Marketing Software & Lead Management Systems Forum
Effective marketing campaigns are often the first step in the customer acquisition process. However, to often marketing gets short rift from the executive team, marketers are under-resourced and marketing campaigns are not systemic, automated, measured or learned from. This marketing forum seeks to share market research, expert insight and peer advice to support marketers to better select and deploy marketing and CRM software systems, improve campaign performance, increase marketing budget ROI and demonstrate marketings strategic role in the customer acquisition, engagement and renewal process.
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Eloqua is the category-defining marketing automation leader. However, that leadership is more at risk now than at any time in the last decade. The competitive landscape has ballooned and become fragmented. Venture-backed start-ups spring up with near predictability. Nonetheless, the release of Eloqua 10 has reconfirmed why Eloqua continues to lead the marketing automation software industry.
Marketo is an aggressive up and comer in the lead management and marketing automation software industry. This hyper growth company is a thought leader, practices what it preaches, delivers impressive marketing software and backs it up with outstanding customer support. Marketo clearly aspires the top leadership position and has become the marketing software vendor to catch.
In our Pardot review, we quickly learned there are more differences than similarities for many key marketing software evaluation criteria—the company is laser focused on its SMB target market, it achieves very high growth within the limitations of staying cash flow positive, its profitable, and without outside capital it marches to its own tune and not a third party exit plan or liquidation event.
HubSpot helps bridge the gap between a smaller company's marketing skills and its ability to gain market visibility. When both skills and visibility exist, the company gains market share. However, if one or the other is absent, the company falters. HubSpot focuses on building online market visibility for SMBs, particularly those that lack technical or digital marketing savvy.
Kwanzoo aims to increase the volume of top of funnel leads by engaging online prospects with interactive ad units—which include polls, surveys, shares, opt-ins and banners—to collectively increase online lead conversions over a variety of channels. These techniques offer increased synergy when integrated with marketing automation software systems.
The How To Guide For Marketing Automation Software Selection
This How To Guide provides a sample illustration, references repeatable best practices and delivers on the specific steps and actions necessary to manage your software selection project, define your marketing software requirements, create a useful requirements document - and make the most informed purchase decision when selecting a lead management system or marketing automation software solution.
While traditional marketing management systems, often included with Customer Relationship Management systems, perform campaign setup, profiling and integration with sales force automation (SFA), a new breed of marketing automation or lead management systems have stepped up with increased lead acquisition capabilities, including automation to capture prospect information using form submissions, assess prospects' online behaviors to determine where they are in the sales process, nurture prospects with highly relevant messaging until they are ready to buy, score the prospects based on their digital behaviors, automatically forward sales ready leads to the sales force once a threshold score is achieved and provide closed loop analysis to continually improve the process.
Top marketing issues include generating more high quality leads (69%), help reduce lengthening sales cycles (39%), education buyers on the value of products (37%), and market to a growing number of stakeholders in the buying process (33%).
Source: MarketingSherpa, B2B Survey 2010
IDC research shows that 62% of B2B vendors need more leads in order to generate the same amount of sales.
Source: IDC 2010
The call from the sales force is not "Give us more leads" - it's "Give us better leads."
Source: MarketingSherpa, B2B Survey 2010
Revenue Disruption—Revenue Performance Management and the Cure for Revenue Dysfunction
Phil Fernandez, CEO of Marketo, squarely explains how a historical breakdown in sales and marketing alignment along with a disruptive change in the way buyers buy has created a revenue dysfunction that stifles revenue growth. In his new book, Revenue Disruption, he also shows how to cure this ill using new thinking and Revenue Performance Management.
Leveraging culture as a predecessor and highly synergistic compliment to business strategy, implementing a go to market business model based on continuous customer success and championing the best practices of the most successful customers for the benefit of all customers are just a few of the actions of industry leader Eloqua, and its tenured CEO, Joe Payne.
The Marketing Automation Institute (MAI) is a community for marketing automation end users who want to maximize the ROI from their marketing automation investment. Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of The Annuitas Group and Executive Director for the newly formed MAI explains the vision, purpose and benefits behind this focused community.
What would an Eloqua IPO mean for the marketing automation software industry, or for Eloqua itself, for that matter? In addition to the media buzz, Eloqua has made its intentions known to potential buyers, customers, and competitors. The announcement also promotes its product, staves off competition from chief competitor Marketo, and indirectly advertises its availability to be acquired.
The most successful marketers are the ones constantly testing the responses to their marketing campaigns. Testing results in incremental improvements over sustained periods of time which then drive better campaigns with tighter focus and improved response rates. Yet most companies don't test their marketing campaigns.
