When we last left Teradata Marketing Applications, it had just been sold to Marlin Equity Partners, whose major previous investment in marketing technology was SaaS email provider BlueHornet. At the time, I expected Marlin would merge the Teradata applications (mostly the old Aprimo product line, plus eCircle email and some other bits) with BlueHornet and was puzzled by why Marlin thought this would result in a good business.
Well, it turns out I was half right: Marlin announced this morning that it is splitting up the business it bought and merging the marketing execution pieces (email, campaign management, etc.) with BlueHornet. The other part – marketing operations functions including planning, workflow, asset management, content distribution, and analytics – will reemerge under the Aprimo brand and be merged with distributed marketing specialist Revenew, which Marline also announced today it has just acquired.
This makes a lot of sense to me. Mrketing operations was Aprimo’s original product and greatest competitive strength. It’s about as unsexy a business as you can imagine, and one that has mostly been merged into larger marketing suites by vendors like SAS, IBM, Adobe, SAP, Oracle, and Infor. It has also been strangely divided between enterprise systems, like Aprimo’s, and specialists in distributed marketing (basically sharing assets with branch offices and channel partners such as distributors, agents, franchisees, etc.) such as Zift Solutions, BrandMuscle and Sproutloud. Revenew competes in the latter arena, so it’s a nice complement to Aprimo’s marketing operations features. In a conversation yesterday, Marlin and Aprimo management told me they hope that an offering that combines enterprise and distributed marketing operations management will be appealing to companies that now do them with separate systems.
It’s a reasonable bet, although far from a certain winner. Separate fiefdoms within large companies don’t always want to cooperate and the big marketing suites will still be hovering over it all, claiming to do everything (or integrate with partners who fill their gaps). There’s also a question of whether Aprimo’s product, first released in 1999, still meets the needs of today’s marketing operations – although Aprimo management pointed out that the system was built as Software as a Service from the start, and further promised quick innovation now that they are an independent business again.
Anyway, I’m no longer puzzled by Marlin’s strategy with the acquisition and see how it could turn out well for them. Good luck to all concerned!
Showing posts with label distributed marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label distributed marketing. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 20, 2016
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
MDC DOT Provides Marketing Automation for Direct Salespeople
I briefly mentioned MDC Dot in an earlier blog post about giving sales people access to marketing automation capabilities. This may not have done them justice since they are more specialized than that general description implied. What MDC Dot really does is serve organizations that wrangle a herd of independent sales people, like financial advisors or direct sales representatives. Those firms have very specific requirements for balancing central control over content and brand image with the agents’ desire for flexibility and personal client relationships. It’s actually a crowded space, with companies like Balihoo and MindMatrix competing aggressively for sales. What sets MDC Dot apart is that it targets organizations where the sales people have modest skills, modest needs, and even more modest budgets. Pricing starts at $15 per month per salesperson for a database of up to 500 active contacts and reaching a still-modest $90 per month for 10,000 active contacts.
Beyond low price, MDC Dot offers two key capabilities to suit its target audience. The first is a structure that links customers to their original salesperson, even if they later contact the organization through a Web search or visit to the corporate Web site. This is especially important for businesses that pay commissions to the customer’s original salesperson. MDC Dot does this by tagging each customer with the original salesperson’s ID and then ensuring that customer is sent back to the salesperson’s own microsite when they return. The initial tagging and subsequent redirection both require inserting some MDC Dot code onto whatever content the salesperson uses for the initial customer interaction. The redirection works best when the corporate Web site and the salespeople’s microsites are all on a subdomain hosted by MDC Dot.
The second key feature makes it easy for sales people to use content created by the central marketing team by automatically inserting tags such as the salesperson’s name and contact information. This customized content can include entire microsites, landing pages, emails, campaign flows, and social media posts. Salespeople can also set up their own contents.
Beyond these special features, MDC Dot also provides basic contact management including notes, tasks, tags, attachments, and activity tracking. Users can send emails, which come from the user’s own domain. Reports show email and Web activities, campaign results, and customers at each stage of the sales funnel. Screens are designed for simplicity and mobile devices. The interface is designed with the target of no more than three mouse clicks to accomplish any one task.
