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Wednesday, December 21, 2011

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 database. But B2B marketing automation

products are largely limited to data they generate internally

or import from CRM. The B2C marketing automation

systems can usually attach to any data structure but rely on

some other system to create it. So, yes, there’s a need for a

company like Empathy Logic. (Before I change topics, other

key points about Empathy Logic are: product is about one

year old; uses Pentaho open source software for data

integration and business intelligence; runs on the Amazon

EC2 cloud infrastructure; and charges $10,000 to $20,000

per month for its services.)

Empathy Logic got me thinking about a topic that doesn’t

get discussed much in B2B marketing automation circles:

the place of marketing automation in the larger marketing

system architecture. B2B marketing automation vendors

generally position their systems as a replacement for

separate applications including email, forms creation, Web

analytics, content management, and reporting. This may

leave the impression that marketing automation is the only

system a marketing department needs. Marketing

automation vendors have little incentive to correct the error,

since mentioning integration would only slow the sales

cycle. (For more about integration requirements, take a

look at our recent workbook on the topic.)

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Customer Experience Matrix This is the blog of David M. Raab, long-time marketing technology consultant and

analyst. Mr. Raab is Principal at Raab Associates Inc. The blog is named for the

Customer Experience Matrix, a tool to visualize marketing and operational interactions

between a company and its customers.

Page 1 of 29Customer Experience Matrix: December 2011

2/9/2014http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.in/2011_12_01_archive.html

Raab Associates does have its own model of a complete

marketing architecture. But before presenting it, let's look

at some other opinions. I found three surveys that address

the issue.

The most intriguing was published last September by Adobe

and Econsultancy. The focus is online marketing (remember

that Adobe owns Omniture, Day Software, Demdex and now

Efficient Frontier) but the survey is especially interesting

because it asked about adoption, value received, and effort

required. The original report presented these separately but

I’ve combined them in a bubble chart:

This is worth some exploration. You’ll see that marketing

automation is at the bottom – meaning it’s the least

resource intensive of the technologies listed. But it’s also

farther left than most, meaning it’s also among the least

effective at delivering profits. (I’m going to assume that

“significant impact on the bottom line” meant significant

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positive impact.) I’m really feeling a bit disrespected here:

marketing automation is easy AND ineffective? Maybe the

survey-takers are getting poor results because they’re not

putting in the necessary resources. Or maybe they're

mostly Web marketers who aren't really all that familiar with

it.

Either way, the respondents still gave marketing automation

a better effort / value ratio than attribution, buzz monitoring

and social media management. Maybe they understand

those better and see how much work is involved. But

campaign management, which I think is email campaigns

but might be Web ad campaigns, also rates as harder than

marketing automation. Doesn't marketing automation

include email and a whole lot more? I have a hard time

understanding how email alone could be harder.

This survey also addresses the ever-popular question of

adoption. This group reported that 38% were using

marketing automation. That’s considerably higher than most

estimates but it’s among the lowest rates on the chart. In

that sense, at least, it supports the general belief that

marketing automation is still in its early stages. I’ve

provided the actual numbers below:

If you looked carefully at the previous survey, you probably

noticed that a few important applications were missing, such

as Webinars. Oops. A survey last February by Act-On

Software had a more realistic range of applications.

▼ December (9)

Beyond Marketing

Automation:

Building a

Complete M...

Influitive Helps

Marketers Build an

Army of Advoca...

Marketing

Automation

Interface Should

Focus on Cus...

Marketing

Automation Skills

are Scarce:

Vendor Str...

Social Media

Features in

Marketing

Automation Syst...

LeadLife Bundles

Services with

Marketing

Automatio...

SDL Buys Marketing

Automation

Vendor Alterian

for ...

Assess Marketing

Automation

Vendor Services

Before...

New Workbook:

Estimating the

Cost of Marketing

Aut...

► November (8)

► October (6)

► September (5)



The Act-On survey isn't perfect for today's purpose: it was

sent to small and mid-size business, listed several marketing

automation components separately (email, lead nurturing,

and lead scoring), lumped all of social media into a single

category, and ignored Web analytics entirely. Still, it gives a

pretty reasonable idea of the relative utilization of different

methods, most of which would involve different marketing

systems.

