Marketing Vendor Selection: Trends You'll Need to Support

As I wrote yesterday, no one knows exactly what we’ll want from our marketing automation systems in the future. But it's still worth taking a guess at what looks likely.  Here are some trends I expect will be important.

Social Media. The first wave of marketing automation features for social media is now several years old.  These included making it easier to share emails and Web pages, tracking shares through embedded URLs, and monitoring social media conversations. The second wave is just starting.  It includes more sophisticated features for working within social media platforms, such as delivering forms and personalized ads within Facebook, using social sign-on to capture more data, and building more detailed profiles based on activities, consumption, connections and influence. Beyond the execution technology itself, these features will require substantial increase in analytical horsepower to make sense of the results.

Mobile. Many marketing automation vendors have added mobile interfaces for the marketers and salespeople who work with them.  But the focus is now shifting to marketing campaigns that are delivered by mobile.. The first change is to create standard materials in mobile-friendly formats. But this will soon be followed by more profound adjustments for touch screens, shorter view times, QR codes, special-purpose apps, gamification, social interactions, location awareness, and other mobile-specific possibilities. Third party developers will probably pioneer these capabilities, so look for marketing automation vendors who are good at integrating with outsiders and, eventually, have the money to acquire their technology.

Video. Plenty of video is used already in marketing promotions.  It's particularly useful as a way to generate lots of content at relatively low cost. But marketing automation vendors haven’t built many special features to make video easier to use. One big need is better tagging to make video more search-friendly; others are better upload and content analysis to support user-generated content. This may be another area where marketing automation vendors rely on external developers rather than pioneering for themselves.

Benchmarks. This is a hot topic among vendors, both because clients love benchmarks and because there are now enough clients to supply sufficient data. Benchmarking requires standard definitions to allow comparisons across program types, funnel stages, responses, and industry groups. It also needs ways to present the information so marketers can easily understand it. Eventually, benchmark systems will start making recommendations on what to try next – although I've yet to see that happen.

Testing. Too few marketers have a rigorous testing program, and, perhaps for that reason, most marketing automation vendors have focused their energies elsewhere. This may be changing, as marketers see simple and effective testing in other areas like Web landing pages and paid search. Speaking as someone who trained in traditional direct marketing, where testing is an absolute religion, I can only hope so.

Automation. Let’s face it: most marketing automation today is still pretty darn manual. The automation I'm talking about here is having the system make choices so marketers don’t have to. Think about lead scoring, where the traditional approach is for a team of people to sit around a table and negotiate a set of scoring rules. An automated approach would eliminate that by using techniques like regression analysis to derive the formulas directly from the data. Other automated applications could be matching contents to user behavior and choosing the optimal timing for campaign messages. This type of automation is a way to overcome the skill shortage that has slowed the growth of the automation industry. In that sense, it’s an alternative, or at least a supplement, to better training (creating more skilled people) and easier interfaces (making the few skilled people more productive). Delivering this automation requires major investments in statistical technology, standardized definitions, and process monitoring to avoid the “sorcerer’s apprentice” problem of uncontrolled execution.

External data. Marketing automation systems are increasingly gathering data from external sources like social media, list compilers, and online behavior tracking. They’re also moving past CRM to tap other internal systems like accounting, manufacturing and order processing. This poses a major challenge for some marketing automation vendors, who didn't design their system for sources outside of CRM. It requires more flexible data models, APIs for smooth data exchange, and often a substantial increase in total data volume. More complex data also implies much higher implementation and maintenance costs, making marketing automation tougher to sell.

Pay per Result. This is the ultimate extension of external data: instead of buying information, marketers can just buy qualified leads directly. It's also another way to compensate for the skills shortage. Of course, some pay-per-lead programs have been around for years. But as marketers use them more aggressively, the marketing automation systems will need to get better at merging their inputs, identifying duplicates, estimating the value of new names, and analyzing long-term results.


Analytics. Many marketers claim they want better analysis but few have made the investment. Perhaps this will finally change as data becomes more widely available, CEOs press for clearer return on marketing investments, and the exploding complexity requires better measurement to keep marketing under control. We’re seeing two specific applications: revenue analytics that look beyond marketing to track the entire customer life cycle, and optimization to allocate resources across the many different marketing opportunities. Both require substantial investments in new data structures, reporting tools, visualization, dashboards, information distribution, and user management. Marketers who are serious about analytics need to look closely at which vendors have created the necessary foundations and will continue build on them.