Corporate users can see the list of salespeople they are managing, along with performance statistics for each user. They can’t see the actual customers in the salesperson’s database. Corporate users also have tools to build email and social content and to set up contact sequences. These sequences are what puts the "dot" in MDC Dot: they’re built by connecting “Qualification Dots” to assign sequence members (all contacts, by contact type, via campaign manager, via sequence group), “Activity Dots” to react to behaviors within the sequence (opened an email, clicks an email, or visited a Web page, or not), and “Action Dots” to either send an email or transfer customers to another sequence group.
Sequences are built by connecting the dots (get it?). As you may have noticed, the set of available dots is pretty limited, although they are adequate to create basic email campaigns. At the moment each sequence can contain just one “Activity Dot” split, but multiple splits should be available later this year. Several sequences can be assigned to the same campaign and execute in priority order. This allows more complex treatments despite the simple design of the individual sequences.
The system also can do basic lead scoring and assign prospects to sales funnel stages. It lacks segmentation tools, although users can build an on-screen list of customers based on tags and then add the listed customers to campaigns. Landing pages must currently be built by the vendor. Tools to let users build their own filters and landing pages are under development.
MDC Dot was introduced in December 2014 and currently has more than 2,000 paying end users.
Beyond low price, MDC Dot offers two key capabilities to suit its target audience. The first is a structure that links customers to their original salesperson, even if they later contact the organization through a Web search or visit to the corporate Web site. This is especially important for businesses that pay commissions to the customer’s original salesperson. MDC Dot does this by tagging each customer with the original salesperson’s ID and then ensuring that customer is sent back to the salesperson’s own microsite when they return. The initial tagging and subsequent redirection both require inserting some MDC Dot code onto whatever content the salesperson uses for the initial customer interaction. The redirection works best when the corporate Web site and the salespeople’s microsites are all on a subdomain hosted by MDC Dot.
The second key feature makes it easy for sales people to use content created by the central marketing team by automatically inserting tags such as the salesperson’s name and contact information. This customized content can include entire microsites, landing pages, emails, campaign flows, and social media posts. Salespeople can also set up their own contents.
Beyond these special features, MDC Dot also provides basic contact management including notes, tasks, tags, attachments, and activity tracking. Users can send emails, which come from the user’s own domain. Reports show email and Web activities, campaign results, and customers at each stage of the sales funnel. Screens are designed for simplicity and mobile devices. The interface is designed with the target of no more than three mouse clicks to accomplish any one task.
Corporate users can see the list of salespeople they are managing, along with performance statistics for each user. They can’t see the actual customers in the salesperson’s database. Corporate users also have tools to build email and social content and to set up contact sequences. These sequences are what puts the "dot" in MDC Dot: they’re built by connecting “Qualification Dots” to assign sequence members (all contacts, by contact type, via campaign manager, via sequence group), “Activity Dots” to react to behaviors within the sequence (opened an email, clicks an email, or visited a Web page, or not), and “Action Dots” to either send an email or transfer customers to another sequence group.
Sequences are built by connecting the dots (get it?). As you may have noticed, the set of available dots is pretty limited, although they are adequate to create basic email campaigns. At the moment each sequence can contain just one “Activity Dot” split, but multiple splits should be available later this year. Several sequences can be assigned to the same campaign and execute in priority order. This allows more complex treatments despite the simple design of the individual sequences.
The system also can do basic lead scoring and assign prospects to sales funnel stages. It lacks segmentation tools, although users can build an on-screen list of customers based on tags and then add the listed customers to campaigns. Landing pages must currently be built by the vendor. Tools to let users build their own filters and landing pages are under development.
MDC Dot was introduced in December 2014 and currently has more than 2,000 paying end users.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Optify Lets Agencies Provide Small Business with Marketing Automation, Distributed Marketing, and Sales Enablement
In case you were wondering, I see four themes emerging today in B2B marketing automation:
The first three trends strike me as defensive: small vendors need niches to compete against the huge resources of the big general purpose marketing automation products, who are all now part of larger companies (Eloqua, Pardot/ExactTarget), public (Marketo) or heavily funded (Act-On, HubSpot). By contrast, the fourth trend seems to be driven by recognition that small business presents a huge opportunity.