I found a one more survey that listed marketing systems,

from the CMO Council in July 2011.

► August (5)

► July (3)

► June (6)

► May (5)

► April (6)

► March (8)

► February (7)

► January (6)

► 2010 (75)

► 2009 (96)

► 2008 (60)

► 2007 (146)

► 2006 (74)

About Me

DAVID RAAB

David Raab is consultant

in marketing technology

evaluation and analytics.

He is Principal at Raab

Associates Inc., which

publishes the B2B

Marketing Automation

Vendor Selection Tool.

Mr. Raab has written

hundreds of articles for

industry publications.

Many of these are

available without charge

at

www.archive.raabassociat



This is by far the broadest list. It includes CRM, call center,

master data management, talent (staff) management,

ecommerce, and product life cycle systems. That the

question describes them all as “marketing automation

solutions” gives some idea of how broadly the term is

sometimes defined – which I still suspect is a major reason

that many surveys show that “marketing automation” has

such a high penetration rate. Unfortunately, this survey

didn't ask directly about usage.

If we look across all three surveys and add Raab Associates'

own research, a reasonably complete set of components for

a marketing architecture would include:

esinc.com Mr. Raab can

be reached at

[email protected]

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• marketing database management (data extraction,

customer data integration, master data management,

database updates)

• Web advertising (paid search, banner ads)

• Web site management (Web content creation and

management, search engine optimization, ecommerce

if relevant.

• Web analytics and optimization (could be part of Web

site management but still largely done by separate

systems.)

• social marketing (blogs, social media monitoring,

social media posting, community management,

advocate management)

• Webinars (it seems odd to make these their own

category but they’re still separate systems and don’t

easily fit with Web site management or social

marketing)

• marketing automation (direct mail, email, mobile,

landing pages, web behavior, nurture campaigns, lead

scoring, reporting; includes batch, trigger, and event-

driven campaigns and real-time interactions)

• media buying (for conventional media: TV, radio,

newspaper, magazine, outdoor, etc.)

• marketing resource management (project

management, workflow, content and digital asset

management, budgets and forecasts, purchasing, staff

management)

• analytics (reporting, dashboards, attribution,

marketing measurement, predictive modeling, mix

optimization – this extends beyond the channel-

specific applications like Web analytics)

• CRM (not usually run by marketing but so intimately

connected with marketing systems that I'd consider it

part of the architecture. I'm using CRM as a catch-all

term for sales automation, order processing, customer

service, loyalty, call centers, and partner

management.)

There are many ways to draw this architecture and perhaps

I'll return to it another day. My point for now is simply that

marketing automation is just one piece of the larger

marketing puzzle -- and marketers need to recognize that

they'll need to pull data from multiple systems to do a

thorough job of managing customer relationships.

Marketonomy blog

MineThatData blog

Neil Raden blog

Neolane blog

Pardot blog

Perfect Customer

Experience blog

Propelling Brands blog

Ready Contacts Blog

SalesFUSION blog

Silverpop Demand

Generation blog



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Labels: marketing automation, marketing system architecture,

technology infrastructure

Monday, December 19, 2011

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 motivational methods to company advocates.

Marketers define “challenges”, such as sharing content,

making a referral, creating case studies, or providing a

reference, and the system issues points to advocates who

perform them. Advocates can accumulate points and

exchange them for rewards. Advocates can also earn

badges, move through levels, and compare themselves to

others on leader boards. The system can also offer games,

contests, and direct messages to advocates. These features

all give advocates a continuing stream of new reasons to

stay active.

This is a strikingly simple concept – but I think it’s brilliant.

An army of advocates can be a tremendous resource, but

without a way to attract, nurture and direct them, they’re

less an army than a random mob. Influitive lets marketers

gradually strengthen advocate relationships by posing

challenges that require increasing levels of commitment.

