answer may not matter to marketers who don’t themselves work for a marketing automation vendor. But I think it’s worth pondering anyway, if only as an interesting case study in business strategy.

My own answer is: at stage of the industry, the basic features of marketing automation are pretty much set, so radically different features are not likely to emerge as a major competitive advantage. (That’s not to say new features won’t be important, particularly extensions into areas like social and mobile. But new features won’t be enough because they can be copied too quickly if they're really popular.) Rather, a new industry leader would have to remove the critical bottleneck to industry growth: the shortage of marketers with the skills needed to fully use marketing automation capabilities.

I don’t think I need to spend too much time defending that particular premise: if you want a data point, how about the widely quoted Sirius Decisions figure that 85% of marketers do not believe they are using their marketing automation platform to the fullest. Let's move onto the more important question: how could a vendor change the situation?

It seems to me there are three ways to approach this:

- make the systems radically easier to use. This is by far my preferred solution. It may seem an unobtainable goal: after all, ease of use has been a top priority of marketing automation vendors for years, and you’d think that by now all those smart people would have made things about as easy as they can be. But I think the right basis of comparison is Google AdWords, which made entry-level search engine marketing so incredibly simple that pretty much anyone can do it with no training at all.

As with AdWords, a radically simpler marketing automation system would just ask users to make a handful of basic decisions about content and target audience, and would build everything else automatically. Again like AdWords, the system would automatically optimize the programs based on results. This implies a degree of automation well beyond today’s marketing automation products, although increasingly common features like dynamic content and integrated predictive modeling offer a hint at how it could happen.

You could argue that marketers don’t want to delegate so much responsibility to a system, but many seem to have delegated to AdWords quite happily. Of course, AdWords also lets more sophisticated marketers make more decisions for themselves, and I’d expect any marketing automation system to provide that option as well. And, again as with search engine marketing, I’d expect the most sophisticated marketers to adopt more specialized systems than AdWords itself—but those will marketers will remain a minority.


- make it radically easier for marketers to use existing functions. This is not about making the functions themselves simpler: per my earlier comment, I’ll accept that all those smart folks have done about as much as possible in that direction. But I think more can be done to help marketers learn to use those functions more quickly and with less work.

What I have in mind specifically is “just in time” approaches that make it very easy for marketers to learn how to do a new task once they've started it, rather than taking separate training classes or looking up detailed instructions. This means context-sensitive help functions that can guess what you’re trying to do and offer advice when you seem to be having trouble. It also means lots of little instructional snippets instead of monolithic tutorials that have to be consumed all at once. This is standard stuff in the software industry, although some companies do it much better than others.

I think a marketing automation vendor who really focused on this would have a major advantage among new users, who are exactly the key audience.  If you want a specific benchmark for this approach, it’s that people can perform tasks with zero advance training.

- provide services so marketers don’t need to use the systems themselves. Quite a number of vendors have taken the services-based approach. In a way, it’s an admission of defeat: no, we really can’t make the systems simple enough for mere mortals. But I'd be happy to trade pride for success.

 The trick to this approach is to keep the service cost low enough that you can actually make money.  That comes down to things like prepackaged templates for creative materials and campaign flows, highly automated processes so the service staff can work efficiently, and standardized methodologies so inexperienced (ok, that's a euphemism for low cost) individuals can be easily trained to provide adequate service. Again, these are pretty standard things but I don’t think any vendor has really designed their system and business model around them.

Note that a system designed for efficient use by highly trained service people would look quite different from one designed for easy use and learning by lightly trained end-users. So this approach would really imply fundamental change in how vendors build their products.

As I said earlier, my preferred option is the first one, making systems radically simpler. But I’m guessing the more practical one is the middle choice of providing more effective help using systems similar to today’s. It’s possible that middle option isn’t viable: maybe vendors can’t provide enough additional help to make a difference. But I don’t think I’ve seen any vendor really focus on that option – and won’t concede I’m wrong until I have.

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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, I’m not saying marketing automation vendors should find a new approach just because I’m bored with the old one. But the truth is that the old way doesn’t work: every experienced developer I’ve ever spoken with has told me they’ve found users get confused when flow charts grow past a handful of branches. That’s true even though users themselves design campaigns by drawing a flow chart on a whiteboard. If you watch that process closely, you’ll see that (a) users themselves have trouble when their diagram gets too complex and (b) they can’t make much sense of it when they come back the next morning (assuming the whiteboard wasn’t erased).

