21st Century Public Relations

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Digest...

Dan Freeman, the president of marketing consultancy Marketing Growth Strategies: “First-time implementers are just trying to do the nuts-and-bolts, simple stuff like landing pages or knowing who is visiting their website, while those who have been doing marketing automation for six months or a year are looking at the next stage … full nurture programs, automated workflows, and more.”

 

In fact, many of the new marketing automation buyers aren’t even doing email marketing or customer relationship management (CRM), which means they are fairly unsophisticated buyers.

 

That’s something the 70-plus marketing automation vendors will want to keep in mind — not just because new buyers have specific needs, but also (and maybe especially) because a big chunk of existing system owners are keeping their eyes open as well. As is well-documented, many companies use multiple marketing automation systems – and have a surprising openness to switching.

 

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Intermediate/ Digest...

The average ROI from implementing marketing automation, according to our survey respondents, is 27.8 percent. Almost every single company of the 83 surveyed so far reported positive ROI, with four of them reporting massive 150 percent increases in revenue.

But when we asked whether their investment in marketing automation was worth it, 42 percent said they were “not sure.” Another 7.2 percent responded with a flat out “no.” Only 48 percent of respondents confidently answered in the affirmative.

 

Some clues, however, can be found in the fact that many companies really didn’t understand how challenging their particular system would be to run, what kinds of skills they needed, and how much content they would like to produce to feed the machine.

 

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Digest...

Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud (try saying that three times fast) has launched a new visual “Journey Builder” that promises to enable marketers to understand, define, and create coherent, unified customer experiences across Web, social, email, apps, advertising, sales, and service.

 

That’s a big promise. And it’s available today.

 

Salesforce plans to deliver on this promise by providing essentially a drag-and-drop graphical user interface for customer interactions, across all your media and channels. Salesforce calls it a “canvas,” which marketers can use to map customer journeys across apps and social and email, building flows and stages through which they hope to bring prospects and existing customers.

 

Journey Builder is available today, but the new features won’t be available until about November/October of this year.

 

Pricing will start at $5,000/month for a subscription, with the dollars rising as you send more messages to customers via the system.

 

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Basic/ Digest...

The marketing automation system is launching out of beta today, and the company’s press release calls it “as easy to use as a search engine.” That’s because the system, which combines marketing automation and CRM into one package, pretty much is a search engine.

 

Add a lead? Type it in. Search for a lead? Type it in. List contacts, create workflows, add tags, list customers: type it in. Doing anything is based on the search/GX box. Type “London” into the box, and you’ve got all your contacts in that geography. “London leads” gives you all leads in that area; “London customers” gives you all current customers. “Create workflow” brings you to the workflow creation screen, where you can build nurture and drip campaigns with triggers, delays, and actions.

 

Integrating [MAS and CRM] is not exactly new in the small-to-medium-sized business world. ZohoCRM has a similar vision, SalesPilot integrates basic CRM features into its marketing automation tool, as does InfusionSoft, which boasts 21,000 business customers. But it’s not exactly common, either.

 

One feature that’s particularly impressive in the product is how it builds custom workflows visually — and especially how it integrates them into services that you might not expect.

 

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Marketing has changed more in the last five years than in the 100 before that. The speed of change in marketing is picking up its pace, and it’s going to keep accelerating.  The implication is that marketers will need a customer engagement platform to keep up. Here's why marketers need a platform, and what that platform looks like.

Advanced/ Excerpt...

Here’s what a marketing platform needs to deliver:

1. UNDERSTAND: Track customer identity, contacts, and context across every digital, social, and mobile channel — then organize this information into a single, open data repository.
2. ORCHESTRATE: Design and coordinate engaging customer experiences and continuous conversations that take each customer on a personal journey over time – and do this in an organized, automated way.
3. PERSONALIZE: Deliver relevant, personalized content and messages across channels and devices.
4. MANAGE: Support the operational aspects of running a marketing department. Plan the marketing calendar, coordinate content, track investments, and tie the marketing budget directly to results.
5. OPTIMIZE: Measure and maximize marketing ROI across channels. Attribute outcomes to each marketing experience, regardless of which application handled the interaction.  Support data-driven decision making at the speed of marketing.
6. LEARN: The pace of change in marketing isn’t slowing down, so the platform also needs to give guidance, best practices, and knowledge to help marketers keep up.

Lastly, as discussed above, a true platform needs to be open to allow other marketing applications to tap into their data repositories, workflow capabilities, analytics, and so on. A true platform provides a backbone of common orchestration, common management, and common measurement, competing with the other platforms to provide the most complete ecosystem of marketing solutions.

 

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