Influitive founder Mark Organ describes the process as an

"advocate development funnel" whose ultimate goal is

"social nurturing" by advocates who provide personal

references to potential buyers who are also their

professional peers. While these ideas are intriguing, I

suspect they're not really necessary. The practical benefits

of systematically managing advocates are probably obvious

to marketers who have been struggling to regain control



over their social media presence .

My thumbnail description doesn’t cover the important

technical features that make Influitive practical. These

include controls over how challenges are issued (who is

eligible, date limits, quantity limits, etc.), managing awards,

and API-level integration to pull profile data (LinkedIn),

record completed challenges (Quora, Twitter, Facebook,

LinkedIn) and announce completed challenges

(Salesforce.com Chatter). The company plans additional API

connections with Jive, ZenDesk, and other systems.

One caveat in all this is the legal and ethical issues

regarding rewards for advocates. Ardath Albee wrote about

this recently in some detail. Since Eloqua is an Influitive

client, I asked Eloqua VP of Content Marketing Joe Chernov

(who also co-chairs the Word of Mouth Marketing

Association's member ethics panel) how they use it without

breaking any rules. His answer is worth printing in full:

We neither give rewards, nor have we ever given rewards, in

our use of Influitive. We give badges and thank-you's … in

other words, we show our appreciation in the form "social

currency." But we give no cash, no prizes, no compensation.

If the Influitive platform reaches a point that it can hardwire

disclosure into the testimonial across all media channels,

then we'd consider material incentives in certain

circumstances. But it's my fundamental belief that marketers

think they need to offer valuable perks, but if a client truly

is an advocate, then the person is often entirely willing to

help … for nothing in exchange but gratitude.

In other words, it's quite possible to use Influitive without

violating disclosure standards. The product supports this

with automated disclosure options, which can be made

mandatory if a company wants. Naturally, this doesn't

guarantee all clients will be equally scrupulous.

Influitive is currently in beta. Pricing is free up to 20 active

advocates, and then starts at $500 per month, growing at

roughly $20 per advocate per month. It has 16 customers,

about half above the 20 advocate minimum.

Posted by David Raab at 11:52 AM 0 comments


Labels: advocate management, influitive, social media marketing

Thursday, December 15, 2011



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.



Labels: campaign management software, ease of use, flow charts,

marketing automation systems, user interface

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

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 reports of user

dissatisfaction – not enough to stop people from using the

systems, but perhaps enough to prevent them from

expanding their deployments or recommending marketing

automation to their friends. Act-On Software recently

reported that 40% of marketers are dissatisfied with their

campaign management program.



Surveys, like this one from IBM, show many obstacles to

successful deployment. But the ultimate problem is staff

skills: marketers who know how to use their systems and

understand their benefits can make a compelling case for

investments in programs, integration, technology, data,

process change, and whatever else is required.



Marketing automation vendors are painfully aware of these

issues. They've taken a range of approaches to addressing

them. I've seen four distinct strategies:

• training. This is the most direct approach: if users

don’t have enough skills, then teach them. I’m using

“training” in a broad sense to include all types of

preparation before deployment: these include

marketing planning, process change, content

development, metrics definition, and organizational

realignment as well as actual training in system use.

This is the traditional strategy for B2C marketing

automation and at B2B firms large enough to afford

substantial pre-deployment investments. It’s also the

preferred option of most industry consultants (myself

included) because it provides the strongest platform

for future success. Among B2B vendors, Eloqua is the

poster child for this approach. (And I should note that

many vendors are supporting the Marketing

Automation Institute's training program too.)

But not everyone can afford through training and

preparation for a marketing automation deployment. The

remaining strategies are designed to help those who cannot.



• ease of use. Simple systems let marketers get

started with minimum preparation. This is by far the

most popular strategy among vendors, presumably

because it increases sales by placing the fewest

demands on buyers. It's applied by Marketo, Pardot,

Act-On Software, Genius, Net-Results, and many

others. It’s also the most popular strategy among

buyers, judging by how many installations never grow

past the basic functions. But the approach is also

probably the reason for high dissatisfaction: marketers

must find they face a much steeper learning curve

than they expected to use their systems' fully. For

long-term success, vendors who take this approach

must ensure that their clients keep growing after the

initial deployment.