I only mention this because I’ve recently been looking at a lot of new (to me) vendors and haven’t been able to write about many of them. Placing them in the larger industry perspective gives me a chance to at least drop all their names and makes it easier to decide which to profile next. I’ll use the extremely scientific approach of selecting Optify, since it appears in all four categories.
Optify was founded in 2008 and launched its original product, a search engine optimization (SEO) tool, about a year later. Its primary clients were then, and still remain, digital marketing agencies. Both the agencies and their clients have been mostly small businesses – in the survey for our soon-to-be-published VEST report, Optify reports that 60% of its clients have under $5 million revenue. This makes it a system for both small business and service vendors: two of my four themes. Its distributed marketing capabilities stem from its agency roots, since the fine-grained, hierarchical permissions needed to let one agency manage installations for multiple clients are similar to the permissions needed to distribute permissions between central marketers and local affiliates. That's theme number three.
Finally, Optify has expanded into conventional marketing automation over the past 18 months and most recently added basic contact management and distribution of lead information, scores, and alerts to sales people. This is enough sales enablement to complete its sweep of the four themes. I guess I should send them a t-shirt or something.
You can also think of Optify as having worked its way down from the top of the funnel (SEO) to the middle (marketing automation) and towards the bottom (CRM). This will remind marketing automation aficionados of HubSpot, which has made a similar journey. The biggest obvious difference (if you ignore HubSpot’s $100 million or so in venture capital funding) is that HubSpot offers its own blogging and Web content management, while Optify provides WordPress and Drupal plug-ins for visitor tracking and landing pages. This is the standard approach among marketing automation products – as Optify says on its Web site, “We know you already have a website and a favorite marketing CMS.” The system can also create Facebook landing pages and track visitors to them.
What Optify does offer inbound marketers is extensive support for search engine optimization. This includes detailed research into keyword rankings for the client and competitors, analysis of Web pages for features that improve search ranks, an inbound link manager, and a Twitter client to publish posts and embed trackable URLs that measure campaign results.
Moving towards the middle of the funnel, Optify offers reasonably powerful email and landing page builders, based on templates or HTML. Landing pages can be attached to an auto-responder email, while standard fields on forms are automatically mapped to Salesforce.com. Emails are delivered through ExactTarget. Users can create lists and segments based on all contact properties, activities, email history, and custom fields. There are no real multi-step campaigns, however.
Sales enablement includes lead scoring, with multiple scores per lead; alerts based on search keywords and lead scores; a live ticker showing current Web site visitors with companies identified via reverse IP lookup; and appending of company data from Dunn & Bradstreet. The system can send each salesperson a daily email of newly qualified leads, selected with shared rules or separate rules for each salesperson.. Salespeople can view their contact list, drill down to individual profiles, aand drill further to see behavior details – even as far as each page viewed during a Web site visit. Users can send the contact a system email or add it to a list.
CRM integration is currently limited to sending data to Salesforce.com. A proper API for bi-directional integration with any CRM system is under development.
Reporting is a particular strength. Optify can build a unified contact profile by connecting names, email addresses, social accounts, and multiple cookies for the same person, using site log-ins, email clicks, and form submits on different devices. This lets reports show Web visits, conversions and other subsequent activity from search, social, and email campaigns. A dashboard lets users pick widgets to display selected information. Data can be exported to Excel, which is what many of Optify's agency clients prefer. The company is planning an API to let clients export data directly.
All told, this is a pretty reasonable package for a small business marketing system. It’s broadly similar to the scope of small business leaders Infusionsoft and Ontraport, although those products offer more elaborate campaigns and process flows. Pricing is also competitive with other small business systems if not especially cheap: company marketers pay based on page views and emails sent; starting at $350 per month for 10,000 views and 25,000 emails, . Agency pricing is based on the number of Web sites and email volume. Distributed marketing also has its own pricing.
