Summary: Database and digital marketing are both data-driven. But they differ in plenty of other ways that make it hard for specialists in one to adapt smoothly to the other. Here's a detailed look at the differences.
Yesterday’s long (or merely long-winded?) post described the different mindsets of database and digital marketers but it was pretty short on differences between the two marketing methods themselves. Today I’ll try to be more concrete.
DB or Not DB
Database marketing is built around a marketing database that contains addressable, identifiable individuals. By “addressable”, I mean there is information such as a mailing address or phone number that lets the marketer contact the individual. By “identifiable”, I mean information is available to link data about the same individual from multiple sources. Addresses are the most common identifiable information, although there are also non-address identifiers such as Social Security Number. Addresses and identifiers are both required: a database without addresses couldn’t be used for most marketing, and a set of records that can’t be linked to other sources is just a list.
The consolidated database is the heart of the database marketing concept. Data from multiple sources lets database marketers make more effective predictions about the best treatments for each individual, and treatments across multiple channels are more effective when they are coordinated centrally. The marketing database contains attributes (age, income, location, etc.) and behaviors (promotion responses, purchases, customer service interactions, etc.). It can certainly include digital activities such as Web page views and social media comments, so long as these can be linked back to a known individual.
Digital marketing does not use a database of addressable, identifiable individuals. It may gather information from one source and even track it over time for the same entity. (Example: Web site behavior tied to a browser cookie.) But unless the entity can be linked to other sources through an identifier, the digital marketer can only make treatment decisions based on information captured in the source channel itself. This is far from useless – behavioral and contextual targeting can be quite powerful. But from a database marketing perspective, the data is frustratingly incomplete.
Addressable Media
Database marketing only works in addressable media: that is, where a message can sent to a specific individual. Addressable media include direct mail, email, outbound telemarketing, and customer service interactions. They can also include digital channels such as Web pages, mobile messages, kiosks and ATM machines, but ONLY where the recipient is known before a message is sent. Thus, a Web page that has identified me because I’ve registered and logged in (manually or via a cookie) is addressable; a Web page that I visit anonymously, even if it recognizes me as a previous visitor from a cookie, is not addressable.
Digital marketing includes many non-addressable media, including paid and organic search, Web banner advertising, social media, and anonymous forms of Web sites, kiosks, mobile (e.g., location-based messages), and the rest. These generate plenty of useful data, such as click through rates, search rankings, sentiment analysis, and page views. But this data and related analysis are quite different from what database marketers are used to.
Prediction vs Reaction
Database marketers have the rich information needed to accurately predict which offers are most appropriate for each customer. Combined with their access to customer addresses, this allows them to initiate effective outbound marketing campaigns and to define static rules for interactive dialogs. Note that in most addressable media (mail, email, outbound telemarketing), the offer must be selected before the customer is actually contacted, and making multiple offers often reduces response. So database marketers have strong reasons to work on making highly accurate predictions.
By definition, digital marketers cannot target outbound campaigns at individuals. They do have opportunities to manage interactions, but often know only what has happened during the current interaction itself. This greatly reduces their ability to make predictions. Instead, they present multiple options and react as people respond. Happily, most digital media are inherently interactive, so this is a practical approach. Since rule-based decision flows are less viable as the number of options increases, digital marketers lean more heavily on self-adjusting automated decision engines.
Message Control
Database marketers directly control the messages they send to each customer. This is yet another factor that helps to justify the costs of building a comprehensive database, running sophisticated predictive models and precisely customizing each message.
Digital marketers have vastly less control over who sees what. Much of their messaging is blind to the audience who will see it, or can only be targeted on limited information about behavior or context. Indeed, some of the most effective and intriguing digital marketing techniques, such as viral campaigns and shareable widgets, rely on distribution that's totally beyond the marketer's control. Social media provide even less control, since the messages themselves are composed outside the company. The net result of all this is to reduce the degree of individual targeting that digital marketers can execute.
Response Measurement
Database marketers can typically capture response to a promotion directly, with a coupon, telephone call or Web click. Even when they can’t, their database still ultimately tells them who bought what, so they can correlate the promotions they’ve addressed to an individual with that individual’s subsequent behavior. The ability to do precise response measurement is yet another factor that lets database marketers fine-tune their programs.
Digital marketers can also measure who clicks on a Web ad, and sometimes can track that person further into the buying cycle. But they don’t know what other promotions or social media that person saw, what else they purchased, who else saw the same promotion but didn’t respond, or who responded through some other channel. All these uncertainties leave digital marketers reliant on indirect measures, such as consumer panels and surveys, which are more typical of conventional mass media. These are approaches that most database marketers would find almost laughably imprecise.
What’s It All Mean?
Database marketers and digital marketers both have plenty of data and the good ones are highly analytical. Both can apply advanced statistical techniques and rigorous testing methods. Both can work to integrate their data and their customer strategies across channels. To some extent, they even work with the same media: in particular, a Web site can support both digital (anonymous) and database-driven (addressable) marketing programs.
Yet despite these similarities and interactions, the two groups work in largely different media, use different techniques and have different priorities. Database marketing is inherently more controlled and precise; digital marketing is more fluid. Good marketers will learn to apply both. But individuals who have specialized in any one area will find it hard to adjust to the other. At a minimum, they’ll need to be conscious that the old rules don’t apply.
Adjustment is even harder for organizations, who will have invested in specialized systems, processes and people to support one technique or the other. This, in my opinion, is why the leading database marketing vendors have not been the leading digital marketing vendors. Which, if you’ll recall, was where I started this discussion.
One final point: there's no reason the same organization or individual can't master both database and digital marketing. That is, although there are major differences between the two, there is no fundamental conflict. My point in these articles is simply that it will take conscious effort to address the differences and fill the gaps that they imply.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Can Database Marketers Learn Digital Tricks?
Summary: Database marketing and digital marketing are more different than it seems. It's hard for experts in one to adjust to the other.
Yesterday’s post touched briefly on what I see as a fundamental transition between database marketing and digital marketing, and in particular on the changes that marketers and their supporting vendors must make to navigate the change successfully. This is an important topic, so I thought I’d return for a closer look.
It’s self-evident that digital marketing (mostly on the Internet, but also mobile, in-game, and eventually interactive TV) is a major change from both traditional mass media and more recent database marketing (mail, email, telemarketing, CRM). What’s less obvious is that the skills and attitudes that have served database marketers well for the past twenty or more years – an entire career for many – don’t transfer to the digital world. It’s true that database and digital marketing are both technology-enabled and thus seem as if they should draw on similar talents. But the similarities are superficial while the differences are profound.
Let’s cut to the core of the matter: the first rule of database marketing is that whoever has the biggest database, wins. Database marketers strive to gather ever-more information about their customers and (to a lesser extent, because less data is available) about their prospects. Their Holy Grail is the ever-receding “360 degree view of the customer,” a phrase I’ve always disliked because (a) it treats the customer as an object and (b) no one can possibly know everything about their customers. Today, at least to my mind, it also conjures up a full-body scan X-ray, an image I hope enough people find so offensive that it will finally put the phrase to rest.
Sorry for the rant. My point is that database marketers’ ideal is a perfectly detailed customer database, which would allow them to target precisely the “right offer to the right customer at the right time.” This attitude leads to highly structured, finely segmented campaigns and carefully-plotted, rules-driven interaction flows which make the best possible use of whatever data is actually available.
Digital marketers have no such illusions about the completeness of the data they could ever hope to assemble. I’m not saying many of them wouldn’t like to identify each person they interact with, just that this is obviously impossible in most situations. Thus, digital marketers start from a premise that they’ll be interacting with people cloaked by varying degrees of anonymity, and look for ways to make the best use of the limited information available. In one case this might a search term they used to reach a Web site; in another it might be a history of movies they and others have rented; in yet another it might be their current physical location. Most innovations in digital marketing involve improving the value extracted from such limited data, rather than attempting to link the data to an identity that can then be enhanced with large volumes of personal information from other sources.
(Caveat: yes, there are some major efforts aimed precisely at providing digital marketers with individual identities. But these run up against both the fundamental difficulty of identifying people in most digital media. Even more important, their value is limited because immediate past data about behavior and context is usually more powerful at predicting immediate future behavior than static personal information from external sources.)
A corollary to the limited and contextual nature of most digital customer data is that marketing programs don’t have enough information to make reliable predictions about the most appropriate treatments. Thus, multi-step marketing campaigns or highly structured interaction dialogs are less useful than simply giving people a variety of choices and letting them guide the process for themselves. Again, this is a matter of degree: deciding which choices to present itself requires predictions about which items the customers will prefer. But presenting multiple choices is quite different from trying to guess in advance which one is best.
In other words, we’re talking about a loss of control over the marketing process. This is still more obvious at the start of the marketing cycle, when companies are first attracting customers into a relationship. Database marketers spend lots of effort acquiring and enhancing prospect lists so they can decide whom to approach and which offers to send them. By contrast, most digital marketing contacts are initiated by the prospects themselves in response to an advertisement or social media message. Certainly digital marketers can select their advertising audiences, but this resembles traditional media buying more than an outbound direct marketing campaign. Even (or, perhaps, especially) with social media interactions, the marketer has very little control over what is communicated to whom.
Indeed, even though database marketers do plenty of acquisition, I think it’s fair to say that they find it relatively frustrating because the available data is generally so limited. Most would probably prefer to work on customer management – cross sell, upsell and retention – where richer data is available. By contrast, digital marketers have happily embraced the notion of “inbound marketing”, which is precisely the art of attracting new people to their products. To speculate still further, the reason that business marketers are adopting marketing automation much more enthusiastically than they ever adopted traditional database marketing may be that business marketing automation is largely being used in acquisition-friendly digital media, and business marketers are more acquisition-oriented (i.e., focused on lead generation) than their consumer marketing brethren.
Control is also a major differentiator when it comes to marketing measurement. Perhaps the proudest claim of database marketers is that all their efforts are highly and precisely measurable. Reality is a bit more messy, but it’s true that database marketing does support proper champion/challenger testing for companies willing to make the investment. Digital marketing also supports such testing. But many digital efforts involve display advertising where at least some of the value comes from exposures that do not prompt immediate, measurable activity. This is another area where digital marketing more closely resembles traditional mass media advertising than anything else. In fact, digital marketers increasingly base their measurements on consumer panels and surveys, almost precisely duplicating the conventional mass media approach. Again, the fundamental point is a difference in attitude: database marketers treat precise measurement as their ideal, even though they realize it isn’t fully attainable. Digital marketing doesn’t permit that illusion, so its practitioners can more easily accept less exact approaches.
By now I’ve probably annoyed many of my friends in both the database and digital marketing industries. Let me make clear that I’m not arguing that database marketing is obsolete or somehow inferior to digital marketing. They do different things and will coexist, just as mass media survived when database marketing appeared. In fact, good marketers will learn to integrate them effectively, letting each do what it does best. Actually, I’d argue that rule- and data-driven Website personalization has more in common with classic database marketing than with most digital marketing methods. In that case, integration between the two types of marketing happens within the Web site itself.
Nor am I arguing that database and digital marketing have nothing in common. Both are, obviously, dependent on technology and both are measurable in their own ways. Both work with customer databases – in fact, as digital marketers get better at capturing and integrating customer data, they will find themselves increasingly reliant on database marketing techniques. And, of course, both ultimately perform the basic marketing tasks of understanding their customers and using that knowledge effectively.
Rather, I’m trying to show that different skills and assumptions are needed for success in the two areas, and to suggest that this makes it difficult for people and organizations to transition from one to the other. This, in my opinion, is why the direct marketing agencies, marketing service providers and marketing software vendors who dominate the database marketing industry have not transferred their leadership to the digital marketing channels. The only new medium they easily adopted was email, but that was essentially database marketing to begin with.
This doesn’t mean that database marketing vendors are inevitably doomed or trapped in a shrinking specialty. But it does mean that those firms must recognize the fundamental differences between their old industry and the new one. They cannot make the easy but false assumption that digital marketing is a natural extension of database marketing techniques. Only the marketers and vendors who aggressively embrace digital marketing in its own terms will be able to lead the new industry.
Yesterday’s post touched briefly on what I see as a fundamental transition between database marketing and digital marketing, and in particular on the changes that marketers and their supporting vendors must make to navigate the change successfully. This is an important topic, so I thought I’d return for a closer look.
It’s self-evident that digital marketing (mostly on the Internet, but also mobile, in-game, and eventually interactive TV) is a major change from both traditional mass media and more recent database marketing (mail, email, telemarketing, CRM). What’s less obvious is that the skills and attitudes that have served database marketers well for the past twenty or more years – an entire career for many – don’t transfer to the digital world. It’s true that database and digital marketing are both technology-enabled and thus seem as if they should draw on similar talents. But the similarities are superficial while the differences are profound.
Let’s cut to the core of the matter: the first rule of database marketing is that whoever has the biggest database, wins. Database marketers strive to gather ever-more information about their customers and (to a lesser extent, because less data is available) about their prospects. Their Holy Grail is the ever-receding “360 degree view of the customer,” a phrase I’ve always disliked because (a) it treats the customer as an object and (b) no one can possibly know everything about their customers. Today, at least to my mind, it also conjures up a full-body scan X-ray, an image I hope enough people find so offensive that it will finally put the phrase to rest.
Sorry for the rant. My point is that database marketers’ ideal is a perfectly detailed customer database, which would allow them to target precisely the “right offer to the right customer at the right time.” This attitude leads to highly structured, finely segmented campaigns and carefully-plotted, rules-driven interaction flows which make the best possible use of whatever data is actually available.
Digital marketers have no such illusions about the completeness of the data they could ever hope to assemble. I’m not saying many of them wouldn’t like to identify each person they interact with, just that this is obviously impossible in most situations. Thus, digital marketers start from a premise that they’ll be interacting with people cloaked by varying degrees of anonymity, and look for ways to make the best use of the limited information available. In one case this might a search term they used to reach a Web site; in another it might be a history of movies they and others have rented; in yet another it might be their current physical location. Most innovations in digital marketing involve improving the value extracted from such limited data, rather than attempting to link the data to an identity that can then be enhanced with large volumes of personal information from other sources.
