The Continued Move Toward Marketing Automation

Recent acquisitions by Marin, MediaMath, and Kenshoo are a sign of more to come as competition heats up in the marketing automation sector.

Marin Software has taken a more serious move into social marketing with its acquisition last week of Social Moov, a social ads platform based in France. The value of the deal is estimated at around $20.75 million and immediately injects Marin with social marketing capabilities, allowing its customer base to tap into Facebook video ad units, Twitter Ads API support, and television synchronization capabilities, which all augment its current social offering. 

This is just another recent move toward a consolidation in social marketing automation, an industry currently valued at $3.65 billion according to a February 2015 eMarketer report. 

This move by Marin comes on the heels of MediaMath’s acquisition of social ad firm Upcast back in October of last year. 

According to MediaMath chief operating officer (COO) Ari Buchalter: "Our mission is to assemble a full end-to-end stack for our advertisers – one single platform that allows them to access media across channels. Facebook [and other social sites] represent a large and growing share of consumer attention, so this was a critical piece to add." 

MediaMath had originally considered building its own social ad buying technology in-house, however, opted instead to acquire, which allows them to quickly offer this new functionality to its client-base. 

Both Marin and MediaMath might have been originally influenced by Kenshoo’s acquisition of Adquant in September of last year. The Adquant acquisition gives Kenshoo, traditionally in search and predictive marketing technology, a stronger footprint into the social advertising market and an entry into solutions for mobile applications, customer lifetime value optimization and penetration into the gaming vertical, all of which Adquant is a leader at. 

Three significant acquisitions in the last six months is testament toward the uber competitive marketing automation market we are seeing right now. This market is estimated to reach $5.5 billion by 2019 according to eMarketer.

These acquisitions are really a perfect match. 

Marin, Kenshoo, and MediaMath are three large technology organizations with global scale. However, each is missing a key technology piece that can be filled by the new acquisitions. And for the newly acquired Social Moov, Upcast, and Adquant, being part of a bigger family immediately gives them access to a larger global network where they can look to take their existing clients to. 

Over time, these organizations want to build products that are integrated, allowing them to provide their clients with truly holistic digital marketing capabilities. A one-stop shop end-to-end technology platform that can essentially power your entire digital marketing program. And I believe for both brands and agencies looking to drive efficiencies themselves, this is a good thing. 

In a November 2014 survey from Salesforce.com covering around 5,000 marketers worldwide, 22 percent of them were reportedly using marketing automation, with 34 percent saying they plan to begin using in the next 12 months.  

This represents a huge upside for marketing automation companies. Hence the significant move toward acquisitions as of late. 

With marketing automation we can clearly see an improvement around campaign efficiency and effectiveness, better operational visibility, and a higher quantification of marketing value among other benefits. 

And traditionally we have seen large data focused companies in the arena of travel, finance, and retail take advantage of marketing automation, but we are now starting to see a variety of other verticals test it out to help them shorten their sales cycles and to close deals. 

Moving forward we will most likely continue to see further consolidation as competition heats up. Marin, MediaMath, and Kenshoo are just the start. 

And I would suspect that marketing automation starts to even bleed into other channels like content and maybe even traditional TV, offering agencies and brands a truly integrated offering.

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3 Compelling Trends to Watch in Marketing Automation

In August Gleanster published the 2014 Marketing Automation benchmark report, covering 53 vendors, complete with vendor rankings (based on end-users) and analyst commentary on each vendor. The marketing automation vendor rankings showcase user perceptions across four criteria: ease of use, ease of deployment, features, and overall value. A minimum of 8 users for each solution featured on the FLASH rank these providers on a scale of 1 to 5.

Click here to view the raw data from the Marketing Automation FLASH

What are the three most compelling trends to watch out for in marketing automation?

• Predictive marketing (also commonly referred to as predictive lead scoring, predictive intelligence, and predictive customer lifecycle) platforms are rapidly starting to demonstrate value in the Enterprise and Mid-Size market. These tools use machine-based learning and predictive models to analyze customer data and marketing lists to segment or target leads that have the highest propensity to convert. When you are dealing large organizations with lead volumes in the tens or hundreds of thousands per year, optimizing lead prioritization models can be very powerful- both in terms of marketing spend optimization and revenue lift. I see no reason why these won’t be a core offering in marketing automation – particularly within “marketing cloud” providers that already have establish customers who need these capabilities. Some predictive marketing platforms (Mintigo is one that comes to mind) augment the modeling with additional B2B data, so the solution can actually build models with data you didn’t even know about your customers.  Gleanster will be expanding the research coverage in Predictive Marketing and capturing a benchmark survey in 2014.