Optify has more than 400 agency clients and many more individual sites using the system.
- services: vendors are bundling their systems with services to help marketers use them, either by offering the services themselves (LeadLife, MakesBridge, Ontraport (formerly OfficeAutoPilot), RightWave, SalesEngineInternational) or by creating versions that agencies resell to their clients (Optify, MindFireInc, many others).
- sales enablement: systems to share marketing information with sales (Genius, SalesFusion, LeadFormix, RightOn Interactive, Optify)
- distributed marketing: systems shared between central marketing organizations and local branches, dealers, distributors, sales agents, etc. (NitroMojo, Marketing Advocate, OptifiNow, Optify, Balihoo)
The first three trends strike me as defensive: small vendors need niches to compete against the huge resources of the big general purpose marketing automation products, who are all now part of larger companies (Eloqua, Pardot/ExactTarget), public (Marketo) or heavily funded (Act-On, HubSpot). By contrast, the fourth trend seems to be driven by recognition that small business presents a huge opportunity.
I only mention this because I’ve recently been looking at a lot of new (to me) vendors and haven’t been able to write about many of them. Placing them in the larger industry perspective gives me a chance to at least drop all their names and makes it easier to decide which to profile next. I’ll use the extremely scientific approach of selecting Optify, since it appears in all four categories.
Optify was founded in 2008 and launched its original product, a search engine optimization (SEO) tool, about a year later. Its primary clients were then, and still remain, digital marketing agencies. Both the agencies and their clients have been mostly small businesses – in the survey for our soon-to-be-published VEST report, Optify reports that 60% of its clients have under $5 million revenue. This makes it a system for both small business and service vendors: two of my four themes. Its distributed marketing capabilities stem from its agency roots, since the fine-grained, hierarchical permissions needed to let one agency manage installations for multiple clients are similar to the permissions needed to distribute permissions between central marketers and local affiliates. That's theme number three.
Finally, Optify has expanded into conventional marketing automation over the past 18 months and most recently added basic contact management and distribution of lead information, scores, and alerts to sales people. This is enough sales enablement to complete its sweep of the four themes. I guess I should send them a t-shirt or something.
You can also think of Optify as having worked its way down from the top of the funnel (SEO) to the middle (marketing automation) and towards the bottom (CRM). This will remind marketing automation aficionados of HubSpot, which has made a similar journey. The biggest obvious difference (if you ignore HubSpot’s $100 million or so in venture capital funding) is that HubSpot offers its own blogging and Web content management, while Optify provides WordPress and Drupal plug-ins for visitor tracking and landing pages. This is the standard approach among marketing automation products – as Optify says on its Web site, “We know you already have a website and a favorite marketing CMS.” The system can also create Facebook landing pages and track visitors to them.
What Optify does offer inbound marketers is extensive support for search engine optimization. This includes detailed research into keyword rankings for the client and competitors, analysis of Web pages for features that improve search ranks, an inbound link manager, and a Twitter client to publish posts and embed trackable URLs that measure campaign results.
Moving towards the middle of the funnel, Optify offers reasonably powerful email and landing page builders, based on templates or HTML. Landing pages can be attached to an auto-responder email, while standard fields on forms are automatically mapped to Salesforce.com. Emails are delivered through ExactTarget. Users can create lists and segments based on all contact properties, activities, email history, and custom fields. There are no real multi-step campaigns, however.
Sales enablement includes lead scoring, with multiple scores per lead; alerts based on search keywords and lead scores; a live ticker showing current Web site visitors with companies identified via reverse IP lookup; and appending of company data from Dunn & Bradstreet. The system can send each salesperson a daily email of newly qualified leads, selected with shared rules or separate rules for each salesperson.. Salespeople can view their contact list, drill down to individual profiles, aand drill further to see behavior details – even as far as each page viewed during a Web site visit. Users can send the contact a system email or add it to a list.
CRM integration is currently limited to sending data to Salesforce.com. A proper API for bi-directional integration with any CRM system is under development.