(Caveat: yes, there are some major efforts aimed precisely at providing digital marketers with individual identities. But these run up against both the fundamental difficulty of identifying people in most digital media. Even more important, their value is limited because immediate past data about behavior and context is usually more powerful at predicting immediate future behavior than static personal information from external sources.)
A corollary to the limited and contextual nature of most digital customer data is that marketing programs don’t have enough information to make reliable predictions about the most appropriate treatments. Thus, multi-step marketing campaigns or highly structured interaction dialogs are less useful than simply giving people a variety of choices and letting them guide the process for themselves. Again, this is a matter of degree: deciding which choices to present itself requires predictions about which items the customers will prefer. But presenting multiple choices is quite different from trying to guess in advance which one is best.
In other words, we’re talking about a loss of control over the marketing process. This is still more obvious at the start of the marketing cycle, when companies are first attracting customers into a relationship. Database marketers spend lots of effort acquiring and enhancing prospect lists so they can decide whom to approach and which offers to send them. By contrast, most digital marketing contacts are initiated by the prospects themselves in response to an advertisement or social media message. Certainly digital marketers can select their advertising audiences, but this resembles traditional media buying more than an outbound direct marketing campaign. Even (or, perhaps, especially) with social media interactions, the marketer has very little control over what is communicated to whom.
Indeed, even though database marketers do plenty of acquisition, I think it’s fair to say that they find it relatively frustrating because the available data is generally so limited. Most would probably prefer to work on customer management – cross sell, upsell and retention – where richer data is available. By contrast, digital marketers have happily embraced the notion of “inbound marketing”, which is precisely the art of attracting new people to their products. To speculate still further, the reason that business marketers are adopting marketing automation much more enthusiastically than they ever adopted traditional database marketing may be that business marketing automation is largely being used in acquisition-friendly digital media, and business marketers are more acquisition-oriented (i.e., focused on lead generation) than their consumer marketing brethren.
Control is also a major differentiator when it comes to marketing measurement. Perhaps the proudest claim of database marketers is that all their efforts are highly and precisely measurable. Reality is a bit more messy, but it’s true that database marketing does support proper champion/challenger testing for companies willing to make the investment. Digital marketing also supports such testing. But many digital efforts involve display advertising where at least some of the value comes from exposures that do not prompt immediate, measurable activity. This is another area where digital marketing more closely resembles traditional mass media advertising than anything else. In fact, digital marketers increasingly base their measurements on consumer panels and surveys, almost precisely duplicating the conventional mass media approach. Again, the fundamental point is a difference in attitude: database marketers treat precise measurement as their ideal, even though they realize it isn’t fully attainable. Digital marketing doesn’t permit that illusion, so its practitioners can more easily accept less exact approaches.
By now I’ve probably annoyed many of my friends in both the database and digital marketing industries. Let me make clear that I’m not arguing that database marketing is obsolete or somehow inferior to digital marketing. They do different things and will coexist, just as mass media survived when database marketing appeared. In fact, good marketers will learn to integrate them effectively, letting each do what it does best. Actually, I’d argue that rule- and data-driven Website personalization has more in common with classic database marketing than with most digital marketing methods. In that case, integration between the two types of marketing happens within the Web site itself.
Nor am I arguing that database and digital marketing have nothing in common. Both are, obviously, dependent on technology and both are measurable in their own ways. Both work with customer databases – in fact, as digital marketers get better at capturing and integrating customer data, they will find themselves increasingly reliant on database marketing techniques. And, of course, both ultimately perform the basic marketing tasks of understanding their customers and using that knowledge effectively.
Rather, I’m trying to show that different skills and assumptions are needed for success in the two areas, and to suggest that this makes it difficult for people and organizations to transition from one to the other. This, in my opinion, is why the direct marketing agencies, marketing service providers and marketing software vendors who dominate the database marketing industry have not transferred their leadership to the digital marketing channels. The only new medium they easily adopted was email, but that was essentially database marketing to begin with.
This doesn’t mean that database marketing vendors are inevitably doomed or trapped in a shrinking specialty. But it does mean that those firms must recognize the fundamental differences between their old industry and the new one. They cannot make the easy but false assumption that digital marketing is a natural extension of database marketing techniques. Only the marketers and vendors who aggressively embrace digital marketing in its own terms will be able to lead the new industry.
Monday, February 01, 2010
Unica and Alterian Lead Database Marketers to the Digital Promised Land
Here are some quick thoughts on two items: Unica’s acquisition of paid search bid management system MakeMeTop (now mercifully renamed Unica Search) and Alterian’s recently-released and excellent annual marketing survey.
The connection is that these both support my feeling that many members of the old-line database marketing community have failed to adapt to the new world of digital marketing. I’ve been talking about this a lot with consulting clients but don’t think I’ve written about it at length in this blog.
The gist of the argument is that traditional direct marketing agencies, marketing automation software vendors and marketing services providers have mostly remained focused on outbound campaigns. They did move from direct mail to email, but those are pretty much the same thing. The really cool digital marketing stuff, including Web site development, Web advertising and most recently social media, has been executed by a different set of digital marketing agencies, specialist software vendors, and, ironically, media buyers at traditional ad agencies.
The fundamental reason is that the main skill of database marketers is building a customer database, while the core of digital marketing is responding to the behaviors of anonymous individuals. Of course I’m oversimplifying – much digital marketing does deal with people who have identified themselves – but there’s still a fundamental shift from targeting outbound campaigns at known individuals to managing interactions with anyone willing to engage.
Both Unica and Alterian have been exceptionally forward-thinking among marketing automation vendors in preparing for this transition. Unica’s latest acquisition is particularly interesting because search bid management has almost nothing to do with reaching known individuals. (I say “almost” only because Unica seems to intend to link search click-throughs to a traditional marketing database.) It follows Unica’s acquisition last month of email deliverability expert Pivotal Veracity, which I found less impressive because email is part of the old database marketing world.
Alterian has already made big bets in social media and Web content management, which are also well beyond the scope of traditional database marketing. Its survey provides strong support for the notion that marketers are “moving from a campaign-centric direct marketing model towards multi-channel customer engagement”: in fact, 51% said they were expending a fair or significant amount of effort on exactly that. Related factoids include:
- 61% of marketers do not integrate Web analytics with other customer data.
- 66% of respondents (which included quite a few agencies and marketing services providers, in addition to marketers) plan to invest in social media marketing in 2010
- 36% of respondents plan to invest in social media monitoring in 2010 (a discrepancy that Alterian finds “worrying”, although I’ve previously seen similar data. My take is that many marketers see social media as a way to generate business directly, and look at monitoring as a secondary aim.)
- 38% said coordinating digital and direct marketing agencies was somewhat or very difficult. No surprise there, although I don't necessarily agree with Alterian's contention that this will lead to a unification between the two sets of agencies.
- 35% of marketers expect to move more than 20% of their direct marketing budget into digital channels next year.
In short, the Alterian survey shows that marketers are eagerly moving from classic direct marketing to digital, interactive and social marketing, but still lack the skills and resources to do it effectively. Industry vendors who support them will thrive. Those who don't will quickly be left behind.
The connection is that these both support my feeling that many members of the old-line database marketing community have failed to adapt to the new world of digital marketing. I’ve been talking about this a lot with consulting clients but don’t think I’ve written about it at length in this blog.
The gist of the argument is that traditional direct marketing agencies, marketing automation software vendors and marketing services providers have mostly remained focused on outbound campaigns. They did move from direct mail to email, but those are pretty much the same thing. The really cool digital marketing stuff, including Web site development, Web advertising and most recently social media, has been executed by a different set of digital marketing agencies, specialist software vendors, and, ironically, media buyers at traditional ad agencies.
The fundamental reason is that the main skill of database marketers is building a customer database, while the core of digital marketing is responding to the behaviors of anonymous individuals. Of course I’m oversimplifying – much digital marketing does deal with people who have identified themselves – but there’s still a fundamental shift from targeting outbound campaigns at known individuals to managing interactions with anyone willing to engage.
Both Unica and Alterian have been exceptionally forward-thinking among marketing automation vendors in preparing for this transition. Unica’s latest acquisition is particularly interesting because search bid management has almost nothing to do with reaching known individuals. (I say “almost” only because Unica seems to intend to link search click-throughs to a traditional marketing database.) It follows Unica’s acquisition last month of email deliverability expert Pivotal Veracity, which I found less impressive because email is part of the old database marketing world.
Alterian has already made big bets in social media and Web content management, which are also well beyond the scope of traditional database marketing. Its survey provides strong support for the notion that marketers are “moving from a campaign-centric direct marketing model towards multi-channel customer engagement”: in fact, 51% said they were expending a fair or significant amount of effort on exactly that. Related factoids include:
- 61% of marketers do not integrate Web analytics with other customer data.
- 66% of respondents (which included quite a few agencies and marketing services providers, in addition to marketers) plan to invest in social media marketing in 2010
- 36% of respondents plan to invest in social media monitoring in 2010 (a discrepancy that Alterian finds “worrying”, although I’ve previously seen similar data. My take is that many marketers see social media as a way to generate business directly, and look at monitoring as a secondary aim.)
- 38% said coordinating digital and direct marketing agencies was somewhat or very difficult. No surprise there, although I don't necessarily agree with Alterian's contention that this will lead to a unification between the two sets of agencies.
- 35% of marketers expect to move more than 20% of their direct marketing budget into digital channels next year.
In short, the Alterian survey shows that marketers are eagerly moving from classic direct marketing to digital, interactive and social marketing, but still lack the skills and resources to do it effectively. Industry vendors who support them will thrive. Those who don't will quickly be left behind.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Aprimo Marketing Studio Supports Sophisticated Business Marketers
Summary: Aprimo Marketing Studio offers powerful features in an on-demand system for sophisticated business and consumer marketers. You know who you are.
When I wrote about Aprimo Marketing Studio in a post last August, I was impressed by the scope of the product but reserved judgment because it hadn’t yet been launched. I took a look at the actual product last week. Bottom line: Aprimo delivered what they promised.
Like Aprimo itself, Marketing Studio is a bit of an oddity because it serves both business and consumer marketers. The needs of these two groups don’t necessarily conflict, but they do diverge. This means that a system for both will include several features needed by only one group or the other. Placing them all in the same product adds cost and complexity, which are not a software developer’s friends.
Aprimo has not found a magical solution to this dilemma. Rather, it has conceded the lower tiers of business marketing to simpler systems and aimed Marketing Studio at marketers who need greater sophistication and will accept higher cost and complexity to get it. (For more on vendor classifications, see my list of demand generation vendors from last November.)
In other words, Marketing Studio competes with high-end demand generation systems like Eloqua, Market2Lead and Neolane. Neolane may be the most similar, since it also straddles the business and consumer marketing worlds.
(Small digression: most business marketing systems are designed around data from a sales automation system such as Salesforce.com. But consumer marketers also need inputs from transaction systems. Marketing Studio and Neolane don't have a problem because they can support any data structure. Eloqua and Market2Lead are based on sales automation data, but can incorporate external tables. Other business marketing systems generally cannot.)
As I mentioned earlier, what originally most impressed me about Aprimo Marketing Studio was its scope. This starts with the core functions of any business marketing system: outbound and multi-step email campaigns, landing pages, Web behavior tracking , lead scoring, Salesforce.com integration, reporting and content management.
The system then draws on Aprimo’s heritage in marketing management to add detailed cost tracking, project management, asset workflow including annotation and commenting on PDFs, and a flexible campaign calendar. These are handled crudely, or not at all, in many business marketing products. In Marketing Studio, they are well-implemented with advanced features and an attractive, intuitive interface.
Project management is especially powerful. Project plans include specific tasks assigned to individuals and linked with dependencies. Plans can automatically modify themselves in response to events: for example, if a piece of copy is rejected, the system can add a new set of review and revision steps. This is done by creating the project as a branching flow chart, with rules to determine what takes place at junction. These rules can insert a predefined subflow, such as the review and revision process, which itself is shared across multiple projects. Good stuff.
System scope also extends to inbound marketing. Marketing Studio offers a blog engine tailored to corporate needs: managers can review and approve posts; the system can automatically notify Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook of new post; and each blog topic is assigned a different URL, which helps with search engine rank. Another module lets marketers create Adobe Flash-based Web ads, while an offer manager module tracks the user of offers across promotions. Paid search campaigns are supported through integration with Omniture SearchCenter.
Of course, the bells and whistles wouldn’t matter if the core features were poor. But Marketing Studio handles these quite nicely as well.
Email campaigns can execute as batch projects or trigger dialogs. The system treats these separately, although they are built with the same drag-and-drop flowchart interface. Batch campaigns include powerful segmentation supported by a sophisticated query builder, splits and merges. Batch flows can also update data attributes, calculate lead scores, create personalized URLs, add and remove names from groups, send email and generate output lists for other media.
Trigger dialogs have most of the same capabilities except for the advanced segmentation. In addition, they support wait periods and can send leads and alerts to the sales system. Unlike many demand generation products, Marketing Studio supports circular and merging flows, which can simplify design of complicated programs.
People enter a campaign by being added to a group. This can happen when a list is imported from an external file or the sales automation system, when people submit a Web form or click on an email or page link, or as a step within a campaign flow. External systems can also add names through the Marketing Studio API. Because either type of campaign flow can itself add a name to a group, the possibilities for controlling campaign entry and movement across campaigns are basically unlimited. Trigger campaigns execute immediately when a new lead is added to their group, allowing real-time interactions.