Developers have taken two approaches to this challenge. One is to add features that help manage complexity – all those floating pallets and pop-up menus. These do help but it’s like Chaos Theory as explained in Jurassic Park: piling complexity on complexity eventually ends in a catastrophic collapse. The other approach is to simplify the experience by removing capabilities such as multiple branches and recursive loops. The extreme version of this is interfaces that define each campaign as a single sequence of steps, with no branching at all. This is certainly comprehensible but it can prevent marketers from doing what they want.

Something more radical is needed. Developers must think outside the flow chart. One way to start is to consider interfaces they’re already using in other systems.

• touch screen. Dragging and poking at a flow chart with your fingers instead of a mouse wouldn’t be much of an improvement, although it would help. Creating splits by stretching an icon until it breaks into pieces might be kinda fun. Scaling up or down the way you zoom into online maps – and having the level of detail adjust automatically – would definitely be an improvement. But I’m guessing there are some more dramatic alternatives that avoid the flow chart altogether.  Think about your favorite touch screen apps and see what comes to mind. How could you design a marketing campaign with Angry Birds?

• voice activation. I have no interest in speaking the same commands I could type. But a system that understands voice commands has natural language capabilities to infer what I need based on context and past experience, and thus save me the work of defining the details explicitly. (Think IBM Watson on Jeopardy or iPhone Siri.) If you think about the primal whiteboard scenario, what really happens is the marketers say “let’s add a split here” before drawing it – so a natural language approach could be a big time saver by skipping the drawing step altogether. Or the system might actually ask questions and make suggestions that lead the marketer through the design process: Who is your target market? How many reminder emails do you want? Might I suggest you add a reward: here are the best three to consider.

• virtual reality. The biggest problem with flow charts is they are inherently two dimensional.  This means that intersecting branches must visually overlap, which is very confusing.  Could a virtual reality interface let marketers follow each path independently, like walking down a street or flying through a forest? This comes closer to simulating the customer’s experience – perhaps the marketer could be pelted with messages as she passes through (I’m thinking of monkeys throwing fruit), and toss them back as a response.  Or, imagine a road map that traces the customer's physical journey through  both the real world and cyberspace, with marketing messages presented as billboards and interactions as conversations with passersby.  Or could you map the customer journey itself – a trip through the funnel – with a similar presentation of billboards and conversations?  Think of a child's board game like Candyland or, perhaps more appropriate, Alice's trip down the rabbit hole. 

• data visualization. Think of all those cool illustrations you’ve seen of social networks, molecular structures, Web behaviors, economic trends, geospatial data, manufacturing processes, and who knows what. Why can't marketing systems do better than flow charts and pie graphs? How about a three-dimensional campaign diagram that you can rotate and zoom on three axes? Or a six-dimensional view using height, width, depth, color, size, and shape, with a slider for time? Some of these might be hard to interpret but even a flow chart takes some training to understand. I'm certain that creative design can pack more information into a simpler package.

• games and simulation. Could a marketing campaign sprout like a tree, growing more complex over time and bearing customers as fruit? Simulation games use simple rules and a few user choices to create elaborate cities, empires, and organisms. Some already let users run model businesses. More advanced versions of those programs could use rules derived from your customers' actual behavior to test alternative campaign designs and pick the ones most likely to succeed. The campaign details would be built by the system, so the interface becomes less important, although marketers would still need to review everything before deployment. These designs would be inserted into the matrix of existing programs, so the system could model each program’s incremental impact on the full customer lifecycle and on other program results. This leads directly to the Holy Grail of Marketing Optimization (which might make a fine multi-player quest game, come to think of it).

• multiple views and viewpoints. Most of today's marketing automation systems already let administrators control which features are available to which users. But everyone with access to a given feature usually sees the same thing. The one exception is that salespeople are given wholly separate interfaces tailored to their needs. But this approach should be carried over to other personas within the marketing department – the CMO’s view of campaigns is radically different from the marketing operations person’s, and they should not be looking at the same flow chart. Even the same user might want different views at different times, depending on the task at hand.