• Forget inbound – unbound your marketing. It’s getting A LOT harder to stand out with your inbound strategy.  It’s also more expensive. Inbound is beneficial, but it will never replace traditional marketing tactics. Don’t let the inbound marketing messaging from vendors convolute your demands from a marketing technology platform. You probably still need to send to lists and execute campaigns that might not have “active leads” in them. Many providers are cracking down on loading purchased lists or monitoring bounce rates and punishing (or downright firing) customers for deploying these tactics. Bottom line, you need to invest in a mix of inbound and outbound marketing – and the marketing automation partner you choose ought to be open to some level of SPAM-compliant outreach to non-opt-in lists, especially if you target and segment your lists based on your relevant communication strategy. That’s the key, you can’t just deliver generic messages to generic lists anymore – it’s bad for your brand.  But you should be able to deliver targeted messages to relevant recipients without “hoping they come across a blog post or find a whitepaper”.  Have faith but keep rowing for the shore.  Thing is, every marketing automation provider used their own platform to send campaigns to “non opt-in recipients” to grow their brand, so there needs to be some wiggle room for paying customers.  With more and more innovation around predictive insights (using your existing win/loss data from your salesforce automation system) you can actually narrow down very relevant target audiences that have the greatest chance of converting.  That way you don’t waste boatloads of money on a top of the funnel strategy that only drives a handful of leads.
• When making an investment in marketing automation, have the vendor not only demo what it takes to create the outcome they are showing; dive into the configuration. Too many purchase decisions are based on the “promise of what the solution can offer.” Take a look at what’s under the hood to make the demo run.  Expect to see continued innovation in reporting and analytics in marketing automation, users still struggle with these capabilities. We also expect to see some MAJOR innovation with respect to big data in the marketing automation space.  Marketing automation providers are sitting on a massive amount of data about customer strategy and campaign configurations that could and should be used in aggregate to benchmark and recommend campaign strategies that deliver the best results.  Next generation marketing automation solutions should be providing more than campaign template libraries, they should make recommendations about campaign tactics by industry, company size, and performance.

What should buyers be demanding more of from marketing automation solutions?

• Reporting is still abysmal in most tools. Specifically, campaign comparisons, visual insights, and custom reporting. There’s a data model in there somewhere; we think marketing automation providers should be partnering with on-demand BI tools to unlock the insights in the customer data. That’s where a whole new generation of marketing automation tools will start to blossom.
• Email templates and landing page templates are still a nightmare. Look for providers with a wealth of responsive design and email options that render across service providers. Why can’t marketing automation email and landing page configuration be more like Unbounce? This isn’t a knock on marketing automation; this stuff is hard, and it’s a nightmare in email platforms as well. But if marketing automation is supposed to be the next-gen tool to consolidate and replace legacy technologies like stand-alone email, it had better not bring the same challenges to the table.
• Real-time analysis and real-time CRM integration. In the age of big data we should expect even more from SaaS platforms. It’s really not appropriate for CRM solutions and marketing automation solutions to charge by the drink for computing capacity, data storage, and API calls these days.

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Marketing Automation Tools for Smaller Tasks

While they may not be looking for advanced solutions, small businesses can benefit from many simple, free marketing automation tools. Here's a look at several of the options available.

Marketing automation is a broad term that can mean something different to different people - and for small business owners, there's no doubt that marketing automation will mean something vastly different than it does to a large enterprise. While writing Marketing Automation for Dummies, I distinguished between Marketing Automation with a capital "M," and marketing automation with a lowercase "m." Even basic automations (think the lowercase "m" version) can make your small business run more efficiently.

The marketing automation revolution has created a ton of companies who serve this marketplace. There are also a lot of companies who are not "marketing automation vendors" and never show up on any analyst radar, but which can easily help you streamline your marketing via simple automations. Let's take a look at four technologies that I'd suggest small business owners take a serious look at as their first step toward full automation.

Content Marketing for SMBs

Content marketing is a large piece of marketing automation. Every bit of communication you have with your leads and customers needs to be following the methodologies set out by Seth Godin in his book Permission Marketing, published by Wiley in 1999. He advises marketers to provide people with value, and they will in turn value your relationship. In a world with so much noise from companies, this is the best way to engage and build relationships.

The biggest issue with content marketing for many small businesses is finding the resources to create content. Between finding topics to write about and creating an attractive finished product, content creation can seem like a major drain on time and resources - but it doesn't have to be. Here are a few free tools that can easily help you get over all of these humps.

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Finding ROI in B2B Marketing Can Feel Like Pushing Water Uphill

B2B marketers often have trouble finding campaign ROI because their marketing and sales departments aren't fully integrated and because their lead information isn't properly tracked. Here are some tips for getting solid ROI in a B2B environment.

Every marketer will tell you that the one metric they most desire, but struggle to acquire is campaign return on investment (ROI). B2B marketers, in particular, feel this pain because the systems that have historically been in place to execute campaigns and track sales opportunities reside in two completely different systems and are governed by two completely different departments (CRM-Sales).