Other core features are similarly powerful. Users can build HTML emails, Web pages and multi-page microsites. Emails and Web pages can dynamically select content blocks based on rules that read the attributes of each recipient. Web forms and surveys are also content blocks, so the same rule-based selections can manage branching surveys and progressive profiling (i.e., asking different questions based on what is already known about an individual). The same rule-building interface is used for content selection rules, segmentation queries, and lead scoring. This reduces the amount of user training.
Lead scoring supports multiple scores per person, which is typical in high-end demand generation systems. More impressively, Marketing Studio can also apply multiple rule-sets to the same score calculation. For example, it could use different rules for leads from different geographic regions.
The system can capture Web visitor behavior directly or integrate with Omniture SiteCatalyst. One advantage of using Aprimo’s own Web tracking is that results are available in immediately, compared to nightly with Omniture. Marketing Studio can identify the company of anonymous visitors based on their IP address and retain the history of anonymous visitors when they identify themselves by filling out a form.
Salespeole working with Salesforce.com can see a list of their leads with priority ratings. They can then click on a name to see a digital activity profile (emails sent, links clicked, forms completed, Web site visits). This profile can include activity captured within Marketing Studio or imported to the Marketing Studio database from other systems. Users can drill further into each profile to see the underlying details of each activity. Still within the Salesforce.com interface, salespeople can send an email through Marketing Studio, add a lead to a Marketing Studio campaign, and edit, convert, clone, dedupe or remove the lead record. If the administrator chooses, Salesforce.com users can also open a Marketing Studio portal to see the marketing calendar, assets, lead lists, activity requests, content reviews, project tasks and reports.
Speaking of reports: the system includes 150 standard reports, which users can customize or supplement by creating their own with a basic report writer.
Pricing of Marketing Studio is competitive with other high-end business marketing systems. Fees are based on a combination of database size, email activity, number of users and modules deployed. The starting level is about $4,000 per month, which includes the core marketing features for ten users and up to 100,000 contacts or 250,000 emails. Fees including hosting and email execution. The marketing operations module adds $2,500 per month and other modules such as social media, banner ads, Web analytics and Web alerts add $1,500 each.
Aprimo was founded in 1998 and has more than 200 clients on its original marketing system, which offers modules for marketing automation and marketing resource management. Marketing Studio was launched in September 2009 and at this writing has 22 clients, including a mix of business and consumer marketers.
When I wrote about Aprimo Marketing Studio in a post last August, I was impressed by the scope of the product but reserved judgment because it hadn’t yet been launched. I took a look at the actual product last week. Bottom line: Aprimo delivered what they promised.
Like Aprimo itself, Marketing Studio is a bit of an oddity because it serves both business and consumer marketers. The needs of these two groups don’t necessarily conflict, but they do diverge. This means that a system for both will include several features needed by only one group or the other. Placing them all in the same product adds cost and complexity, which are not a software developer’s friends.
Aprimo has not found a magical solution to this dilemma. Rather, it has conceded the lower tiers of business marketing to simpler systems and aimed Marketing Studio at marketers who need greater sophistication and will accept higher cost and complexity to get it. (For more on vendor classifications, see my list of demand generation vendors from last November.)
In other words, Marketing Studio competes with high-end demand generation systems like Eloqua, Market2Lead and Neolane. Neolane may be the most similar, since it also straddles the business and consumer marketing worlds.
(Small digression: most business marketing systems are designed around data from a sales automation system such as Salesforce.com. But consumer marketers also need inputs from transaction systems. Marketing Studio and Neolane don't have a problem because they can support any data structure. Eloqua and Market2Lead are based on sales automation data, but can incorporate external tables. Other business marketing systems generally cannot.)
As I mentioned earlier, what originally most impressed me about Aprimo Marketing Studio was its scope. This starts with the core functions of any business marketing system: outbound and multi-step email campaigns, landing pages, Web behavior tracking , lead scoring, Salesforce.com integration, reporting and content management.
The system then draws on Aprimo’s heritage in marketing management to add detailed cost tracking, project management, asset workflow including annotation and commenting on PDFs, and a flexible campaign calendar. These are handled crudely, or not at all, in many business marketing products. In Marketing Studio, they are well-implemented with advanced features and an attractive, intuitive interface.
Project management is especially powerful. Project plans include specific tasks assigned to individuals and linked with dependencies. Plans can automatically modify themselves in response to events: for example, if a piece of copy is rejected, the system can add a new set of review and revision steps. This is done by creating the project as a branching flow chart, with rules to determine what takes place at junction. These rules can insert a predefined subflow, such as the review and revision process, which itself is shared across multiple projects. Good stuff.
System scope also extends to inbound marketing. Marketing Studio offers a blog engine tailored to corporate needs: managers can review and approve posts; the system can automatically notify Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook of new post; and each blog topic is assigned a different URL, which helps with search engine rank. Another module lets marketers create Adobe Flash-based Web ads, while an offer manager module tracks the user of offers across promotions. Paid search campaigns are supported through integration with Omniture SearchCenter.
Of course, the bells and whistles wouldn’t matter if the core features were poor. But Marketing Studio handles these quite nicely as well.
Email campaigns can execute as batch projects or trigger dialogs. The system treats these separately, although they are built with the same drag-and-drop flowchart interface. Batch campaigns include powerful segmentation supported by a sophisticated query builder, splits and merges. Batch flows can also update data attributes, calculate lead scores, create personalized URLs, add and remove names from groups, send email and generate output lists for other media.
Trigger dialogs have most of the same capabilities except for the advanced segmentation. In addition, they support wait periods and can send leads and alerts to the sales system. Unlike many demand generation products, Marketing Studio supports circular and merging flows, which can simplify design of complicated programs.
People enter a campaign by being added to a group. This can happen when a list is imported from an external file or the sales automation system, when people submit a Web form or click on an email or page link, or as a step within a campaign flow. External systems can also add names through the Marketing Studio API. Because either type of campaign flow can itself add a name to a group, the possibilities for controlling campaign entry and movement across campaigns are basically unlimited. Trigger campaigns execute immediately when a new lead is added to their group, allowing real-time interactions.
Other core features are similarly powerful. Users can build HTML emails, Web pages and multi-page microsites. Emails and Web pages can dynamically select content blocks based on rules that read the attributes of each recipient. Web forms and surveys are also content blocks, so the same rule-based selections can manage branching surveys and progressive profiling (i.e., asking different questions based on what is already known about an individual). The same rule-building interface is used for content selection rules, segmentation queries, and lead scoring. This reduces the amount of user training.
Lead scoring supports multiple scores per person, which is typical in high-end demand generation systems. More impressively, Marketing Studio can also apply multiple rule-sets to the same score calculation. For example, it could use different rules for leads from different geographic regions.
The system can capture Web visitor behavior directly or integrate with Omniture SiteCatalyst. One advantage of using Aprimo’s own Web tracking is that results are available in immediately, compared to nightly with Omniture. Marketing Studio can identify the company of anonymous visitors based on their IP address and retain the history of anonymous visitors when they identify themselves by filling out a form.
Salespeole working with Salesforce.com can see a list of their leads with priority ratings. They can then click on a name to see a digital activity profile (emails sent, links clicked, forms completed, Web site visits). This profile can include activity captured within Marketing Studio or imported to the Marketing Studio database from other systems. Users can drill further into each profile to see the underlying details of each activity. Still within the Salesforce.com interface, salespeople can send an email through Marketing Studio, add a lead to a Marketing Studio campaign, and edit, convert, clone, dedupe or remove the lead record. If the administrator chooses, Salesforce.com users can also open a Marketing Studio portal to see the marketing calendar, assets, lead lists, activity requests, content reviews, project tasks and reports.
Speaking of reports: the system includes 150 standard reports, which users can customize or supplement by creating their own with a basic report writer.
Pricing of Marketing Studio is competitive with other high-end business marketing systems. Fees are based on a combination of database size, email activity, number of users and modules deployed. The starting level is about $4,000 per month, which includes the core marketing features for ten users and up to 100,000 contacts or 250,000 emails. Fees including hosting and email execution. The marketing operations module adds $2,500 per month and other modules such as social media, banner ads, Web analytics and Web alerts add $1,500 each.
Aprimo was founded in 1998 and has more than 200 clients on its original marketing system, which offers modules for marketing automation and marketing resource management. Marketing Studio was launched in September 2009 and at this writing has 22 clients, including a mix of business and consumer marketers.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Kynetx Lets Marketers Customize User Experience Across Web Sites
Summary: Kynetx lets marketers enhance and coordinate user experience across multiple Web sites. It’s so different from site-based Web personalization that the possibilities can be hard to grasp. But I think they’re substantial.
The classic view of online anonymity is the 1993 New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Today, we realize that our online identities are not as private as they then seemed. But from a marketer’s viewpoint, it’s still maddeningly difficult to recognize online visitors and interact with them as individuals.
The challenge is usually focused on the marketer’s own Web site: when people visit, how can I identify them? But, ideally, marketers would track their customers across all Web sites and interject themselves when appropriate. Ad networks already do this to some extent, using third party cookies to coordinate the messages shown to each individual on different sites. But this doesn’t help marketers who want an active role in managing the user’s experience.
Kynetx offers a more powerful alternative. It installs a browser extension that can send data to an externally-hosted rules engine which returns JavaScript snippets that enhance the current Web page. The data describes the rules to execute and the current context, such as the Web page being viewed. It could potentially include personal information the user has chosen to share, although current Kynetx applications do not.
A concrete example would surely help. One Kynetx application is downloaded by members of the AAA automobile club. When users do a search on Google or other major sites, the application calls the Kynetx rules engine which checks a list of vendors who offer AAA discounts and flags them within the search results. No personal data is shared, yet AAA’s marketers deliver a customized experience that reminds members of their benefits and supports AAA’s partners.
Kynetx applications can also move data from one Web site to another, for example by capturing data and using it fill in a form or execute an API call.
The underlying technology for most Kynetx applications includes “Information Cards”, an open standard for digital identity management supported by Microsoft, Oracle, Google, PayPal and others. The general idea is that people can have different “cards” with different information for different purposes, allowing them to control (and, presumably, minimize) the amount of information they provide in each context. See the Information Card Foundation Web site for details.
In the case of Kynetx, Information Cards also minimize user effort, since the Kynetx browser extension must be installed only once, and then new applications can be added simply by loading a new Information Card. All the heavy lifting is done by the Kynetx rules engine, which resides on a central server accessed over the Internet. In addition to reducing the burden on the user’s computer, this makes updates easy since any changes are made on the server and go into effect without being deployed to user systems.
Development effort is further reduced because each Kynetx application runs on major browsers and operating systems without customization. Rules are written in a Kynetx-developed language with special features for context management. I was particularly pleased to see support for A/B tests, including facilities to randomly select different actions, capture success or failure, and report on results. Applications can run on personal computers, smartphones, or any other Web-enabled device.
Marketers who don’t want to use Information Cards can distribute applications through other “endpoints” including browser toolbars, cookies, wireless proxy servers (for example, in a coffee shop), or bookmarklets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmarklet . All that’s required is something that can identify a user, capture permissions, and call the Kynetx server.
Kynetx was founded in 2007 and currently is used in more than 700 applications from about 250 developers. Although the company does some application development, its primary business is selling execution on its platform, at rates from $.24 to $1.60 per thousand ruleset evaluations.
I’m frankly intrigued by the possibilities of Kynetx, which seems to open a direct channel onto users’ desktops, bypassing traditional Web advertising. It does require a preexisting relationship with the user, but gaining user permission is fast becoming a condition for most online interactions. Kynetx makes it easier to gain this permission by offering something of value in return. Even more important, it should help marketers to strengthen existing relationships by repeatedly demonstrating value after an application is installed.
The classic view of online anonymity is the 1993 New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Today, we realize that our online identities are not as private as they then seemed. But from a marketer’s viewpoint, it’s still maddeningly difficult to recognize online visitors and interact with them as individuals.The challenge is usually focused on the marketer’s own Web site: when people visit, how can I identify them? But, ideally, marketers would track their customers across all Web sites and interject themselves when appropriate. Ad networks already do this to some extent, using third party cookies to coordinate the messages shown to each individual on different sites. But this doesn’t help marketers who want an active role in managing the user’s experience.
Kynetx offers a more powerful alternative. It installs a browser extension that can send data to an externally-hosted rules engine which returns JavaScript snippets that enhance the current Web page. The data describes the rules to execute and the current context, such as the Web page being viewed. It could potentially include personal information the user has chosen to share, although current Kynetx applications do not.
A concrete example would surely help. One Kynetx application is downloaded by members of the AAA automobile club. When users do a search on Google or other major sites, the application calls the Kynetx rules engine which checks a list of vendors who offer AAA discounts and flags them within the search results. No personal data is shared, yet AAA’s marketers deliver a customized experience that reminds members of their benefits and supports AAA’s partners.
Kynetx applications can also move data from one Web site to another, for example by capturing data and using it fill in a form or execute an API call.
The underlying technology for most Kynetx applications includes “Information Cards”, an open standard for digital identity management supported by Microsoft, Oracle, Google, PayPal and others. The general idea is that people can have different “cards” with different information for different purposes, allowing them to control (and, presumably, minimize) the amount of information they provide in each context. See the Information Card Foundation Web site for details.
In the case of Kynetx, Information Cards also minimize user effort, since the Kynetx browser extension must be installed only once, and then new applications can be added simply by loading a new Information Card. All the heavy lifting is done by the Kynetx rules engine, which resides on a central server accessed over the Internet. In addition to reducing the burden on the user’s computer, this makes updates easy since any changes are made on the server and go into effect without being deployed to user systems.
Development effort is further reduced because each Kynetx application runs on major browsers and operating systems without customization. Rules are written in a Kynetx-developed language with special features for context management. I was particularly pleased to see support for A/B tests, including facilities to randomly select different actions, capture success or failure, and report on results. Applications can run on personal computers, smartphones, or any other Web-enabled device.