• customer perspective. I’ve already touched on this but it’s worth more attention. There’s a strong argument that the fundamental notion of separate marketing campaigns should be replaced by integrated customer treatments across all channels and life stages. The flow chart interface is based on the individual campaigns, and becomes impractically complex precisely when campaigns are expanded to accommodate too many contingencies. A customer-centered approach would develop rules for each situation rather than stringing together rules for many different situations. Those rules would be simpler because they dealt with a narrower range of conditions. They could also be spread between campaign logic and dynamic content logic, and many might be replaced altogether by predictive models that choose the highest-value treatment. The explosion of channels and contacts has made integrated customer treatments essential. Marketers need a fundamentally new interface designed to provide them.

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Act-On Software Stresses Ease of Use

Summary: Act-On Software’s revised system offers a reasonable mix of features in an easy-to-use interface. At $500 per month with no annual contract, it’s priced to make it easy to get started with marketing automation.
I started last week to write a review of Act-On Software’s latest release but got distracted by the larger and sexier question of Act-On’s business strategy. So let me try again.

The new release is designed for marketers who want to start using the system with little or no training. The home page all but screams as much, with a huge central panel of “quick start” links to different types of projects. These include:

- outbound marketing programs (e-mail campaigns, events & webinars, and automated programs)
- program components (Web forms, landing pages, list management, media library)
- traffic monitoring (Twitter dashboard, Website visitors)


This mix of programs, components, and monitoring may be logically inconsistent, but it serves the practical purpose of giving marketers one-click access to common tasks. The section for each task continues this approach by combining all task-related functions including set-up, execution and reporting. By contrast, other systems often put reporting in a separate area.

The actual functions provided by Act-On are generally competitive with low-to-mid tier marketing automation products. Of course, every system has its own mix of strengths and weaknesses. In Act-On's case, unusual advantages include:

- “smart” content blocks that can be embedded like widgets in emails and Web pages. These include calendars, Webex invitations, surveys, payments via Paypal, and SMS alerts when a link is clicked.

- unusually close Webex integration, including direct posting of Act-On invitation forms to Webex registration lists and automatic import of attendee lists from Webex into Act-On.

- a “Twitter prospector” that executes automated searches, weeds out spam posts (identified by third-party links within the post), sends the remaining results to an in-box for review, and lets users apply standard templates to create replies.

- Web analytics based on user-assigned page names, so tracking can work without building codes into the URL structure

The system has some other strengths that are less unusual, but still hard to find:

- anonymous visitor tracking based on IP address lookup, with automated integration into Jigsaw to look up contact names and automated alerts for visits from named accounts. While some other system provide this, many marketing automation vendors rely on third-party products instead.

- tracking within Act-On emails sent through Microsoft Outlook. Such emails would otherwise be invisible to the marketing automation system.
- sequential campaign flows with conditional actions in each step and “early exit” conditions that can remove leads from the flow at any step. Most marketing automation systems offer conditional actions, which let the system send different messages to different lead segments. But an early exit rule is harder to find.

- a preinstalled library of stock images, such as form buttons. This simplifies content creation.

Act-On has also retained its list-oriented approach to the marketing database. This lets users manage the database as if it were a set of separate lists. (In reality, Act-On actually does store the leads in a traditional database. The same lead can belong to multiple lists.) Act-On can also push or pull data to Salesforce.com on a list-by-list basis, which gives users more control than moving all records at once. I've never seen the benefits of the list-based approach, but Act-On says its clients find it easier to grasp than traditional segments.
Act-On does have some weaknesses compared with most other products. These include limits on lead scoring and lack of progressive profiling.

As for that user interface: it's certainly attractive and does look easy, although I can't say whether it's substantially simpler than the competition. My general feeling remains that any initial advantage in ease of use quickly becomes irrelevant as marketers gain experience. After that, what really matters is having a system with the capabilities that match your needs. So any selection decision should consider long-term requirements in addition to the interface.
Pricing of Act-On starts at $500 per month, which is low for a mid-tier marketing automation product although it's limited to three users and 10,000 active contacts (plus an unlimited number of inactive contacts). No long-term contract is required and a 14 day free trial is available. Act-On has over 200 clients.

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