• automation. Instead of training marketers to do hard

things or making those things easier, automation has

the system do them instead. This is a much less

common strategy, in part because it's technically

demanding and expensive to execute. It's also a

partial solution at best, since no one thinks marketing

can be fully automated. Still, it's being applied to lead

scoring (creating the actual scoring formulas

automatically, instead of asking users to define them);

to content selection (letting the system predict which

content a visitor is likely to want); and to contact

frequency (letting the system determine how often a

lead should be contacted). HubSpot is following this

approach most aggressively although others are also

applying it in places.

• full service. This strategy argues that it’s ultimately

more efficient for the vendor to do complex marketing

automation tasks than to teach marketers to do the

tasks for themselves. That’s not as crazy as it sounds:

marketing automation tasks like setting up a new

program are often complex, rarely required, and quick

for a well-practiced expert. So buying a couple of

hours or days of service each month really does save

time and money. It also gives access to more

expertise than a small marketing department could

ever build internally. As you might expect, this

approach is most common among at the small

business end of the marketing automation spectrum:

Genoo, MakesBridge, and OfficeAutoPilot are good

examples. But it seems to be creeping upstream:

LeadLife, Treehouse Interactive, and Manticore

Technology apply it to larger customers.

Although I’ve associated specific vendors with each strategy,

the reality is that most companies apply a mix of several.

This violates the classic strategy rule to select one clear goal



and focus all resources on reaching it. But a mixed

approach probably makes sense for marketing automation,

where a tactical choice like making your system easier can

support several strategies and where different buyers may

need different treatments.

This doesn’t mean that vendors can get away with being

sloppy. The market is too competitive and marketing

automation is too complex to succeed despite poor

execution. It’s also likely that a dominant approach will

emerge within each customer segment.

But even then, one size won’t fit everyone. Both vendors

and buyers will still need to match the deployment strategy

to the buyer’s situation.



Labels: b2b marketing automation, industry trends, marketing

automation vendor strategies, marketing skills gap, training

Thursday, December 08, 2011

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 of vendor sites to see what social

features they’re offering. Results are summarized in the

table below. I need to stress that I’ve only credited vendors

for features they list on their site. I strongly suspect that

the data is incomplete, especially for basic features that

are so common the vendors simply don’t bother to mention

them. (Note: the table has been updated after the original

post based on vendor feedback, so it's a bit more reliable

than it was originally.)



The features fell into four broad categories:

• Basic posting and sharing: the most common features

and the simplest level of social media marketing. As I wrote

above, most vendors probably have most of them even

though the chart doesn’t show them.

• Social media monitoring: watching social media for

mentions of the company or other topics and responding

when appropriate. Plenty of third party applications can do

this, so providing it within the marketing automation system

is mostly a matter of convenience.

• Importing social data: loading social data into the

marketing automation database so it can be used for

segmentation, analysis, and sharing with salespeople via

CRM integration. This is harder than monitoring since it

requires linking social identities to marketing leads and

connecting to the social system’s API.

• Social platform integration: using native features of the

social platforms by writing to their APIs. This can be tricky

for the marketing automation vendors to build but it lets

their clients take greater advantage of social media

possibilities.

Looking at the chart as a whole, what stands out is the

sheer variety: once you get past the basics, no features are

common enough to consider them standard. This contrasts

sharply with mature categories like email, landing pages,

and nurture campaigns, where dozens of features are shared

by most systems. The reason is obvious – social media is

still very young – but the disparity still provides interesting

insights into what different vendors feel are most important

to their clients.



The variety also illustrates that a great number of social

media applications are possible (with plenty more to come).

Naturally, the vendors will borrow features from each other,

so we can expect some convergence over time.. A standard

set of features will emerge as the industry figures out what’s

really important.

The list below presents each vendor with a brief explanation

of the table entries. Links on the vendor names go directly

to the vendor Web page or press release that described their

social media capabilities. In cases where the data came

from different sources, I've put the link on the items

themselves.