Marketers who don’t want to use Information Cards can distribute applications through other “endpoints” including browser toolbars, cookies, wireless proxy servers (for example, in a coffee shop), or bookmarklets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmarklet . All that’s required is something that can identify a user, capture permissions, and call the Kynetx server.
Kynetx was founded in 2007 and currently is used in more than 700 applications from about 250 developers. Although the company does some application development, its primary business is selling execution on its platform, at rates from $.24 to $1.60 per thousand ruleset evaluations.
I’m frankly intrigued by the possibilities of Kynetx, which seems to open a direct channel onto users’ desktops, bypassing traditional Web advertising. It does require a preexisting relationship with the user, but gaining user permission is fast becoming a condition for most online interactions. Kynetx makes it easier to gain this permission by offering something of value in return. Even more important, it should help marketers to strengthen existing relationships by repeatedly demonstrating value after an application is installed.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Autonomy Promises to Automate Delivery of Tailored Marketing Messages
Summary: Autonomy is a leader in enterprise search and content management (it owns Interwoven). Its concept of "Meaning Based Marketing" comes quite close to my idea of "content grazing" as a way to reduce marketing complexity while delivering the right content to each customer or prospect.
In my last post, I proposed the (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) term of “content grazing” to describe automatically extracting small bits of information from company documents and feeding them to prospects and customers. The notion had been on my mind for some time, prompted by a sense that traditional approaches to content creation and distribution are fundamentally too expensive to deploy in full. That is, tailoring large content streams for buyer segments and funnel stages is just too much work for both marketers (who can't afford to create the content and campaigns) and buyers (who don’t have time to read the results).
The good folks at Autonomy apparently had similar thoughts. Back in July 2009 they published a paper Meaning Based Marketing that describes using a collection of Autonomy technologies “to truly understand your customers—drawing on everything from transaction history to cross-channel interactions, user generated content, customer and community behavior, as well as third party content—and act on that knowledge to deliver the best performing, most accurate, and relevant content to each individual visitor. Automatically.” That pretty much says it all.
The Autonomy brief has a slightly different scope from my own concept, perhaps because it’s tailored to fit the Autonomy product portfolio. For example, it includes Web content archiving, which I wouldn’t have considered, and excludes creating content from relevant pieces within a larger document. I do consider the latter quite important, because it’s a key to reducing the content creation cost and in making the information more digestible for customers. But the core components of meaning extraction and self-adjusting content selection are certainly present in Autonomy's description.
Specifically, the paper outlines a fully automated process of:
- delivering a tailored customer experience (that is, content recommendations) based on its understanding of both the customer and the contents
- optimizing interactions through real-time multivariate testing
The list also includes market analysis, based on sentiments and trends, as well as the previously-mentioned content archiving. Both are useful additions to the vision.
The paper doesn’t go into much technical detail beyong mentioning that Autonomy unifies the data through its “Intelligent Data Operating Layer” (IDOL). But I suspect you could find much more information elsewhere on their site: Autonomy itself doesn’t seem to be conserving its content-creation budget.
Nor, come to think of it, did I notice any particular personalization or intelligent targeting on my own return visits to their Web site. Either they’re very good at this stuff – and know I’m not a real sales prospect – or they haven’t quite gotten around to deploying these services for themselves. Either way, the concept remains valid and it’s good to see that someone is working to make it happen.
In my last post, I proposed the (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) term of “content grazing” to describe automatically extracting small bits of information from company documents and feeding them to prospects and customers. The notion had been on my mind for some time, prompted by a sense that traditional approaches to content creation and distribution are fundamentally too expensive to deploy in full. That is, tailoring large content streams for buyer segments and funnel stages is just too much work for both marketers (who can't afford to create the content and campaigns) and buyers (who don’t have time to read the results).
The good folks at Autonomy apparently had similar thoughts. Back in July 2009 they published a paper Meaning Based Marketing that describes using a collection of Autonomy technologies “to truly understand your customers—drawing on everything from transaction history to cross-channel interactions, user generated content, customer and community behavior, as well as third party content—and act on that knowledge to deliver the best performing, most accurate, and relevant content to each individual visitor. Automatically.” That pretty much says it all.
The Autonomy brief has a slightly different scope from my own concept, perhaps because it’s tailored to fit the Autonomy product portfolio. For example, it includes Web content archiving, which I wouldn’t have considered, and excludes creating content from relevant pieces within a larger document. I do consider the latter quite important, because it’s a key to reducing the content creation cost and in making the information more digestible for customers. But the core components of meaning extraction and self-adjusting content selection are certainly present in Autonomy's description.
Specifically, the paper outlines a fully automated process of:
- analyzing unstructured content to infer the views, needs and preferences of customers who create or read it
- generating customer profiles based on the contents and associated behaviors
- uncovering customer segments within the data- delivering a tailored customer experience (that is, content recommendations) based on its understanding of both the customer and the contents
- optimizing interactions through real-time multivariate testing
The list also includes market analysis, based on sentiments and trends, as well as the previously-mentioned content archiving. Both are useful additions to the vision.
The paper doesn’t go into much technical detail beyong mentioning that Autonomy unifies the data through its “Intelligent Data Operating Layer” (IDOL). But I suspect you could find much more information elsewhere on their site: Autonomy itself doesn’t seem to be conserving its content-creation budget.
Nor, come to think of it, did I notice any particular personalization or intelligent targeting on my own return visits to their Web site. Either they’re very good at this stuff – and know I’m not a real sales prospect – or they haven’t quite gotten around to deploying these services for themselves. Either way, the concept remains valid and it’s good to see that someone is working to make it happen.
Thursday, January 07, 2010
2010 Will Bring New Features to Demand Generation Systems
Summary: the demand generation market will continue to grow in 2010, and it may attract some new, big competitors from outside the industry. But the real excitement will be features that expand the scope of demand generation products to support inbound marketing, better measurement, and more efficient content creation.
2009 was a year of tremendous growth for demand generation systems (a.k.a. business-to-business marketing automation. By some measures, it's looking more mature: buyers are appearing outside the initial niche of software and technology companies; core functionality is well understood and largely consistent across products; vendors are expanding scope to include new users at existing accounts (in particular, sales departments); pricing is under pressure; and companies are starting to specialize in different customer segments.
On the other hand, there are still plenty of new entrants; few pioneering vendors have failed or consolidated; and related software vendors (in this case, CRM, email and Web site management systems) haven’t yet introduced me-too products. Perhaps most important, many potential buyers still don’t understand the value provided by these systems—although vendors are working very hard to educate them. So, on balance, I'd say the industry is still in a fairly early stage: late adolescence, if you will.
What will 2010 bring? Continued sales growth, for sure: that’s easy enough when you’re starting with a small base. We can also be confident that the feature trends I described in my review of 2009 will continue: better support for social media, greater access for sales departments, and more flexible reporting. I do expect vendors to converge on more standard social media features. These will probably combine the content-sharing and activity-tracking capabilities that different vendors now deliver separately.
There’s also a reasonable chance – although this prediction is less certain – that sales access features will blossom into deeper cooperation between marketing and sales in managing prospect relationships. There's no question in my mind that such cooperation will appear: it's inevitable as marketing’s role expands beyond lead generation to long-term relationship management. What I don’t know is how quickly this will happen or whether the sales access tools will be the connection point. One reason they might not is that sales access tools are used by individual sales people, while broad marketing and sales integration is likely to be controlled by senior sales management.
So much for the rear view mirror. Here are some predictions that are larger departures from the immediate past.
- me-too products. It's just a matter of time before CRM vendors (yes, I mean Salesforce.com) and Web content management vendors decide to compete seriously for marketing automation business. Frankly, this is so obvious that I'm almost embarrassed to mention it. But I wouldn't want anyone to say I failed to see it coming.
- inbound marketing. The work of generating Web traffic through search engine optimization, paid Web ads and expanded Web content has so far been performed outside of most demand generation systems. These are important marketing activities and they are a natural extension of demand generation systems, even though they require closer integration with (or replacement of ) Web content management and Web analytics. Note that Webinars and social media, which are also inbound marketing devices, are already being added to marketing automation products.
This type of extension—supporting new tasks for current users—is typical of maturing products once the core functions widely available. It also implies that vendors specializing in these areas will add their own marketing automation features to compete. HubSpot particularly comes to mind, which is a testament to their own marketing skills.
- external data. Many demand generation systems already make it easy to look up data about prospects from sources like Hoovers or JigSaw and to infer the location and company of anonymous visitors from their IP address. Certainly those features will continue to grow. But there’s another trend that's very pronounced in the consumer marketing space, which is using consumer panels and surveys to measure responses that aren’t captured within the company’s own systems. I haven’t seen much analogous activity among business marketers, but think that will change as the technique becomes more common and as business marketers accept that internal data will never provide all the answers they really need for effective marketing measurement. The task for the marketing automation vendors is making it easier to integrate such data and, in cases such as ad-embedded surveys, to generate it.
- content grazing. I'll explain that label in a moment. The idea is to squeeze the most value from existing marketing content, rather than creating new content for each project and situation. This implies two complementary tasks: being able to extract and classify nuggets of information from existing marketing documents, and being able to deliver exactly the right nugget in each situation.
The underlying insight is that there’s so much information available today that people don’t have time to digest large blocks of it. Rather, they want be fed bite-sized chunks that meet their immediate needs. Hence, the term "content grazing": it's like eating appetizers instead of a full meal.
Today’s marketing best practice is the opposite of content grazing: it’s to develop many different campaigns that deliver large volumes of content for different situations. This is expensive and it's exactly what prospects don't want. The alternative is automated systems that extract and classify content from existing materials, including many such as blog posts that would be created for other purposes. Other automated systems would can select and deliver the correct content during each interaction.
Basically this is the challenge of simulating a human conversation. It’s possible that some solutions will be based on automated customer service agents already used for other interactions. I haven’t seen this applied in a marketing automation context, but suspect it’s a path that marketers will be forced to explore as they recognize the full cost of conventional content-heavy approaches, and that buyers don't want them anyway.
2009 was a year of tremendous growth for demand generation systems (a.k.a. business-to-business marketing automation. By some measures, it's looking more mature: buyers are appearing outside the initial niche of software and technology companies; core functionality is well understood and largely consistent across products; vendors are expanding scope to include new users at existing accounts (in particular, sales departments); pricing is under pressure; and companies are starting to specialize in different customer segments.
On the other hand, there are still plenty of new entrants; few pioneering vendors have failed or consolidated; and related software vendors (in this case, CRM, email and Web site management systems) haven’t yet introduced me-too products. Perhaps most important, many potential buyers still don’t understand the value provided by these systems—although vendors are working very hard to educate them. So, on balance, I'd say the industry is still in a fairly early stage: late adolescence, if you will.
What will 2010 bring? Continued sales growth, for sure: that’s easy enough when you’re starting with a small base. We can also be confident that the feature trends I described in my review of 2009 will continue: better support for social media, greater access for sales departments, and more flexible reporting. I do expect vendors to converge on more standard social media features. These will probably combine the content-sharing and activity-tracking capabilities that different vendors now deliver separately.
There’s also a reasonable chance – although this prediction is less certain – that sales access features will blossom into deeper cooperation between marketing and sales in managing prospect relationships. There's no question in my mind that such cooperation will appear: it's inevitable as marketing’s role expands beyond lead generation to long-term relationship management. What I don’t know is how quickly this will happen or whether the sales access tools will be the connection point. One reason they might not is that sales access tools are used by individual sales people, while broad marketing and sales integration is likely to be controlled by senior sales management.
So much for the rear view mirror. Here are some predictions that are larger departures from the immediate past.
- me-too products. It's just a matter of time before CRM vendors (yes, I mean Salesforce.com) and Web content management vendors decide to compete seriously for marketing automation business. Frankly, this is so obvious that I'm almost embarrassed to mention it. But I wouldn't want anyone to say I failed to see it coming.
- inbound marketing. The work of generating Web traffic through search engine optimization, paid Web ads and expanded Web content has so far been performed outside of most demand generation systems. These are important marketing activities and they are a natural extension of demand generation systems, even though they require closer integration with (or replacement of ) Web content management and Web analytics. Note that Webinars and social media, which are also inbound marketing devices, are already being added to marketing automation products.
This type of extension—supporting new tasks for current users—is typical of maturing products once the core functions widely available. It also implies that vendors specializing in these areas will add their own marketing automation features to compete. HubSpot particularly comes to mind, which is a testament to their own marketing skills.
- external data. Many demand generation systems already make it easy to look up data about prospects from sources like Hoovers or JigSaw and to infer the location and company of anonymous visitors from their IP address. Certainly those features will continue to grow. But there’s another trend that's very pronounced in the consumer marketing space, which is using consumer panels and surveys to measure responses that aren’t captured within the company’s own systems. I haven’t seen much analogous activity among business marketers, but think that will change as the technique becomes more common and as business marketers accept that internal data will never provide all the answers they really need for effective marketing measurement. The task for the marketing automation vendors is making it easier to integrate such data and, in cases such as ad-embedded surveys, to generate it.
- content grazing. I'll explain that label in a moment. The idea is to squeeze the most value from existing marketing content, rather than creating new content for each project and situation. This implies two complementary tasks: being able to extract and classify nuggets of information from existing marketing documents, and being able to deliver exactly the right nugget in each situation.
The underlying insight is that there’s so much information available today that people don’t have time to digest large blocks of it. Rather, they want be fed bite-sized chunks that meet their immediate needs. Hence, the term "content grazing": it's like eating appetizers instead of a full meal.
Today’s marketing best practice is the opposite of content grazing: it’s to develop many different campaigns that deliver large volumes of content for different situations. This is expensive and it's exactly what prospects don't want. The alternative is automated systems that extract and classify content from existing materials, including many such as blog posts that would be created for other purposes. Other automated systems would can select and deliver the correct content during each interaction.
Basically this is the challenge of simulating a human conversation. It’s possible that some solutions will be based on automated customer service agents already used for other interactions. I haven’t seen this applied in a marketing automation context, but suspect it’s a path that marketers will be forced to explore as they recognize the full cost of conventional content-heavy approaches, and that buyers don't want them anyway.