No one vendor will be top of all these trends and neither will any one marketer. My advice is to pick the areas you feel are most important and study what each prospective vendor can do in them today and has planned for the future. Beyond that, take a look at yesterday’s suggestions on finding a future-safe vendor, and pick one you feel reasonably comfortable will adapt to whatever tomorow may bring.

Which B2B Marketing Automation Systems Have Hard-to-Find Features? The Answers May Surprise You

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 main point, at least as I saw it, was that no single vendor dominates everything. Different firms are best at serving small, mid-size and large marketing organizations, and for each of these buyer types, different vendors lead different categories.

It’s like the awards ceremony at a progressive elementary school: everybody is best at something.

That may sound all warm and fuzzy, but this conclusion also has great practical significance: it means that you can’t assume a sector leader has the best product for your particular needs. You must look at the details to find the best match.

I cautioned in that post that you can’t stop at the category level. Even the vendor with the highest category score won’t necessarily have a feature you need. The chart below takes the analysis to the next level, looking at which vendors meet specific requirements. It lists the 33 least common items of the 190 we captured in our research. The green cells identify vendors who fully match an item (score=2); the orange column at the right shows how many of the 18 vendors had this score. (Yellow cells indicate a score of 1, meaning an item was partly fulfilled. I’ve ignored those cells in the following discussion but show them to make the point that many vendors do have some capabilities in these areas.)

There is an obvious over-all pattern: the green cells cluster heavily towards the right. Since the chart is organized with small business systems to the left and big business systems to the right, this means the rarer features are most often found in products for big marketing departments. That makes intuitive sense – you’d expect bigger organizations to need more special features. (You'd also expect to need more features in general, which the data also confirms although I haven't illustrated it here.) One caveat is that the item list itself was leaned heavily towards the needs of mid-size and large businesses; a list of features tailored to small businesses might have a different pattern.

But while most green cells are on the right, there are plenty of exceptions. This is important: it means that buyers who need an unusual feature might find it any type of system. Indeed, nearly half of these items (14 of the 33) can be found in the small business columns (the first five on the left). Nor is it simply that these items are small business specialties. Twelve of the 14 are also found in five big-business products on the right.

The other pattern clearly visible is the two heavily-populated columns in the center, representing mid-market leaders Eloqua and Marketo. The high number of green cells (seven for Marketo and nine for Eloqua) shows that both products are feature-rich. But they're far from twins: their combined green cells cover 13 different items, and there are just three items which both vendors satisfy fully. Once more, the moral of the story is that even direct competitors are quite different when you start looking at details. The good news is this means that buyers who know exactly what they want should be able to distinguish strong from weak candidates quite easily.

Although the items I've listed are shared across all kinds of systems, the distribution isn't simply random. The chart below illustrates which kinds of features are found where. It summarizes the results for the three groups I’ve been discussing: small-business vendors (the five left-hand columns), big-business vendors (the five right-hand columns), and the Marketo/Eloqua combination. Green cells indicate at least one vendor in the group supports an item. Numbers indicate how many vendors support the item.


I’ve given yellow labels to items that are supported big-business systems only. You'll see that most relate advanced marketing planning and administration, which is something only big companies really need. These include detailed cost calculations, expiration dates on marketing content, project schedules, project task detail, results forecasts, approval workflows, marketing calendars, and plan vs. actual reporting. Several of the remaining items relate to advanced offer selection, another requirement for big programs because they have too many potential offers to manage manually or through simple rules. The rest, including multi-language user interface and on-premise deployment, also deal with needs unique to large enterprises. The only real odd-ball here is online chat. What can I say?

The blue labels are items found in a small-business system. All of these are also available in at least one other category, which basically confirms that all kinds of marketers need them. Half relate to specific output channels: fax, RSS, social media, direct mail, email, external Web sites, and Webinars. My interpretation is that vendors of all sizes see the need to simplify multi-channel integration for their clients. The balance are advanced capabilities used by sophisticated marketers in all sizes of organizations.

The five remaining items, with white labels, are shared by mid-tier and big-business systems. Two relate to channel integration (social media and events) and three are generally big-business concerns (fractional revenue attribution, offer coordination, and user-defined matching rules). It’s interesting that the second group are the items shared by Marketo and Eloqua. Without reading too much into this, it suggests that both vendors are looking to the needs of larger rather than smaller companies.

As you’re surely gathered by now, I find this data inherently intriguing. It's a way to understand the contours of the marketing automation industry. But most buyers just want to pick the right system. For them, this data simply reinforces that same central lesson: you must look at the details to find your best match. Still, that’s a lesson too few people have learned, so I’m perfectly happy to keep repeating it.