Marketing automation systems have come a long way in how they integrate key processes around lead management into the core customer relationship management (CRM) platforms that are in place at most companies. Traditionally, marketing systems did not focus on lead management; rather they were built from the ground up to facilitate the execution of a variety of different types of campaigns.

In the evolving B2B marketing automation sector, vendors have transitioned from campaign management focus to lead management focus. The driving force behind this has been the realization that people research, evaluate, and buy online, oftentimes with little or no interaction with sales personnel until the latter part of the sales cycle.

Why have B2B marketers struggled to measure campaign ROI?

There are two primary reasons for the difficulty in tracking campaign ROI in B2B. Firstly, marketing and sales historically operate in two completely different systems. Marketing automation platforms support the marketer (obviously) and CRM systems manage sales. There is a clumsy handoff between marketing and sales when a lead is passed and all too often the data about the sales lead, once it converts to an opportunity, is not visible to marketing. The loop gets broken at this point and marketing and sales scramble to figure out how to match up opportunity values and revenue with the source campaigns.

The second problem that vexes the marketers is that the lead source and campaign information, which is dutifully tracked in the MAP (marketing automation platform), is often not preserved in CRM as a lead moves through the lower half of the sales funnel. The common workflow for leads in CRM is that when a lead is created in the CRM platform, it must often be converted to a contact, linked to an account, and associated with an opportunity.

In CRM, there are four different database tables in play. All too often the lead source information, which is typically associated with the data passed with the lead itself, is not carried over to the contact, account, and opportunity. Worse yet, the originating lead may not be the primary contact associated with an opportunity. The originating lead may be a point person who is creating a short list, but once the lead moves to opportunity, a new set of decision makers may get involved and be flagged as the primary contact associated with the opportunity, which may have no connection to the source lead!

Confused yet?

You're not alone. This convoluted process works fine for opportunity management, but works very poorly for lead source, campaign, and conversion tracking, which is what marketers really need.

Solving this problem is not simple, and while the MAPs will show a dizzying array of reports on the marketing side showing campaign metrics that would make any chief marketing officer (CMO) salivate, the reality is we are still very much dependent upon processes, data, and people who are out of our control. All is not lost. There are a few steps marketing and sales can take to ensure ROI is properly tracked.

1. Integration: It may seem like this goes without saying, but ensuring your MAP and CRM are properly integrated at a database level is the first step. Select a MAP that has a proven track record of integrating at a deep level with your CRM. 
2. Alignment: Marketing and sales must come together and agree on the process of lead management. This includes the handoff and critical pieces of data that must exist in both systems. This must be a top-down approach that is driven and governed by both marketing and sales leadership.
3. Preserve the Data at All Costs: Ensuring marketing source data like lead source and campaign IDs are mapped to the CRM records is crucial. These should be fields that sales cannot edit or update. 
4. Retain Data Through the Funnel: As a lead moves from lead to contact to account to opportunity, most CRM systems will support workflow that automatically copies the originating lead source to each subsequent table in the CRM. 

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Marketing Automation Best Practices: Advanced Level

The last in a three-part series, this post details marketing automation best practices for those with an advanced knowledge of the subject area.

Disclaimer: This article is not for the beginner; it is specifically written for those who have already been using marketing automation for some time, and are very proficient. The techniques I will be going over will not work unless you have a solid foundation in your marketing acumen.

If you are at the advanced level, some of the main items you may struggle with are taking advantage of advanced marketing techniques, and combining them with your data from your marketing automation tool. These techniques include account-based marketing, retargeting, and social media interactions. Here are some of the best practices for marketing automation when working with advanced campaigns.

Marketing Automation Best Practices for Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing and marketing automation are a key combination for many businesses selling B2B. The key here is not to look at these solutions as separate tools, but as a combination approach. Consider these best practices for your account-based marketing programs using your marketing automation tool.

Marketing Automation & Search – 3 Strategies for Mutual Success

Over the past few years, marketing automation has continued to gain influence. For most organizations it's now a crucial piece of the marketing puzzle. This is especially true of the B2B sector.

One of the key points that has caught my attention is the high level of synchronicity that exists between marketing automation platform strategies and my experience with "search" and "top of the funnel" marketing. By identifying and exploring these parallels I've been able to greatly improve my understanding and the results from both disciplines.

Lets look at some of these revelations with you by discussing three of the key areas where these two disciplines overlap and complement each other.

1. Content

A point that's often over-looked when organizations begin building a business case for a marketing automation platform is content. One of the key selling points of any marketing automation platform is its ability to streamline and improve engagement.

The problem is, if there's nothing for your prospects to engage withyou will have no engagement. That's where content comes in.

The variety, volume, and velocity of the content you produce is the only way to fill the top of the funnel and to give leads a reason to continue the conversation. Simply put, marketing automationneedscontent.