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Marketing Automation System Trends: What We Found in the Raab Guide
Summary: Social media and access for sales people were the two big trends among demand generation vendors last year. But enhanced reporting was the most common improvement of all. Could marketers finally be ready to spend on measurement?
I’m pleased to report that the 2010 edition of the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems is officially available today, with updated entries on all vendors (alphabetically: Eloqua, Manticore Technology, Market2Lead, Marketbright, Marketo, Neolane and Silverpop Engage B2B).
Preparing the updates gave me a good review of where developers focused their efforts last year. Even though this is limited to the vendors in the Guide, it's a pretty representative sample of the industry as a whole. Here’s a quick look at what I found.
- Social media. At least three vendors (Eloqua, Marketo and Silverpop) introduced new features aimed at improving marketers’ ability to use social media. What’s most interesting is that no standard approach has yet emerged. Eloqua focused on making it easier to embed sharable links within conventional marketing assets. Marketo added features to capture Twitter posts and Helpstream customer support interactions within a lead’s activity history. Silverpop made it easier to add social media handles to lead records so these could be used to send messages.
- Sales access. The same three vendors also added new tools to give salespeople better access to information the marketing automation system has captured about their leads. But in contrast to social media applications, the sales access modules were remarkably similar. All aimed at showing the activities of selected leads, typically by showing overviews and trends, and then letting users drill into details. The vendors also charged additional per-user fees for these modules. This contrasts with traditional demand generation pricing on database size and/or activity volume, but is the way sales automation systems like Salesforce.com are usually sold. These modules open up a major new revenue stream for the demand generation systems while simultaneously giving sales departments a greater reason to support marketing's purchase of the systems. Even though the modules clearly trespasses on the CRM vendors turf – inviting a potentially devastating counter-invasion – the opportunity seems irresistible.
- Upgraded reporting. You already knew that vendors were adding features for social media and sales access, but did you realize that nearly everyone (five of my seven vendors: Eloqua, Market2Lead, Marketo, Manticore Technology and Marketbright) also made substantial improvements in their business intelligence and reporting capabilities? Popular new features included user-customizable dashboards, better user-defined reports and more extensive standard reports. I take this as evidence that marketers are demanding more sophisticated reporting from their vendors, and suspect further improvements are on the way.
- New user interfaces. Market2Lead, Manticore Technology and Silverpop all introduced major interface upgrades. The focus was less on adding new capabilities than on making existing functions more accessible. I don’t need to remind you that usability is a critical point of competition among industry vendors. But as older vendors revamp their interfaces, it will become harder for buyers to differentiate along those lines. This might lead vendors to highlight the structural differences in their campaign engines, which are ultimately more important for usability than the visual interface. But, the structural issues are much harder for buyers to grasp, so this might not be an effective marketing approach. Could this lead vendors to compete on other grounds entirely?
- Anonymous user look-up and data enhancement. At least three vendors added or enhanced features to use IP address to identify the company of anonymous Web visitors, and/or to look up prospect names and other data about those companies in directories such as Jigsaw and Hoovers. I won’t name those three because the other vendors may have similar capabilities. In fact, anonymous visitor identification and enhancement have become pretty much standard features: today, it would be an exceptional vendor who did NOT make them available. These features also tie into both social media and sales access modules. They illustrate how the role of marketing has changed from simply gathering leads and handing them to sales, to building and managing prospect relationships.
So much for 2009. Many of these trends will surely continue in 2010, but I think we can expect some new directions as well. I'll talk about those in my next post.
I’m pleased to report that the 2010 edition of the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems is officially available today, with updated entries on all vendors (alphabetically: Eloqua, Manticore Technology, Market2Lead, Marketbright, Marketo, Neolane and Silverpop Engage B2B).
Preparing the updates gave me a good review of where developers focused their efforts last year. Even though this is limited to the vendors in the Guide, it's a pretty representative sample of the industry as a whole. Here’s a quick look at what I found.
- Social media. At least three vendors (Eloqua, Marketo and Silverpop) introduced new features aimed at improving marketers’ ability to use social media. What’s most interesting is that no standard approach has yet emerged. Eloqua focused on making it easier to embed sharable links within conventional marketing assets. Marketo added features to capture Twitter posts and Helpstream customer support interactions within a lead’s activity history. Silverpop made it easier to add social media handles to lead records so these could be used to send messages.
- Sales access. The same three vendors also added new tools to give salespeople better access to information the marketing automation system has captured about their leads. But in contrast to social media applications, the sales access modules were remarkably similar. All aimed at showing the activities of selected leads, typically by showing overviews and trends, and then letting users drill into details. The vendors also charged additional per-user fees for these modules. This contrasts with traditional demand generation pricing on database size and/or activity volume, but is the way sales automation systems like Salesforce.com are usually sold. These modules open up a major new revenue stream for the demand generation systems while simultaneously giving sales departments a greater reason to support marketing's purchase of the systems. Even though the modules clearly trespasses on the CRM vendors turf – inviting a potentially devastating counter-invasion – the opportunity seems irresistible.
- Upgraded reporting. You already knew that vendors were adding features for social media and sales access, but did you realize that nearly everyone (five of my seven vendors: Eloqua, Market2Lead, Marketo, Manticore Technology and Marketbright) also made substantial improvements in their business intelligence and reporting capabilities? Popular new features included user-customizable dashboards, better user-defined reports and more extensive standard reports. I take this as evidence that marketers are demanding more sophisticated reporting from their vendors, and suspect further improvements are on the way.
- New user interfaces. Market2Lead, Manticore Technology and Silverpop all introduced major interface upgrades. The focus was less on adding new capabilities than on making existing functions more accessible. I don’t need to remind you that usability is a critical point of competition among industry vendors. But as older vendors revamp their interfaces, it will become harder for buyers to differentiate along those lines. This might lead vendors to highlight the structural differences in their campaign engines, which are ultimately more important for usability than the visual interface. But, the structural issues are much harder for buyers to grasp, so this might not be an effective marketing approach. Could this lead vendors to compete on other grounds entirely?
- Anonymous user look-up and data enhancement. At least three vendors added or enhanced features to use IP address to identify the company of anonymous Web visitors, and/or to look up prospect names and other data about those companies in directories such as Jigsaw and Hoovers. I won’t name those three because the other vendors may have similar capabilities. In fact, anonymous visitor identification and enhancement have become pretty much standard features: today, it would be an exceptional vendor who did NOT make them available. These features also tie into both social media and sales access modules. They illustrate how the role of marketing has changed from simply gathering leads and handing them to sales, to building and managing prospect relationships.
So much for 2009. Many of these trends will surely continue in 2010, but I think we can expect some new directions as well. I'll talk about those in my next post.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
LoopFuse Offers No-Frills Demand Generation
Summary: LoopFuse offers attractive but limited demand generation functions at an easy-to-swallow price.
It’s been nearly a year since I took my first close look at the LoopFuse OneView demand generation system. I didn't write about them because the vendor was planning some major improvements and it made more sense to publish a review after these in place. We reconnected in December and the product is now ready for its close up.
The resulting picture is much prettier than before because the main changes in LoopFuse have been improvements in the user interface. It is now an attractive system with wizards to drive major functions and extensive in-line help messages to clarify next steps. The help functions are built with Helpstream customer support technology, which also provides a knowledge base and online community.
The process to set up multi-step campaigns (which the vendor calls “lead flows”) is now quite straightforward. Users first create the lead flow and link it to recipient and suppression lists that will determine who enters the flow. They then define the flow itself by following prompts to add nodes for activities, conditional decisions, waiting periods and retrial periods. (A retrial resembled a waiting period except that the system keeps retesting the previous condition. For example, the retrial node might check every hour to see whether someone has responded to a previous email. Come to think of it, it would probably make more sense to build the retesting into the conditional node itself.)
Esthetics aside, however, the actual capabilities of the lead flows are still somewhat limited. The only direct action available in an activity node is to send an email; all other options involve updates to the CRM system such as adding a lead, changing data, or assigning an activity. This leaves out other tasks that I consider basic, such as updating data within the LoopFuse database, removing the lead from the flow, or adding the lead to a list. (In the case of data changes, the omission is intentional: Loopfuse argues that such changes should be made in the CRM system and replicated into Loopfuse).
The conditional nodes make up some of the deficit. For example, failure to meet the node condition can remove the lead from the flow. (An activity to remove leads from a different flow will be available around next April.) The conditional nodes can check for several specific conditions, such as email responses, Web page visits, CRM lead status, data values and lead scores. These probably serve most purposes, but some users may be frustrated by the inability to combine several conditions within a single node or to specify more than two branches as outcomes.
Leads enter LoopFuse lead flows when they join the associated recipient list. Lists can include leads with specified data values on the lead record, that originate from a particular Web site or form, or that visited a particular Web page. Several conditions can be combined and lists can be static or regularly updated. But lists can't be selected based on lead scores, email response or activity levels. Again, processes that depended on these would need to incorporate them through conditional nodes in the lead flows.
Lead scores themselves can be based on data values in the lead record, email response or Web pages visited. However, the system cannot base scores on activity patterns such as "three Web site visits in the past week". The system stores one score per lead. Scores are recalculated every hour, which does not support immediate reaction to score-changing events.
LoopFuse provides a graphic email designer that can generate both text and HTML versions. Emails can be personalized with data from the lead record, including the assigned salesperson if available. But data from account or opportunity tables is not available, even though it’s imported from CRM. Nor does LoopFuse support any type of A/B testing, either in the email definition or its lead flows. Each email is tied directly to just one email “campaign”, although the email campaigns themselves can be reused in multiple lead flows.
Unlike most demand generation vendors, LoopFuse does not host landing pages or Web forms for its clients. Instead, the vendor provides a wizard that reads existing, externally hosted forms and generates modified versions that will post data into the LoopFuse database. Another wizard helps users to generate HTML forms from scratch. Either way, the new forms must be copied into pages hosted outside of LoopFuse.
LoopFuse will also provide tags that can be placed on other pages on a client’s Web site to track and report on Web page visits. It lets it generate some page-oriented Web analytics reports similar to Google Analytics.
Reporting is another area that LoopFuse has significantly strengthened in the past year. In addition to Web analytics, it provides detailed reports on Web site visitors, including reports that link anonymous visitors to their company through their IP address. The system also tracks lead movement through sales funnel based on a combination of its own data and information imported from CRM. Other reports show results from email campaigns and lead capture forms.
LoopFuse also gives salespeople a report showing recent activities by their assigned leads, allowing them to drill into each lead for details. A “company dashboard” report lets both sales people and marketers see all visitors from a particular company, again based on IP address. The report shows both known and anonymous visitors and lets users connect directly with external databases including Hoovers, Jigsaw and Zoominfo to look up additional information. LoopFuse can also alert salespeople by email when high-priority accounts perform specified activities captured in the system.
LoopFuse does a particularly good job with CRM integration. Because its sales process depends heavily on free trials, the company has developed a self-service wizard that guides users through the process of connecting to Salesforce.com, including an automated check for whether LoopFuse has been granted access permissions in the client’s Salesforce.com installation. (Apparently this is a very common omission.) Users have field-by-field control over how data conflicts between the systems are resolved. In addition to Salesforce.com, the vendor has a standard integration for SugarCRM.
Pricing in LoopFuse is based on email and Web page volume, with no limit on the number of names in the system database. This is unusual but not unique: Pardot and LeadLife take a similar approach. (See my recent list of demand generation vendors for an overview of competitive pricing.) Rates are quite aggressive: $750 per month for 50,000 emails and page views combined, or $1,250 per month for a much more generous 250,000 total.
LoopFuse was founded in 2007 although it was largely in stealth mode through early 2009. The company currently has more than 50 paid clients.
It’s been nearly a year since I took my first close look at the LoopFuse OneView demand generation system. I didn't write about them because the vendor was planning some major improvements and it made more sense to publish a review after these in place. We reconnected in December and the product is now ready for its close up.
The resulting picture is much prettier than before because the main changes in LoopFuse have been improvements in the user interface. It is now an attractive system with wizards to drive major functions and extensive in-line help messages to clarify next steps. The help functions are built with Helpstream customer support technology, which also provides a knowledge base and online community.
The process to set up multi-step campaigns (which the vendor calls “lead flows”) is now quite straightforward. Users first create the lead flow and link it to recipient and suppression lists that will determine who enters the flow. They then define the flow itself by following prompts to add nodes for activities, conditional decisions, waiting periods and retrial periods. (A retrial resembled a waiting period except that the system keeps retesting the previous condition. For example, the retrial node might check every hour to see whether someone has responded to a previous email. Come to think of it, it would probably make more sense to build the retesting into the conditional node itself.)
Esthetics aside, however, the actual capabilities of the lead flows are still somewhat limited. The only direct action available in an activity node is to send an email; all other options involve updates to the CRM system such as adding a lead, changing data, or assigning an activity. This leaves out other tasks that I consider basic, such as updating data within the LoopFuse database, removing the lead from the flow, or adding the lead to a list. (In the case of data changes, the omission is intentional: Loopfuse argues that such changes should be made in the CRM system and replicated into Loopfuse).
The conditional nodes make up some of the deficit. For example, failure to meet the node condition can remove the lead from the flow. (An activity to remove leads from a different flow will be available around next April.) The conditional nodes can check for several specific conditions, such as email responses, Web page visits, CRM lead status, data values and lead scores. These probably serve most purposes, but some users may be frustrated by the inability to combine several conditions within a single node or to specify more than two branches as outcomes.
Leads enter LoopFuse lead flows when they join the associated recipient list. Lists can include leads with specified data values on the lead record, that originate from a particular Web site or form, or that visited a particular Web page. Several conditions can be combined and lists can be static or regularly updated. But lists can't be selected based on lead scores, email response or activity levels. Again, processes that depended on these would need to incorporate them through conditional nodes in the lead flows.