In a world of increased competition, shrinking customer bases and eroding financial margins, savvy marketers are leveraging new marketing automation software to automate lead development processes such as lead acquisition, nurture campaign management, lead scoring, customer segmentation, customer data integration (CDI) and marketing analysis.
CRM solutions have found a new strength for forward thinking marketers. Instead of just recording and making sense of transactional data, CRM solutions can be used to create, synthesize, correlate and display the data in visual presentations that identify patterns, relationships and new sale opportunities. The effect is a more direct integration between marketing strategy and system automation.
The idea of a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) has been growing slowly but steadily over the past decade. Only a handful had the role and title of CCO five years ago, including forward-thinking Monster.com, Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems. Although they don’t all have the same responsibilities, they tend to focus on customer acquisitions, retention, service and relationships..
By applying messages over a prescribed period of time in calculated intervals and in a progressive sequence, drip marketing campaigns help build customer awareness for your company and products and systemically move the customer into an active sales cycle when they are ready to buy. Drip campaigns also provide the benefits of increased response rates and less executional effort.
Marketing automation software that is integrated with CRM software eliminates many time-consuming yet vital tasks, automates both atypical and commonly recurring business processes, advances sales prospects to become sales ready leads, provides analytics to measure benefits and results, and ensures closed-loop visibility around acquiring new customers.
Just when marketing automation software is becoming an accepted add-on to CRM systems, technology vendors are upping the ante, providing growing capabilities as a service. This newest cloud-based category of Marketing as a Service (MaaS) is an extension of the marketing automation software provided by technology vendors like Eloqua, Aprimo, Marketo, Silverpop and Unica.
According to Forrester Research, marketing capabilities have been largely under served from CRM software providers, thereby giving a new breed of marketing automation vendors a sizable market void to satisfy. These new marketing systems automate everything from lead acquisition to landing page creation to sophisticated nurture campaigns with automated scoring and lead distribution.
Using your CRM software 360 degree view of the customer relationship you can aim targeted offers at highly specific segments of your customer base to build loyalty, deliver relevant messaging, grow customer share and retain more of your customers. Consider the following six step approach to use targeted offers to increase customer loyalty.
Even without CRM software or marketing analytics, there's a simple way to track the impact of your campaigns. Using a marketing control group, you can select and exclude a random sample from your campaign's marketing list, measure the targeted population activity and identify the difference, as well as the halo effect.
A well-run Customer Relationship Management system can help you avoid traditional marketing campaign challenges while improving campaign response rates, conversion rates and marketing budget ROI. For example, when marketers deliver targeted messages to segmented buyers, email reads increase by 200% or more.
As marketing becomes more focused, pervasive and customer centric, and as campaigns become more sophisticated in using more data points, leveraging clean, complete and accurate data becomes more critical to achieving results. To maximize campaign effectiveness and marketing budget ROI, consider the following six best practices to data management.
In marketing pursuits the demographic of one is the ideal destination. That is, each marketing message is precisely targeted to the needs, buy criteria or maximum receptivity of a single customer. The theory behind the demographic of one is that the more closely you tailor your campaign to your target, the more likely it is to produce the desired response.
Marketing lists are the lifeblood of conventional marketing. We use lists to outreach new prospects, keep track of customers, follow prospects through the nurture process and manage campaigns that contact our customers or prospects. However lists can also be tedious and time-consuming to manage. That's where CRM software can add value.
We all know its less costly and time consuming to sell existing customers over new customers, but many marketers fail to recognize its also less costly to sell to former prospects and customers than new accounts. Consider this 11 step process to mine your marketing database and add new life to old prospects.
I'm surprised by the number of marketing pros who suggest direct mail no longer has role in the marketing mix. It should not go unnoticed that retailers continue to show impressive returns with their paper based catalogues or marketers continue to show innovation - and impressive response rates - with odd sized and abnormal form factor mail distributions.
Marketing Briefs
IBM Enters the Marketing Automation Software Industry
IBMs acquisition of marketing software maker Unica Corp. for approximately $480 million clearly demonstrates an increasing enterprise software market for lead management and marketing automation systems. Unica's 500 employees will be folded into IBM's Software Solutions Group, and IBM will integrate Unica's technology with its own to help customers manage multiple-channel communications, customer experience management to promote customer loyalty and satisfaction, the company said in a press release. "IBM understands the demands on today's organizations to transform core business processes in functions such as marketing with intelligence and automation," Craig Hayman, general manager, IBM Industry Solutions, said in a statement. "Unica was a clear choice for IBM based on its power to automate a broad set of marketing capabilities and its established reputation for delivering customer success in marketing to organizations around the world."
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