Reporting is a particular strength. Optify can build a unified contact profile by connecting names, email addresses, social accounts, and multiple cookies for the same person, using site log-ins, email clicks, and form submits on different devices. This lets reports show Web visits, conversions and other subsequent activity from search, social, and email campaigns. A dashboard lets users pick widgets to display selected information. Data can be exported to Excel, which is what many of Optify's agency clients prefer. The company is planning an API to let clients export data directly.
All told, this is a pretty reasonable package for a small business marketing system. It’s broadly similar to the scope of small business leaders Infusionsoft and Ontraport, although those products offer more elaborate campaigns and process flows. Pricing is also competitive with other small business systems if not especially cheap: company marketers pay based on page views and emails sent; starting at $350 per month for 10,000 views and 25,000 emails, . Agency pricing is based on the number of Web sites and email volume. Distributed marketing also has its own pricing.
Optify has more than 400 agency clients and many more individual sites using the system.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Balihoo Offers "Local Marketing Automation" for Channel Partners
One of first marketing automation systems I ever saw – this would be during the Reagan Presidency – was a custom-built dial-up network to distribute collateral to farm equipment dealers. This and similar seeds have since sprouted into a forest of products that help brand marketers work with dealers, distributors, franchisees, and agents. Some of these channel marketing systems focus on lead distribution, some on locally-customizable promotion materials, and some on campaign management. All must mediate the delicate relationship between relatively sophisticated central marketing departments and their firmly independent channel partners.
These products are part of the marketing automation industry, although their specialized nature places them on the periphery. General purpose marketing automation vendors also compete for this business with what are usually called “distributed marketing” options. I keep a distant eye on the space because it’s relevant but there are too many choices to track it closely. The best I can do is make an occasional visit to see what’s new.
I made my latest foray last week after a briefing request from Balihoo. I accepted partly because Balihoo labels itself as “local marketing automation”, which includes the two magic words that most pique my interest. More important, channel marketing issues have cropped up several times recently in my consulting and are likely to be even more prominent in my work at Left Brain DGA. So it was worth taking a look.
I’m glad I did. Balihoo is an impressive product that combines localizable (is that a word?) content distribution with pre-packaged campaigns in email, direct mail, mobile, online ads, print, and broadcast media. It also helps local partners set up their own Web sites and social network accounts, register with local directories and search engines, and record telephone as well as online responses. The company says these latter features are unique, and a couple hours of my competitive research seemed to confirm this.
As Balihoo’s tagline suggests, it is designed to provide a marketing automation system for each channel partner. Users set up a “my info” page with contact information, store hours, directions, and other details. These are then pulled into promotion templates as needed, meaning that much localization is fully automatic. This saves effort, ensures consistency, and simplifies changes. The system also stores a customer list – owned by and only accessible to the channel partner – which can function as a simple CRM system.
The heart of Balihoo is wizard-driven processes to set up different kinds of marketing campaigns. These can include “negotiated” media such as television, newspaper and radio ads, which are purchased and trafficked by Balihoo on the buyers’ behalf, and "non-negotiated" media, such as printed mailers, email messages, and Web search ads, which local marketers can purchased directly. In all cases, the campaigns are set up by central marketers as templates that determine which elements, if any, the local marketers can change. Templates can include predefined options, such as a list of standard offers, that give local marketers some choice without allowing them complete freedom. The system can also require central approval before a campaign is released.
In addition to one-off campaigns, local marketers can subscribe to on-going programs such as a recurring “new movers” mailing based on purchased lists. The system supports event-triggered and multi-step campaigns, although Balihoo has found that most local marketers balk at entering the response details needed to maintain them.
Balihoo can automatically apply co-op dollars to locally-selected campaigns, billing local partners only for the net amount due. This is a major benefit by itself, compared with the usual method of having channel partners lay out the funds and then apply for reimbursement. When central marketers feel a particular program is extremely important, they can even fund it fully themselves.
The system also provides detailed response reports, including recordings of telephone responses – which the company has found are much more important for local companies than national marketers. Even though customer data remains with the channel partner, Balihoo inserts tracking codes and captures aggregate response information so it can judge the effectiveness of different programs.