Lead scores themselves can be based on data values in the lead record, email response or Web pages visited. However, the system cannot base scores on activity patterns such as "three Web site visits in the past week". The system stores one score per lead. Scores are recalculated every hour, which does not support immediate reaction to score-changing events.
LoopFuse provides a graphic email designer that can generate both text and HTML versions. Emails can be personalized with data from the lead record, including the assigned salesperson if available. But data from account or opportunity tables is not available, even though it’s imported from CRM. Nor does LoopFuse support any type of A/B testing, either in the email definition or its lead flows. Each email is tied directly to just one email “campaign”, although the email campaigns themselves can be reused in multiple lead flows.
Unlike most demand generation vendors, LoopFuse does not host landing pages or Web forms for its clients. Instead, the vendor provides a wizard that reads existing, externally hosted forms and generates modified versions that will post data into the LoopFuse database. Another wizard helps users to generate HTML forms from scratch. Either way, the new forms must be copied into pages hosted outside of LoopFuse.
LoopFuse will also provide tags that can be placed on other pages on a client’s Web site to track and report on Web page visits. It lets it generate some page-oriented Web analytics reports similar to Google Analytics.
Reporting is another area that LoopFuse has significantly strengthened in the past year. In addition to Web analytics, it provides detailed reports on Web site visitors, including reports that link anonymous visitors to their company through their IP address. The system also tracks lead movement through sales funnel based on a combination of its own data and information imported from CRM. Other reports show results from email campaigns and lead capture forms.
LoopFuse also gives salespeople a report showing recent activities by their assigned leads, allowing them to drill into each lead for details. A “company dashboard” report lets both sales people and marketers see all visitors from a particular company, again based on IP address. The report shows both known and anonymous visitors and lets users connect directly with external databases including Hoovers, Jigsaw and Zoominfo to look up additional information. LoopFuse can also alert salespeople by email when high-priority accounts perform specified activities captured in the system.
LoopFuse does a particularly good job with CRM integration. Because its sales process depends heavily on free trials, the company has developed a self-service wizard that guides users through the process of connecting to Salesforce.com, including an automated check for whether LoopFuse has been granted access permissions in the client’s Salesforce.com installation. (Apparently this is a very common omission.) Users have field-by-field control over how data conflicts between the systems are resolved. In addition to Salesforce.com, the vendor has a standard integration for SugarCRM.
Pricing in LoopFuse is based on email and Web page volume, with no limit on the number of names in the system database. This is unusual but not unique: Pardot and LeadLife take a similar approach. (See my recent list of demand generation vendors for an overview of competitive pricing.) Rates are quite aggressive: $750 per month for 50,000 emails and page views combined, or $1,250 per month for a much more generous 250,000 total.
LoopFuse was founded in 2007 although it was largely in stealth mode through early 2009. The company currently has more than 50 paid clients.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Spredfast Offers Systematic Management for Social Media Campaigns
Summary: Social Agency’s Spredfast helps marketers schedule social media campaigns the same way they schedule paid advertising. Cool.
It seems like common courtesy to listen to an existing conversation before jumping in with a comment. If social media worked the same way, companies would first buy a monitoring system to track what’s being said, followed by tools to respond to comments made by others. Only later would they initiate conversations and, eventually, provide tools to help their friends spread the word.
Silly me. I should have known that marketers talk first and listen later.
I’m not talking about personal style, although the decibel level at any marketing conference speaks for itself. But a recent eMarketer article B2B Marketers to Increase Social Spend cited two surveys that showed this is also a matter of policy.
Specifically, a study from Visible Technologies and SiriusDecisions found the most common use for social media was to “generate awareness” (25%), while another study in B2B Magazine found the top use for social networks was “thought leadership” (60%). True listening ranked fifth in the Visible Technologies/SiriusDecision survey (“monitor and respond” at 14%), and third in the B2B Magazine survey (“customer feedback” at 46%).
On reflection, this makes sense. Marketers are primarily interested in getting out their messages. Perhaps this is an old habit that will change in a customer-driven world. But I suspect that marketing results will always be driven by activity, and results are ultimately what matter. So I’ve now revised my expected sequence of social media activities to start with broadcast, only then followed by monitor, respond, initiate individual conversations and empower advocates.
Armed with this insight, I was much less surprised when Kenneth Cho of social marketing agency Social Agency told me that his new social media campaign tool Spredfast had been purchased immediately after release by major companies including AOL, IBM, HP, Cisco and Porter Novelli. Although I’ve seen plenty of “listening platforms” like Radian6, Alterian Techrigy and Scout Labs, I hadn't previously seen a system aimed primarily at managing outbound social messages. (Now that I'm looking, though, I find that ObjectiveMarketer seems to offer something similar.)
Of course, the listening platforms can also post social media messages, as can the social media features now found in many marketing automation systems. What distinguishes Spredfast is that marketers can schedule their posts through the life of a social media campaign, rather than simply replying or initiating conversations on demand. Spredfast supports on-demand posting too.
Another key feature is that Spredfast supports multiple “voices” of actual or constructed individuals, each having accounts in multiple channels (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.). The campaign calendar lays out of scheduled events by all voices over time, and is color-coded to show whether a particular event has already been delivered, is ready to go, or still needs approved content. This looks strikingly similar to the media plan for a flight of broadcast ads and serves very much the same purpose.
Users can drill into an event to add the content itself including bit.ly links that allow the system to track the click-through. One particularly nice feature is that when users assign the same content to multiple events, the system will automatically create different bit.ly links for each event. This makes it easy to track results for each event independently.
Spredfast's developers also recognized that large companies will have many different people working on different aspects of a project. Users can be assigned rights to specific campaigns, voices and events, with precise control over who can view, edit and approve content. Pricing is based on the number of campaigns, not users, so large organizations can incorporate as many people as needed.
As the bit.ly tags suggest, Spredfast also pays substantial attention to measurement. It provides three major summary metrics:
- activity (how much content the system is publishing),
- reach (the number of views, friends, followers, subscribers, etc.), and
- engagement (numbers of comments, retweets, likes, etc.).
Top-level reports summarize these by campaign and let users drill down to see detailed statistics by channel and voice and, ultimately, the actual content such as comments or reviews.
The system archives content and responses so they remain available even after they are dropped from the social media platforms that originally carried them. In addition to cumulative statistics, Spredfast displays daily statistics for the past seven days, giving a sense of trends.
Perhaps wisely, Spredfast's developers drew the line at reporting the raw numbers for its metrics. Users who want more elaborate scoring, perhaps applying different weights to different kinds of activities, can export the raw data and calculate outside the system. Similarly, Spredfast makes no attempt at relating social media programs to business results such as leads or revenue.
The system does provide what Cho called a “minimalist” listening platform, which can automatically search across public listening tools (Google, Google Blog Search, Social Mention, Twitter, Boardreader, Bing) for key words, and present any results so users can review and republish or reply to them. It also provides an RSS reader for feeds selected by the user, as well as a site indexer that can show the frequency of different terms in user-specified blogs as a word cloud. This helps users tailor their posts to encourage coverage.
Spredfast began its public beta in mid-November. The system is a vendor-hosted service. It is available in a free version with limited functionality; a $50 per month standard version with one campaign, no collaboration and no metrics after the first month; and $250 per month enterprise version supporting all features for up to three campaigns.
It seems like common courtesy to listen to an existing conversation before jumping in with a comment. If social media worked the same way, companies would first buy a monitoring system to track what’s being said, followed by tools to respond to comments made by others. Only later would they initiate conversations and, eventually, provide tools to help their friends spread the word.
Silly me. I should have known that marketers talk first and listen later.
I’m not talking about personal style, although the decibel level at any marketing conference speaks for itself. But a recent eMarketer article B2B Marketers to Increase Social Spend cited two surveys that showed this is also a matter of policy.
Specifically, a study from Visible Technologies and SiriusDecisions found the most common use for social media was to “generate awareness” (25%), while another study in B2B Magazine found the top use for social networks was “thought leadership” (60%). True listening ranked fifth in the Visible Technologies/SiriusDecision survey (“monitor and respond” at 14%), and third in the B2B Magazine survey (“customer feedback” at 46%).
On reflection, this makes sense. Marketers are primarily interested in getting out their messages. Perhaps this is an old habit that will change in a customer-driven world. But I suspect that marketing results will always be driven by activity, and results are ultimately what matter. So I’ve now revised my expected sequence of social media activities to start with broadcast, only then followed by monitor, respond, initiate individual conversations and empower advocates.
Armed with this insight, I was much less surprised when Kenneth Cho of social marketing agency Social Agency told me that his new social media campaign tool Spredfast had been purchased immediately after release by major companies including AOL, IBM, HP, Cisco and Porter Novelli. Although I’ve seen plenty of “listening platforms” like Radian6, Alterian Techrigy and Scout Labs, I hadn't previously seen a system aimed primarily at managing outbound social messages. (Now that I'm looking, though, I find that ObjectiveMarketer seems to offer something similar.)
Of course, the listening platforms can also post social media messages, as can the social media features now found in many marketing automation systems. What distinguishes Spredfast is that marketers can schedule their posts through the life of a social media campaign, rather than simply replying or initiating conversations on demand. Spredfast supports on-demand posting too.
Another key feature is that Spredfast supports multiple “voices” of actual or constructed individuals, each having accounts in multiple channels (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.). The campaign calendar lays out of scheduled events by all voices over time, and is color-coded to show whether a particular event has already been delivered, is ready to go, or still needs approved content. This looks strikingly similar to the media plan for a flight of broadcast ads and serves very much the same purpose.
Users can drill into an event to add the content itself including bit.ly links that allow the system to track the click-through. One particularly nice feature is that when users assign the same content to multiple events, the system will automatically create different bit.ly links for each event. This makes it easy to track results for each event independently.
Spredfast's developers also recognized that large companies will have many different people working on different aspects of a project. Users can be assigned rights to specific campaigns, voices and events, with precise control over who can view, edit and approve content. Pricing is based on the number of campaigns, not users, so large organizations can incorporate as many people as needed.
As the bit.ly tags suggest, Spredfast also pays substantial attention to measurement. It provides three major summary metrics:
- activity (how much content the system is publishing),
- reach (the number of views, friends, followers, subscribers, etc.), and
- engagement (numbers of comments, retweets, likes, etc.).
Top-level reports summarize these by campaign and let users drill down to see detailed statistics by channel and voice and, ultimately, the actual content such as comments or reviews.
The system archives content and responses so they remain available even after they are dropped from the social media platforms that originally carried them. In addition to cumulative statistics, Spredfast displays daily statistics for the past seven days, giving a sense of trends.
Perhaps wisely, Spredfast's developers drew the line at reporting the raw numbers for its metrics. Users who want more elaborate scoring, perhaps applying different weights to different kinds of activities, can export the raw data and calculate outside the system. Similarly, Spredfast makes no attempt at relating social media programs to business results such as leads or revenue.
The system does provide what Cho called a “minimalist” listening platform, which can automatically search across public listening tools (Google, Google Blog Search, Social Mention, Twitter, Boardreader, Bing) for key words, and present any results so users can review and republish or reply to them. It also provides an RSS reader for feeds selected by the user, as well as a site indexer that can show the frequency of different terms in user-specified blogs as a word cloud. This helps users tailor their posts to encourage coverage.
Spredfast began its public beta in mid-November. The system is a vendor-hosted service. It is available in a free version with limited functionality; a $50 per month standard version with one campaign, no collaboration and no metrics after the first month; and $250 per month enterprise version supporting all features for up to three campaigns.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
My List of Demand Generation Vendors and Their Target Customers
[Note: I update this post periodically to keep the information reasonably current.]
Summary: Demand generation features often sound similar, but the different vendors do aim at different types of clients. If you're looking for a system, try to find a vendor who will match your company.
One of the audience members at the B2B Marketing University in Boston asked about demand generation systems for small businesses, and how to distinguish among the vendors in general. My brief answer was that the biggest difference was less functionality than the target markets the different vendors pursue. This has more to do with the degree of personal selling (and after-sale service) than anything else. I also promised a blog post on the topic. Here it is.
(Incidentally, there's one more B2BU session left this year, in Seattle on December 1. I'll be flying cross country to attend, so you could too.)
The table below presents a reasonably comprehensive list of demand generation (a.k.a. B2b marketing automation) vendors, with links to my reviews where I've written one. The vendors are divided into four categories based on my understanding of their target customers. I'm sure some of the vendors will tell me they're in the wrong place -- and since this ranking is based on their own perception of their target markets, I'll make adjustments when they do. (Clever of me to write this while they're all distracted by DreamForce, don't you think?)
- Micro Business: these products are aimed at companies where the owner does their own marketing, or perhaps one employee who does marketing along with other functions. The systems have very low starting prices tailored to low volumes. Most offer a CRM option (typically priced at $10 to $20 per seat per month) for companies who don't want to pay for Salesforce.com. The feature/function lists of these products are often comparable to systems aimed at larger companies, although there are certainly differences when you look at the details. (Note: I've put NurtureHQ into this category based on their price and what I can tell from the Web site. I haven't had a chance to review it personally.)
- Small Business: these products are sold to small businesses, often with just one or two people in the marketing department. Vendors keep costs to a minimum by selling largely online or over the phone, and through self-service approaches such as free trials and pay-by-month arrangements without contracts. Prices are a little lower than products in the Small/Mid Size category, but the difference isn't usually that large. Similarly, functionality is generally comparable although they may be less sophisticated at some tasks such as dynamic content generation (automatically altering an email or Web page based on lead characteristics) and branching campaign flows.
- Small/Mid Size: these firms sell to small and mid-size companies, and occasionally to divisions of the giants. Every vendor cites a different revenue range for its "sweet spot" but $50 million to $500 million might be typical. Starting prices are all over the map; I've assigned vendors to this category based on a combination of pricing, features and my personal sense of their business. Functionally, these are pretty sophisticated products, although they don't usually meet all the needs of very large marketing organizations, such as fine-grained security and advanced content management. (See the Vendor Usability Study on the Raab Guide site for a discussion of these features.)