Neolane

- posting: central panel to post tweets and Facebook

updates

- sharing: place sharing buttons on emails

- tracking: measure clicks on links in system-generated

posts.

- Facebook forms: use forms within Facebook pages and

apps to gather customer permissions

- social sign-in: use social media sign-in services to replace

marketing automation forms

- personalized Facebook ads: display different ad versions on

a Facebook page based on the user’s profile, including both

Facebook and non-Facebook data

Marketo

- sharing: place sharing buttons on landing pages

- tracking: measure visitors from the shared pages

- load Twitter feed: connector to load Twitter conversations

to lead profiles and use the conversations in campaign rules

Eloqua

- sharing: place sharing buttons on emails and other

marketing materials


marketing automation forms

- Klout segmentation: add Klout scores to lead profiles and

use them in campaign rules

- show Twitter feed: let salespeople see a lead’s Twitter

posts on their Profiler dashboard

IBM/Unica

- social monitoring: use CoreMetrics Social to find social

media mentions of company



Aprimo

- posting: manage blog posts with review process and SEO

recommendations

- sharing: place sharing buttons on email and microsites

- tracking: integrate with third party web analytics to track

social referrals

- monitoring: integrate with third party social listening tools

for monitoring

Pardot

- posting: central panel to schedule and send social

messages

- load social profile: use Qwerly to import social media

profiles and add to marketing automation lead profile

- show social profile: show social profile data in CRM

Silverpop

- posting: send posts to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and/or

RSS feeds along with email sends

- sharing: place sharing buttons on email


sign-in forms

- Facebook forms: add registration forms to Facebook and

blogs

- badges and buttons: embed buttons and badges in email

for Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, StumbleUpon, XING

Act-On Software

- tracking: embed trackable links in system-generated posts

- social prospecting: find relevant social conversations and

send to in-box; send template-based responses

SalesFusion

- sharing: place sharing buttons on email and landing pages


and online documents

TreeHouse Interactive

- sharing: place sharing buttons on email and landing pages


- Facebook forms: build advanced forms that can work

within Facebook pages

Net-Results

- load social profile: find data about visitors on Jigsaw,

Linkedin, Twitter and post to marketing automation lead



profile

Genius

- tracking: embed trackable links in personalized web

promotions and chat messages

Loopfuse

- social monitoring: use Collecta realtime search to find

social media mentions of company

HubSpot

- posting: send social media messages and blog posts

- sharing: place sharing buttons on blog posts and other

content

- social monitoring: find social media mentions of company

and respond

- Facebook forms: build ‘welcome’ app to capture leads on

Facebook page



Labels: demand generation software, marketing automation systems,

social media marketing, vendor comparison

Wednesday, December 07, 2011

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. LeadLife

originally used a linear sequence of steps, while the new



system uses a branching flow chart. This is a somewhat

unusual choice for a small business-oriented system, whose

clients tend to find flow charts difficult to work with. But

LeadLife – like many other marketing automation vendors –

found its clients tend to design campaigns as flow charts. It

therefore chose to build the flow chart interface but to

exclude the more confusion-inducing features, like the ability

to send leads back to previous steps in the same flow or to

start new flows in the middle.

On the other hand, the system does include some features

not usually found in small business systems. These include

rule-driven, dynamic content blocks within emails, which

LeadLife found many clients applied fairly easily. The system

rule-builder also combines power with simplicity: for

example, rules can reference specific links within an email

(powerful) and the system automatically presents a list of

links within the specified email (simple).

Probably more important, LeadLife has also bundled

marketing services with its software. For example, vendor

staff will design the campaign flows for the client, further

reducing the risk that the flow chart will cause confusion.

Vendor staff will teach the client best practices such as

building several small campaigns instead of a single

complicated one.



Services are provided with every level of the product,

including the lowest price of $750 per month. Specific

options include marketing strategy, content creation, design,

lead nurturing campaigns, lead process definition, and

analytics. Most are performed by LeadLife’s internal staff

although copywriting and design may be sent to

subcontractors.