Balihoo is purchased by the central marketing department and delivered on a Software-as-a-Service platform. Brand marketers can reskin their instance to give it a company identity. Pricing is based on the number of local marketers who use the system. A typical big company pays $200,000 to $300,000 per year, not including media fees (passed through at cost) and supplemental services such as local registration. These could be paid by either the local partner or the national brand. Balihoo entered the “local marketing automation” business in 2008 and now has more than thirty enterprise clients serving more than 100,000 local businesses. If you’re keeping score at home, it has received $17 million in venture funding.
Ok folks – what you just read is a perfectly adequate blog post. I could easily stop here. But remember those several hours of research? I’m not letting them go to waste. Here’s a table that compares features in Balihoo and several competitors. One big caveat is this is based on what I could glean from company Web sites, which don’t necessarily cover everything.
Analyzing this table is easily worth a post of its own but I doubt I’ll have time to write it. So I'll make do with a few quick observations:
- it's worthwhile to distinguish between distribution and syndication. Distribution refers to making materials available for local marketers to download and customize for themselves. Syndication refers to sending materials that are already customized with the local company name, address, and contact information but the local marketers cannot change. Syndication gives more central control and saves the local marketers work. It makes particular sense for automatically pushing materials to partner Web sites.
- some systems just do content distribution and/or syndication. Remember that this is the original function of channel marketing automation. There are many more products than I listed here with this capability, and it borders on general purpose digital asset management and content management – sectors with literally hundreds of products.
- most vendors also support email and direct campaigns. This is a distinct step up in complexity, since it requires loading and/or purchasing prospect lists. It shares borders with several types of general purpose systems, including email, CRM, and marketing automation.
- once you get past basic content distribution and email/direct mail production, features vary more substantially. This is where buyers will need to pay close attention to their current and future needs.
- several vendors offer media buying. These may be automated for direct-purchased media or services for media requiring negotiation and trafficking. Either is a big step beyond basic content distribution.
- social media support is hard to find. Only a few vendors offer it and they provide different combinations of setting up social network sites for the local business; providing content to share in social networks; and providing tools to post social messages. This could be an important feature for vendors to add: local businesses need help learning how to make social media work.
- managing co-op funds is surprisingly rare. You’d think this would be a common feature, since it's a logical extension of content distribution. But either the vendors just don’t talk about it on their Web sites (unlikely) or they’ve found that clients have other ways to handle it. I’m dimly aware that there are specialized co-op accounting systems – but that’s a corner of the forest I’ve never explored.
- services vary greatly. From a vendor viewpoint, the purpose of services is to remove roadblocks that prevent clients from using their systems. As a result, services vary depending on the features the vendor is trying to support. The list includes creating marketing materials, buying media, managing data, training users, executing entire programs, and building custom software.
These products are part of the marketing automation industry, although their specialized nature places them on the periphery. General purpose marketing automation vendors also compete for this business with what are usually called “distributed marketing” options. I keep a distant eye on the space because it’s relevant but there are too many choices to track it closely. The best I can do is make an occasional visit to see what’s new.
I made my latest foray last week after a briefing request from Balihoo. I accepted partly because Balihoo labels itself as “local marketing automation”, which includes the two magic words that most pique my interest. More important, channel marketing issues have cropped up several times recently in my consulting and are likely to be even more prominent in my work at Left Brain DGA. So it was worth taking a look.
I’m glad I did. Balihoo is an impressive product that combines localizable (is that a word?) content distribution with pre-packaged campaigns in email, direct mail, mobile, online ads, print, and broadcast media. It also helps local partners set up their own Web sites and social network accounts, register with local directories and search engines, and record telephone as well as online responses. The company says these latter features are unique, and a couple hours of my competitive research seemed to confirm this.
As Balihoo’s tagline suggests, it is designed to provide a marketing automation system for each channel partner. Users set up a “my info” page with contact information, store hours, directions, and other details. These are then pulled into promotion templates as needed, meaning that much localization is fully automatic. This saves effort, ensures consistency, and simplifies changes. The system also stores a customer list – owned by and only accessible to the channel partner – which can function as a simple CRM system.