- Mid/Large: these vendors have the features needed to serve large companies and large marketing departments. They also tend to have a broader range of supplemental capabilities, such as support for telephone call centers. Pricing tends to be higher and more complicated, allowing buyers to pay for specific components as needed. These vendors have geared their sales process to selling to large firms, with the in-person demonstrations, technical reviews, formal proposals and contract negotiations that implies. Of course, these companies will sell to mid-size firms as well.
Final Thoughts: I know it's a cliche, but you really do need to select a vendor that matches your own company needs. Considerations extend beyond feature checklists to include sales and support models, pricing structures, training requirements, consulting partners, and usability. This list should aim you at the right neighborhood to begin your search -- but don't be afraid to look elsewhere if you find a product that seems appropriate.
* also in Raab Guide
Summary: Demand generation features often sound similar, but the different vendors do aim at different types of clients. If you're looking for a system, try to find a vendor who will match your company.
One of the audience members at the B2B Marketing University in Boston asked about demand generation systems for small businesses, and how to distinguish among the vendors in general. My brief answer was that the biggest difference was less functionality than the target markets the different vendors pursue. This has more to do with the degree of personal selling (and after-sale service) than anything else. I also promised a blog post on the topic. Here it is.
(Incidentally, there's one more B2BU session left this year, in Seattle on December 1. I'll be flying cross country to attend, so you could too.)
The table below presents a reasonably comprehensive list of demand generation (a.k.a. B2b marketing automation) vendors, with links to my reviews where I've written one. The vendors are divided into four categories based on my understanding of their target customers. I'm sure some of the vendors will tell me they're in the wrong place -- and since this ranking is based on their own perception of their target markets, I'll make adjustments when they do. (Clever of me to write this while they're all distracted by DreamForce, don't you think?)
- Micro Business: these products are aimed at companies where the owner does their own marketing, or perhaps one employee who does marketing along with other functions. The systems have very low starting prices tailored to low volumes. Most offer a CRM option (typically priced at $10 to $20 per seat per month) for companies who don't want to pay for Salesforce.com. The feature/function lists of these products are often comparable to systems aimed at larger companies, although there are certainly differences when you look at the details. (Note: I've put NurtureHQ into this category based on their price and what I can tell from the Web site. I haven't had a chance to review it personally.)
- Small Business: these products are sold to small businesses, often with just one or two people in the marketing department. Vendors keep costs to a minimum by selling largely online or over the phone, and through self-service approaches such as free trials and pay-by-month arrangements without contracts. Prices are a little lower than products in the Small/Mid Size category, but the difference isn't usually that large. Similarly, functionality is generally comparable although they may be less sophisticated at some tasks such as dynamic content generation (automatically altering an email or Web page based on lead characteristics) and branching campaign flows.
- Small/Mid Size: these firms sell to small and mid-size companies, and occasionally to divisions of the giants. Every vendor cites a different revenue range for its "sweet spot" but $50 million to $500 million might be typical. Starting prices are all over the map; I've assigned vendors to this category based on a combination of pricing, features and my personal sense of their business. Functionally, these are pretty sophisticated products, although they don't usually meet all the needs of very large marketing organizations, such as fine-grained security and advanced content management. (See the Vendor Usability Study on the Raab Guide site for a discussion of these features.)
- Mid/Large: these vendors have the features needed to serve large companies and large marketing departments. They also tend to have a broader range of supplemental capabilities, such as support for telephone call centers. Pricing tends to be higher and more complicated, allowing buyers to pay for specific components as needed. These vendors have geared their sales process to selling to large firms, with the in-person demonstrations, technical reviews, formal proposals and contract negotiations that implies. Of course, these companies will sell to mid-size firms as well.
Final Thoughts: I know it's a cliche, but you really do need to select a vendor that matches your own company needs. Considerations extend beyond feature checklists to include sales and support models, pricing structures, training requirements, consulting partners, and usability. This list should aim you at the right neighborhood to begin your search -- but don't be afraid to look elsewhere if you find a product that seems appropriate.
| vendor | link to my review | CRM option available | published price list | starting price |
Micro Business | ||||
| Infusionsoft* | blog | yes | yes | $199/month for 10,000 names, 25,000 emails |
| MakesBridge* | blog | yes | yes | $150 / month for 50,000 names, 5,000 emails, |
| NurtureHQ | yes | $295 / month for 5,000 names | ||
| OfficeAutoPilot* | blog | yes | $597 / month for 50,000 names, 100,000 emails | |
Small Business | ||||
| ActiveConversion | blog | $500 / month for 10,000 visitors (email not included) | ||
| Act-On Software | blog | yes | $500 / month for 5,000 active names | |
| Alsamarketing | blog | $750 / month for 10,000 names and 25,000 emails | ||
| Beanstalk Data | blog | yes | $1,500/month | |
| Genoo | blog | yes | $599 / month for 10 users, unlimited leads, up to 50,000 emails / month - other versions from $199 / month | |
| HubSpot* | blog | yes | $1,000/month for 10,000 names - other versions from $200/month | |
| LoopFuse | blog | yes | $350 / month for 10,000 names, unlimited email and pageviews - free version up to 2,500 names, 5,000 email / month | |
| Net-Results* | blog | $350 - $400 / month for 30,000 page views, 10,000 emails, 2 hours of support | ||
| Pardot* | blog | yes | $1,000 / month for 30,000 emails | |
| SalesFusion* | blog | yes | $1,500 / month for 25,000 names, 125,000 emails | |
| True Influence | blog | yes | $1,500 for 10,000 names | |
Small/Mid-Size | ||||
| eTrigue | blog | $1,000 / month for 10,000 names (unlimited email, page views, users) | ||
| Genius.com* | blog | $1,100 / month - free version up to 3,000 names, 10,000 emails / month | ||
| LeadFormix (was LeadForce1)* | blog | limited | $500 / month | |
| Lead Genesys | yes | $995 / month for 10,000 names, 20,000 emails, 25,000 page views | ||
| LeadLife | blog | $500 / month for 1,500 emails; $1,395 / month for 25,000 emails | ||
| Manticore Technology* | blog | $2,000 / month up for 10,000 names | ||
| Marketo* | blog | yes | $1,500 / month up to 10,000 names (lite); $2,400 / month up to 25,000 names (full) | |
| Marqui | blog | $1,000 / month | ||
| Right On Interactive* | blog | $1,700 / month | ||
| Treehouse Interactive* | blog | yes | $599 / month for 5,000 contacts | |
Mid/Large | ||||
| Aprimo Marketing Studio* | blog | $4,000 per month for the base version with up to 10 users and 250,000 emails | ||
| Eloqua* | blog | yes | typically starts above $2,500/ month | |
| Marketbright (out of business) | blog | $1,600 / month | ||
| Oracle CRM On Demand Marketing* | blog | $2,000 - $4,000 per month | ||
| Neolane* | blog | $5,000 / month | ||
| Silverpop Engage8* | blog | (not available) |
* also in Raab Guide
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Aberdeen Predicts Web Content Systems Will Add Marketing Automation: I Agree, But...
Summary: a new Aberdeen Group report argues that Web content management systems should add customer management features and will ultimately compete with traditional marketing automation products. I agree with one reservation: I doubt large companies will use a single system to manage all customer touchpoints.
I’ve been convinced for some time that Web content management systems (CMS) will become important platforms for marketing automation. The logic is that Web sites are increasingly the primary method of interaction between a company and its customers, and that Web analytics, testing and personalized treatments are better executed within the content management system rather than by external products. See my July 14 post on CMS vendor SiteCore for a more detailed explanation, and the admission that I borrowed much of this thinking from SiteCore VP Marketing Darren Guarnaccia.
(Opposing viewpoint: marketing automation vendors tell me they don’t see CMS systems as competitors, largely because the systems are sold to IT rather than marketing departments. But this could change.)
Aberdeen Group’s report Next Generation Web Content Management makes a convincing case for a similar position. In fact, the study contains any number of pithy summaries of what I see as the fundamental trends driving the industry:
“Supporting prospects throughout the buying cycle requires a dialogue between a company and the prospect, and this dialogue should be highly relevant, timely and personalized to maximize marketing effectiveness and grow top-line revenue.”
“The new paradigm in customer engagement assumes consumers have control over the buying process, not marketers. Marketers now have to embrace the customer centric shift and deliver relevant, timely content when and where the buyer wants to receive it. This demands multi-channel engagement and automated personalized content delivery.”
“By incorporating some of the most valuable components of today’s marketing technologies (like lead scoring, dynamic content, analytics, profiling, and integration), the next generation of WCM [Web content management] tools have the potential to deliver highly personalized online experiences with little or no effort from marketers.”
Exactly.
Author Ian Michiels has been evangelizing integrated marketing platforms for the past year or longer. One section of the paper specifically describes the “battle for the integrated platform.” Michiels writes:
“Niche technology providers are increasingly starting to realize consolidation and integration will be inevitable for marketing technologies. The question is: Which technology will emerge as foundation for integrated capabilities?”
He then offers email marketing, web analytics, web content management and customer relationship management as contenders.
I agree with one major reservation. If I read Michiels correctly, he believes that one integrated system will execute the interactions across all channels. Certainly this is the fond hope of the marketing automation vendors, but I don’t believe that large companies will use the same system for all touchpoints. There are just too many channels, and new options appear too quickly, for any one vendor to satisfy everyone in a large enterprise. It’s more likely that companies will employ multiple touchpoint systems and use a central marketing platform to coordinate them.
More specifically, I see the integrated marketing platform as an underlying technology with three main roles:
- gather data from multiple sources, including touchpoint systems. This will happen in both batch and real time.
- apply analytics and decision rules to select treatments for each customer.
- push the treatment decisions back to the touchpoints for execution.
Products to do this already exist. Major contenders include Chordiant, thinkAnalytics and Infor’s CRM Interaction Advisor.
How important is the distinction having one system execute all interactions and having one system coordinate interactions that are executed by separate systems? Michiels would probably argue it’s a big difference (and I'm wrong) because he sees the difficulty of integrating multiple systems as a major barrier to coordinated treatments, and therefore a primary reason companies will be forced to adopt a single system.
But I feel the main barriers to cross-channel coordination are organizational, not technical. In my view, getting a company to replace all its existing touchpoints with a single central system faces greater organizational and financial barriers than getting it to coordinate its existing separate systems.
Let’s assume I’m right that most companies will deploy a central decision engine with multiple touchpoint systems. Doesn't this contradict my prediction that touchpoints like Web content management and CRM will expand their marketing automation functions, threatening the current marketing automation vendors?
I don’t think so. Even though I expect touchpoint systems to ultimately become delivery channels for central decisions, I doubt the touchpoint vendors will accept this role without a fight. Rather, they will expand their ability to manage interactions, thereby positioning themselves to provide the central decisioning platform itself.
Indeed, there’s a good case for having one touchpoint system make decisions for itself and other touchpoints. This avoids integration hassles between the central decision platform and one execution system, while still allowing coordination across all interactions. The logical candidate for this joint role is a company’s primary touchpoint system, which these days is probably either the Web site or CRM. Hence my prediction.
In fact, if I had to bet, I’d wager that the hybrid model will be the most successful. Financially and organizationally, it's easier to expand a major execution system than to integrate a separate decision engine. Even though an independent decision system may be technically more elegant, the organizational and financial issues are likely to be decisive.
At this point, the “hybrid model” and “one big system” may be sounding pretty similar. After all, both involve central decisions made within a major touchpoint system. But there’s a fundamental difference: “one big system” is designed to avoid integration issues by doing everything internally, while the “hybrid model” uses a primary system designed with external integration in mind. These imply very different technical approaches. Vendors building these systems, and companies looking to buy them, need to choose which philosophy they favor and act accordingly.
I’ve been convinced for some time that Web content management systems (CMS) will become important platforms for marketing automation. The logic is that Web sites are increasingly the primary method of interaction between a company and its customers, and that Web analytics, testing and personalized treatments are better executed within the content management system rather than by external products. See my July 14 post on CMS vendor SiteCore for a more detailed explanation, and the admission that I borrowed much of this thinking from SiteCore VP Marketing Darren Guarnaccia.
(Opposing viewpoint: marketing automation vendors tell me they don’t see CMS systems as competitors, largely because the systems are sold to IT rather than marketing departments. But this could change.)
Aberdeen Group’s report Next Generation Web Content Management makes a convincing case for a similar position. In fact, the study contains any number of pithy summaries of what I see as the fundamental trends driving the industry:
“Supporting prospects throughout the buying cycle requires a dialogue between a company and the prospect, and this dialogue should be highly relevant, timely and personalized to maximize marketing effectiveness and grow top-line revenue.”
“The new paradigm in customer engagement assumes consumers have control over the buying process, not marketers. Marketers now have to embrace the customer centric shift and deliver relevant, timely content when and where the buyer wants to receive it. This demands multi-channel engagement and automated personalized content delivery.”
“By incorporating some of the most valuable components of today’s marketing technologies (like lead scoring, dynamic content, analytics, profiling, and integration), the next generation of WCM [Web content management] tools have the potential to deliver highly personalized online experiences with little or no effort from marketers.”
Exactly.
Author Ian Michiels has been evangelizing integrated marketing platforms for the past year or longer. One section of the paper specifically describes the “battle for the integrated platform.” Michiels writes:
“Niche technology providers are increasingly starting to realize consolidation and integration will be inevitable for marketing technologies. The question is: Which technology will emerge as foundation for integrated capabilities?”
He then offers email marketing, web analytics, web content management and customer relationship management as contenders.