Bundled services are LeadLife’s solution to the skill gap that

keeps so many companies from adopting marketing

automation or using it fully. Other companies have taken a

similar approach. Still others have tried alternatives

including keeping the system very simple, providing

extensive training to use more complex systems, and using

automation to handle complicated functions. Although most

vendors apply them in combination, their emphases do

vary. It's not clear which choice will prove most effective --

but a lot of money is riding on the outcome.

Back to LeadLife. The scope of the new product includes

typical marketing automation functions: campaigns, email,

landing pages and forms, lead scoring, behavior tracking,

CRM integration, sales alerts, segmentation, and reporting.

Reports and some other features are still a work in progress

but the basics are in place. LeadLife is migrating its existing

70 customers to the new system over the next few months.

The system is sold on a month-to-month basis (no long-term

contract) and prices are based on email volume and

services. Clients at all levels get the full set of system

features.



Labels: b2b marketing automation, leadlife, marketing software,

vendor services

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

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 doing so well lately, with about $55

million revenue for the past year and cash-basis loss around

$6 million. Management has also been in flux: CEO David

Eldridge resigned in April, a new CEO Heath Davies was

named in July, and president and co-founder Michael Talbot

resigned in October. The company was nearing the end of a

100 day restructuring plan that dropped its headcount from

440 to 260. It had also taken several red-flag accounting

actions including restating revenue, changing its revenue

recognition policy, and taking large asset write-downs.

You math whizzes out there will have already noted that the

purchase price is just under 2x revenue, compared with the

5x-ish prices paid a year ago for Unica and Aprimo. Whether

this puts a damper on the prospective valuations of other

marketing automation vendors is hard to say: Alterian was

obviously struggling, and its main business model was to

license its software to marketing service providers rather

than selling it directly or via Software as a Service. On the

other hand, Alterian did have some SaaS components to its

business, notably SM2 social media monitoring (formerly

Techrigy).

Alterian also had a bold vision of extending beyond

traditional campaign management and analytics to include

marketing resource management and web content

management as well as social media. I’d still argue the

strategy was correct, but that Alterian didn’t have the

financial resources or market clout to execute it. Certainly its

costs got ahead of its revenue: at 440 employees on $55

million revenue, it had just $125,000 revenue per employee,

compared with the $200,000 I consider standard (see my

post from last January on revenue ratios -- even at that

time, when Alterian had just 370 employees, it was already

below par.)

SDL’s chairman is quoted as saying that “The marketing

analytics, campaign management and social media were the

big attractions” of Alterian, so presumably the company will

keep those businesses. The content management piece,

about 27% of Alterian sales, will presumably be merged with

SDL’s much larger Web content management business.

The big question for the marketing services providers who

are Alterian’s primary customer base is how SDL will treat

them, since they are not SDL’s current core clients. That’s

more than a little scary, especially given the dearth of

alternative mid-priced marketing automation systems for

consumer marketers. (See my list of B2C vendors from

September and my discussion of the differences between

B2B and B2C marketing automation from October.)



On the brighter side, I can argue that the Alterian acquisition

supports my long-standing contention that marketing

automation and Web content management will eventually

coalesce into a single system. Any gloating is restrained by

the fact that Alterian had already combined the two and

didn’t succeed. But this probably just shows that deep

pockets will be needed to pull off the combination in a world

where the competitors are heavyweights like IBM, Oracle,

Adobe, SAS and Teradata.



Labels: acquisitions, digital marketing, integrated systems, marketing

automation, marketing software, Web content management

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 offer three types of services:

• deployment: help with setting up your system

• support: help in operating your system after it’s

deployed

• account service: help in growing your business.

Different companies have different needs in each area.

Buyers must understand those needs to know what they

want a vendor to provide. I've written extensively about

needs analysis in other posts and workbooks, so I won’t

repeat those discussions here.