The heart of Balihoo is wizard-driven processes to set up different kinds of marketing campaigns. These can include “negotiated” media such as television, newspaper and radio ads, which are purchased and trafficked by Balihoo on the buyers’ behalf, and "non-negotiated" media, such as printed mailers, email messages, and Web search ads, which local marketers can purchased directly. In all cases, the campaigns are set up by central marketers as templates that determine which elements, if any, the local marketers can change. Templates can include predefined options, such as a list of standard offers, that give local marketers some choice without allowing them complete freedom. The system can also require central approval before a campaign is released.
In addition to one-off campaigns, local marketers can subscribe to on-going programs such as a recurring “new movers” mailing based on purchased lists. The system supports event-triggered and multi-step campaigns, although Balihoo has found that most local marketers balk at entering the response details needed to maintain them.
Balihoo can automatically apply co-op dollars to locally-selected campaigns, billing local partners only for the net amount due. This is a major benefit by itself, compared with the usual method of having channel partners lay out the funds and then apply for reimbursement. When central marketers feel a particular program is extremely important, they can even fund it fully themselves.
The system also provides detailed response reports, including recordings of telephone responses – which the company has found are much more important for local companies than national marketers. Even though customer data remains with the channel partner, Balihoo inserts tracking codes and captures aggregate response information so it can judge the effectiveness of different programs.
Balihoo is purchased by the central marketing department and delivered on a Software-as-a-Service platform. Brand marketers can reskin their instance to give it a company identity. Pricing is based on the number of local marketers who use the system. A typical big company pays $200,000 to $300,000 per year, not including media fees (passed through at cost) and supplemental services such as local registration. These could be paid by either the local partner or the national brand. Balihoo entered the “local marketing automation” business in 2008 and now has more than thirty enterprise clients serving more than 100,000 local businesses. If you’re keeping score at home, it has received $17 million in venture funding.
* * *
Ok folks – what you just read is a perfectly adequate blog post. I could easily stop here. But remember those several hours of research? I’m not letting them go to waste. Here’s a table that compares features in Balihoo and several competitors. One big caveat is this is based on what I could glean from company Web sites, which don’t necessarily cover everything.
Analyzing this table is easily worth a post of its own but I doubt I’ll have time to write it. So I'll make do with a few quick observations:
- it's worthwhile to distinguish between distribution and syndication. Distribution refers to making materials available for local marketers to download and customize for themselves. Syndication refers to sending materials that are already customized with the local company name, address, and contact information but the local marketers cannot change. Syndication gives more central control and saves the local marketers work. It makes particular sense for automatically pushing materials to partner Web sites.
- some systems just do content distribution and/or syndication. Remember that this is the original function of channel marketing automation. There are many more products than I listed here with this capability, and it borders on general purpose digital asset management and content management – sectors with literally hundreds of products.
- most vendors also support email and direct campaigns. This is a distinct step up in complexity, since it requires loading and/or purchasing prospect lists. It shares borders with several types of general purpose systems, including email, CRM, and marketing automation.
- once you get past basic content distribution and email/direct mail production, features vary more substantially. This is where buyers will need to pay close attention to their current and future needs.
- several vendors offer media buying. These may be automated for direct-purchased media or services for media requiring negotiation and trafficking. Either is a big step beyond basic content distribution.
- social media support is hard to find. Only a few vendors offer it and they provide different combinations of setting up social network sites for the local business; providing content to share in social networks; and providing tools to post social messages. This could be an important feature for vendors to add: local businesses need help learning how to make social media work.
- managing co-op funds is surprisingly rare. You’d think this would be a common feature, since it's a logical extension of content distribution. But either the vendors just don’t talk about it on their Web sites (unlikely) or they’ve found that clients have other ways to handle it. I’m dimly aware that there are specialized co-op accounting systems – but that’s a corner of the forest I’ve never explored.
- services vary greatly. From a vendor viewpoint, the purpose of services is to remove roadblocks that prevent clients from using their systems. As a result, services vary depending on the features the vendor is trying to support. The list includes creating marketing materials, buying media, managing data, training users, executing entire programs, and building custom software.
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