I agree with one major reservation. If I read Michiels correctly, he believes that one integrated system will execute the interactions across all channels. Certainly this is the fond hope of the marketing automation vendors, but I don’t believe that large companies will use the same system for all touchpoints. There are just too many channels, and new options appear too quickly, for any one vendor to satisfy everyone in a large enterprise. It’s more likely that companies will employ multiple touchpoint systems and use a central marketing platform to coordinate them.
More specifically, I see the integrated marketing platform as an underlying technology with three main roles:
- gather data from multiple sources, including touchpoint systems. This will happen in both batch and real time.
- apply analytics and decision rules to select treatments for each customer.
- push the treatment decisions back to the touchpoints for execution.
Products to do this already exist. Major contenders include Chordiant, thinkAnalytics and Infor’s CRM Interaction Advisor.
How important is the distinction having one system execute all interactions and having one system coordinate interactions that are executed by separate systems? Michiels would probably argue it’s a big difference (and I'm wrong) because he sees the difficulty of integrating multiple systems as a major barrier to coordinated treatments, and therefore a primary reason companies will be forced to adopt a single system.
But I feel the main barriers to cross-channel coordination are organizational, not technical. In my view, getting a company to replace all its existing touchpoints with a single central system faces greater organizational and financial barriers than getting it to coordinate its existing separate systems.
Let’s assume I’m right that most companies will deploy a central decision engine with multiple touchpoint systems. Doesn't this contradict my prediction that touchpoints like Web content management and CRM will expand their marketing automation functions, threatening the current marketing automation vendors?
I don’t think so. Even though I expect touchpoint systems to ultimately become delivery channels for central decisions, I doubt the touchpoint vendors will accept this role without a fight. Rather, they will expand their ability to manage interactions, thereby positioning themselves to provide the central decisioning platform itself.
Indeed, there’s a good case for having one touchpoint system make decisions for itself and other touchpoints. This avoids integration hassles between the central decision platform and one execution system, while still allowing coordination across all interactions. The logical candidate for this joint role is a company’s primary touchpoint system, which these days is probably either the Web site or CRM. Hence my prediction.
In fact, if I had to bet, I’d wager that the hybrid model will be the most successful. Financially and organizationally, it's easier to expand a major execution system than to integrate a separate decision engine. Even though an independent decision system may be technically more elegant, the organizational and financial issues are likely to be decisive.
At this point, the “hybrid model” and “one big system” may be sounding pretty similar. After all, both involve central decisions made within a major touchpoint system. But there’s a fundamental difference: “one big system” is designed to avoid integration issues by doing everything internally, while the “hybrid model” uses a primary system designed with external integration in mind. These imply very different technical approaches. Vendors building these systems, and companies looking to buy them, need to choose which philosophy they favor and act accordingly.
Friday, November 06, 2009
B2B Marketing University Part 2: Marketing Content Has to Work Harder
Summary: As marketers add more content to meet needs throughout the purchase cycle, they must work harder to ensure prospects actually read it.
One of the emergent themes at Tuesday’s session of the B2B Marketing University was the growing importance of marketing “content”. The general logic was that marketers increasingly interact with prospects throughout different stages of the sales cycle, and each stage needs different materials. The materials also need to be tailored to different types of buyers – or “personas” if you want to get fancy – so you need even more variety.
Of course, buying stages and buyer types have always existed. But much of the information now delivered through Web interactions was previously delivered in person by salespeople, who could just talk or write an email. Since Web interactions require formally prepared “content”, the need for content has grown.
There’s no arguing with that, and as someone who is paid to write the occasional white paper, I'm glad to hear it. But, still, as I listened to people talking about needing to build more and more content, this little voice in my head kept reminding me of another grand theme of the conference, which is the increasing range of information that prospects already have available. Odd, my little voice said: We’re being told to generate more content even though buyers have less time to read it.
This isn’t really a contradiction. The greater competition for buyers’ attention actually means we have to build content they find more useful than anyone else’s. Creating a wide variety of items does this by letting us offer buyers something that precisely matches their needs of the moment.
The little voice went away after that. (It helped that the bar had opened.) But this perspective also offers some additional guidance. Recognizing that buyers are extremely time-constrained, marketers should:
- create small, bite-sized pieces of content rather than huge chunks of it. (Yes, this implies fewer, shorter white papers. **sigh** But there are still situations where old-style, long white papers are appropriate.) The good news here is this should help to keep content creation costs down.
- put additional energy into mechanisms that make it easier for prospects to find the content they want. This means bulking up on-site search engines and carefully monitoring the queries people submit. It also means better navigation tools to expose what’s available so people can find it quickly. As a side benefit, letting people specify exactly what they want to know also lets you store that information and use it to better target your future treatments.
- ruthlessly evaluate the utilization of the content we do provide, to ensure we don’t create more than necessary and to identify topics that may need additional coverage.
- incorporate feedback mechanisms so that prospects can rate the content we’ve sent them, again to foster continuous improvement.
- make the content easily available to salespeople so they can use it themselves. This saves them the time spent crafting emails that convey pretty much the same information.
In sum, as marketers increase their investment in content, they also need to manage that investment more carefully. This may mean shifting funds from content creation to content distribution and evaluation. Bad news for marketing creators, perhaps, but good news for marketing performance.
One of the emergent themes at Tuesday’s session of the B2B Marketing University was the growing importance of marketing “content”. The general logic was that marketers increasingly interact with prospects throughout different stages of the sales cycle, and each stage needs different materials. The materials also need to be tailored to different types of buyers – or “personas” if you want to get fancy – so you need even more variety.
Of course, buying stages and buyer types have always existed. But much of the information now delivered through Web interactions was previously delivered in person by salespeople, who could just talk or write an email. Since Web interactions require formally prepared “content”, the need for content has grown.
There’s no arguing with that, and as someone who is paid to write the occasional white paper, I'm glad to hear it. But, still, as I listened to people talking about needing to build more and more content, this little voice in my head kept reminding me of another grand theme of the conference, which is the increasing range of information that prospects already have available. Odd, my little voice said: We’re being told to generate more content even though buyers have less time to read it.
This isn’t really a contradiction. The greater competition for buyers’ attention actually means we have to build content they find more useful than anyone else’s. Creating a wide variety of items does this by letting us offer buyers something that precisely matches their needs of the moment.
The little voice went away after that. (It helped that the bar had opened.) But this perspective also offers some additional guidance. Recognizing that buyers are extremely time-constrained, marketers should:
- create small, bite-sized pieces of content rather than huge chunks of it. (Yes, this implies fewer, shorter white papers. **sigh** But there are still situations where old-style, long white papers are appropriate.) The good news here is this should help to keep content creation costs down.
- put additional energy into mechanisms that make it easier for prospects to find the content they want. This means bulking up on-site search engines and carefully monitoring the queries people submit. It also means better navigation tools to expose what’s available so people can find it quickly. As a side benefit, letting people specify exactly what they want to know also lets you store that information and use it to better target your future treatments.
- ruthlessly evaluate the utilization of the content we do provide, to ensure we don’t create more than necessary and to identify topics that may need additional coverage.
- incorporate feedback mechanisms so that prospects can rate the content we’ve sent them, again to foster continuous improvement.
- make the content easily available to salespeople so they can use it themselves. This saves them the time spent crafting emails that convey pretty much the same information.
In sum, as marketers increase their investment in content, they also need to manage that investment more carefully. This may mean shifting funds from content creation to content distribution and evaluation. Bad news for marketing creators, perhaps, but good news for marketing performance.
Thursday, November 05, 2009
B2B Marketing University: For Now, Marketing Automation and CRM Are Still Separate
Summary: Marketing automation and CRM systems may eventually converge, but for now marketers need help explaining why they need a system of their own.
I hugely enjoyed yesterday’s Boston session of the Silverpop-sponsored B2B Marketing University. (You can catch another session in Atlanta next week and in Seattle on December 1.) I won’t try to recap four hours of insights from Adam Needles from Silverpop, Carlos Hidalgo of Annuitas Group and Joe Moloney of Conselltants (no Web site, it seems), as well as Yours Truly. But there were a couple of topics that caught my fancy:
1. People still don’t understand the difference between marketing automation vs. CRM.
I really thought the distinction was pretty clear by now, but the question came up more than once. My own answer boiled down to a perhaps-not-convincing “trust me, they’re really different”, although I’ve addressed the question in depth in the resources section of the Raab Guide Web site.
Joe Moloney gave a more detailed answer about limits in Salesforce.com in particular, including lack of CAN-SPAM compliance and limits on mass emails. Someone (I think it was end-of-day panelist Meg Heuer of Sirius Decisions) also pointed out that CRM data is often very dirty, which isn't a problem for salespeople working with one record at a time, but making it hard to use for marketing.
The immediate take-away here is that the industry still needs to educate prospective buyers on why marketers need a separate system. Vendors take note.
2. Will Marketing automation and CRM remain separate?
The discussion also segued into whether marketing automation and CRM will merge in the long run. I still suspect they will, driven by the need for ever-closer cooperation between marketing and sales teams in managing prospect relationships. But the other presenters disagreed, largely arguing that the separate groups have distinct needs. (See Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf? Is Salesforce.com a threat to vendors of marketing automation solutions? by Market2Lead CMO Kevin Joyce for a good statement of the separatist position.)
Part of the reason I expect convergence to happen is that it’s already taking place. (The past is so much easier to predict than the future.) The movement is coming mostly from the marketing automation side, presumably because there is more money to gain by moving into sales from marketing systems than vice versa:
- marketing automation systems for small businesses (Infusionsoft, Office Autopilot, Net-Results, etc.) typically include a CRM option for clients who don’t want to pay for a separate Salesforce.com or other license.
- firms aimed at larger installations (Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Genius.com, Active Conversion) are providing widgets that give sales people direct access to marketing automation information.
3. Technology may impede Software-as-a-Service sales automation vendors from adding marketing automation.
As Joe Moloney was listing the limits that Salesforce.com places on mass access to client data, I recalled that these are in place fundamentally to avoid large analytical queries that could slow down response for all other users of the shared systems. This isn’t an inherent problem with Software-as-a-Service itself: remember, the B2B marketing automation vendors themselves all operate on a SaaS model, and there is a growing number of SaaS business intelligence systems too.
But even though modern database technology allows one system to handle both CRM transactions and analytical marketing queries, this does take an appropriate design. I strongly suspect that existing SaaS CRM vendors like Salesforce.com would need to fundamentally rearchitect their systems to support serious marketing automation processing, especially for clients with millions of contact records. This may impede them from adding marketing automation capabilities, although newer SaaS CRM systems could emerge that are designed from the start to do both.
From this perspective, another reason combined marketing automation/CRM systems are first being offered to small companies may be that it’s easier to provide good performance for both applications when volumes are small.
Yesterday also triggered another set of thoughts regarding the importance of marketing content. But since one of these was the need to keep materials short, I’ll put them into a separate post.
I hugely enjoyed yesterday’s Boston session of the Silverpop-sponsored B2B Marketing University. (You can catch another session in Atlanta next week and in Seattle on December 1.) I won’t try to recap four hours of insights from Adam Needles from Silverpop, Carlos Hidalgo of Annuitas Group and Joe Moloney of Conselltants (no Web site, it seems), as well as Yours Truly. But there were a couple of topics that caught my fancy:
1. People still don’t understand the difference between marketing automation vs. CRM.
I really thought the distinction was pretty clear by now, but the question came up more than once. My own answer boiled down to a perhaps-not-convincing “trust me, they’re really different”, although I’ve addressed the question in depth in the resources section of the Raab Guide Web site.
Joe Moloney gave a more detailed answer about limits in Salesforce.com in particular, including lack of CAN-SPAM compliance and limits on mass emails. Someone (I think it was end-of-day panelist Meg Heuer of Sirius Decisions) also pointed out that CRM data is often very dirty, which isn't a problem for salespeople working with one record at a time, but making it hard to use for marketing.
The immediate take-away here is that the industry still needs to educate prospective buyers on why marketers need a separate system. Vendors take note.
2. Will Marketing automation and CRM remain separate?
The discussion also segued into whether marketing automation and CRM will merge in the long run. I still suspect they will, driven by the need for ever-closer cooperation between marketing and sales teams in managing prospect relationships. But the other presenters disagreed, largely arguing that the separate groups have distinct needs. (See Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf? Is Salesforce.com a threat to vendors of marketing automation solutions? by Market2Lead CMO Kevin Joyce for a good statement of the separatist position.)
Part of the reason I expect convergence to happen is that it’s already taking place. (The past is so much easier to predict than the future.) The movement is coming mostly from the marketing automation side, presumably because there is more money to gain by moving into sales from marketing systems than vice versa:
- marketing automation systems for small businesses (Infusionsoft, Office Autopilot, Net-Results, etc.) typically include a CRM option for clients who don’t want to pay for a separate Salesforce.com or other license.
- firms aimed at larger installations (Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Genius.com, Active Conversion) are providing widgets that give sales people direct access to marketing automation information.
3. Technology may impede Software-as-a-Service sales automation vendors from adding marketing automation.
As Joe Moloney was listing the limits that Salesforce.com places on mass access to client data, I recalled that these are in place fundamentally to avoid large analytical queries that could slow down response for all other users of the shared systems. This isn’t an inherent problem with Software-as-a-Service itself: remember, the B2B marketing automation vendors themselves all operate on a SaaS model, and there is a growing number of SaaS business intelligence systems too.
But even though modern database technology allows one system to handle both CRM transactions and analytical marketing queries, this does take an appropriate design. I strongly suspect that existing SaaS CRM vendors like Salesforce.com would need to fundamentally rearchitect their systems to support serious marketing automation processing, especially for clients with millions of contact records. This may impede them from adding marketing automation capabilities, although newer SaaS CRM systems could emerge that are designed from the start to do both.
From this perspective, another reason combined marketing automation/CRM systems are first being offered to small companies may be that it’s easier to provide good performance for both applications when volumes are small.
Yesterday also triggered another set of thoughts regarding the importance of marketing content. But since one of these was the need to keep materials short, I’ll put them into a separate post.
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