Similarly, the new workbook assumes you know what you’re

looking for. It focuses on how to get it by providing

suggestions for who to talk to, what to ask them, and how to

interpret their answers. Each service types involves talking

to different people:



for deployment, talk to:

• deployment staff to understand their skill level, typical

projects, and project management methods

• sales staff to understand deployment services and

pricing

• references to understand the types of services

provided and the quality of work

for support, talk to :

• head of support to understand services, staff

qualifications, training, and reward systems

• front-line support staff to understand the kinds of

problems they handle, internal systems that help

manage their work, and how they’re motivated

• sales staff to understand support services and pricing

• references to understand service levels and

satisfaction

for account service, talk to:

• head of account services to understand staff

qualifications, measurement methods, and whether

they have “success managers” separate from “account

managers”

• account manager to understand their skills, training,

workload, and objectives

• head of training to understand the kinds of training

available, who delivers it, and if they understand how

customers use the system

• head of professional services to understand the quality

and scope of services

• head of partner relations to understand the types of

partners and the company's investment in building a

partner ecosystem

• sales staff to understand the types of account services

and pricing

• references to understand the scope and quality of

account services

The workbook offers dozens specific questions in each of

those areas. I suppose you could just send each company

the list and get back written answers, but you’ll get much

more value from telephone and personal interviews. These

let you listen to the replies and ask follow-up questions to

drill into topics of interest. You probably won't need to ask

every question to every person; the first few answers will

often be enough to give a good idea of how the company

does things in each area.





Labels: marketing automation vendor selection, marketing software

evaluation

Monday, December 05, 2011

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 software itself. This is where

most buyers focus their analysis, but it’s a tiny fraction

of the value at play. Background research for the

workbook suggested that automation costs are from

1% to 5% of an average marketing budget. This

means that the direct system cost is pretty much

insignificant compared with the marketing budget it

will help to manage. To put it another way: even a

small improvement in the other 95% to 99% of

marketing costs can easily pay for a marketing

automation system.

• operations costs: other costs related to running the

marketing automation system, such as staff time and

costs of related systems. Most of these are marketing

operations costs, and there may be others in sales and

IT. You’re already incurring many of them, so the

analysis has to identify how much they’ll increase or

decrease as a result of marketing automation. This is

really hard since it takes a detailed understanding of



your current processes and how they'll change. But

the stakes are high: operations costs are about 25%

of a typical marketing budget.

• marketing program costs: the expenses for specific

marketing programs, such as advertising, trade shows,

email, etc. These are the other 75% of the typical

marketing budget. Marketing automation can reduce

these costs substantially, both through reduced waste

and through shifting funds to more effective programs.

• revenue: many marketers shy away from building

revenue gains into their marketing automation

calculation, but revenue is ultimately the reason for

their investment. From an analytical perspective, it’s

important not to double-count revenue gains

(assuming the same marketing budget) and cost

savings (from a lower marketing budget). It's also

important to recognize that revenue isn’t 100% profit.

The workbook describes how to do this. To keep

things in perspective: marketing costs are under 10%

of revenue at most firms, meaning that direct

marketing automation are under 0.5% of revenue.

Analyzing all four items in depth is a big job. The good news

is you don’t usually need to assess them all at once.

• building a business case for marketing automation

needs only a rough estimate for direct system costs,

since they’re so small compared with the revenue,

marketing program costs, and operations.

• comparing marketing automation systems lets

you focus on the system costs and changes in

marketing operations costs, since those may vary

considerably from one product to another. The impact

on program costs and revenues should be about the

same unless you're considering systems with widely

different capabilities. But hopefully you identified your

needs earlier in the process, so you'll only be

comparing similar systems once you reach the final

evaluation..

It's useful to understand these cost categories, but the real

work is gathering the details for each component. This is

where the workbook comes in: it lists of specific items to

consider, so you have a framework to help ensure your

analysis is complete. This is important: to take a real-world

example, one of my consulting clients recently received

quotes from two marketing automation vendors, one of

which included email delivery and one of which did not.

Recognizing the difference made it easy to prepare a true



Newer Posts Older Posts

apples-to-apples comparison, but we could have easily

missed it until later the process if we had not used a formal

framework.



Labels: marketing automation cost, marketing software evaluation,

vendor selection

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