This need to feed your automated marketing platform with whitepapers, guides, articles, videos, podcasts and infographics is great for those of us living in the top of the funnel. The content that will be created can be utilized and repurposed for SEO, PPC and content marketing.

For example, if the marketing automation team is developing a monthly whitepaper, the SEO team can break apart a piece of the whitepaper and turn it into a blog post, web page or PR piece. This can be done on a separate budget that doesn't hit the search marketing team's (shh.. don't let the automation team catch on). Additionally, this whitepaper can be used behind gated lead forms via PPC campaigns. These shared resources are good for the entire company.

Word of caution: I'm not advocating duplicate content or content "spinning". There's a fine line between repurposing good content and making Google angry. Let's look at some good and bad examples:

Bad:

• Rewriting an article three different ways and posting in three different locations (internal blog, external byline article, and web page)
• Writing articles and using the same content within boring press releases.

Good:

• Repurposing a byline article as a PDF in automation outreach that doesn't get indexed or republished.
• Turning a video interview into a summarized blog post (published and indexed) along with a guide (not published or indexed and used for MA).
• Turning automation guides into click candy slideshows or images that are published online.

2. Insights and Analytics

Most marketing automation technologies (e.g. Marketo, Act-On, Pardot, Eloqua etc.) will provide deep behavior insights and analytics. This data can be extremely useful, not just for increasing engagement and conversions at the bottom of the funnel, but also for top of the funnel activities. How?

• Keywords: For example, marketing automation platforms will give deep insights into which keywords existing leads are using to search for your product or service. Why is this important? Well, if you know how often a typical SEO/PPC lead is going back to Google and using a particular search term to reconnect with your service or product, you can then attribute this lead back to a particular marketing activity which focuses on leads much further up the funnel. This can help with the ongoing issue of attribution when reporting and re-allocating resources.
• Return on Investment: If you're like most digital marketers, you probably have difficulty correlating ROI to marketing initiatives. The classic case is SEO. You probably know a conversion occurred, but don't know who converted. A good analogy from the sports world is the team score vs. the box score. You might be winning, but who is actually scoring the goals? Marketing automation platforms can track conversions to the person that actually converted and the value of the closed business (if any).
  For example, ROI can be attributed to keyword data and used to identify phrases from leads that are closer, or farther away from the decision process. When we get our hands on this data, we were able to identify that business closed, the timelines and ratios of that closed business based on phrases. We can also recognize the value of the closed business within your CRM, like Salesforce. For example, a series of contacts that had an original lead source from a keyword like "software solutions" can drive a great deal of SEO and PPC leads, but have an 8 month sales cycle and close at 10 percent. Another search for "software solution integration timeline" would typically close within 60 days of that search at 50 percent. Our marketing automation platform showed us that "software solution integration timeline" was a phrase that should definitely have a large emphasis in our SEM and SEO efforts. It may have lower volume, but the higher close ratios and shorter timeframe made it an extremely valuable term.

3. Conversion and Dynamic Pages

Marketing automation platforms have the ability to deliver dynamic content based on visitor data and demographics. This is extremely powerful for marketing initiative. For the purpose of this post let's explore how this can help with our search efforts:

• PPC:Using a piece of Java code, dynamic pages can insert different messages based on user data from automation and CRM. Let's see how:
  • No Marketing Automation Platform Data: If you're running a campaign on Adwords and a random visitor clicks on your ad from the keyword "software solution", you'll serve a page that is all about your "software solution".
  • With Marketing Automation Platform Data: If you're running a campaign on Adwords and a known visitor clicks on your ad from the keyword "software solution", we recognize that is Bob Smith, who is the CEO of a manufacturing company. Our landing page will now serve information catered to Bob. This can be a piece of gated content that speaks to how our software solution works with manufacturing organizations. This will dramatically increase your conversion rates.
• SEO: Using the example noted above, we can dynamically insert information on internal pages catered to Bob's demographics, which include his vertical, manufacturing, and his title, CEO. Our internal pages can replace standard logos with the logos of our manufacturing clients and also display snippet testimonials from other CEOs who love our software. Doing this will increase the stickiness of the internal pages and dramatically increase the conversion rate. 
  The downside to creating these dynamic pages is the time associated with setting up the 1 on 1 communications. A better approach is to create buckets that recognize common demographics and serve dynamic content to each bucket. Using the example of Bob from the manufacturing company, we could recognize all visitors that work in the manufacturing vertical. This is much more scalable.

Summary

Advanced marketing automation platforms can have a huge impact on your engagement, conversions, and new business. It can improve the way your organization handles prospects at the "bottom of the funnel". But the data and insights can also help improve "top of funnel" activities and performance from initiatives like SEO, SEM, social, and content marketing.

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