Marketing Automation Software

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Current platform vendors

Current big names in marketing automation include HubSpot, Salesforce Pardot, Eloqua, Marketo, and Act-On.

Every year, you’ll find more and more competitors appearing, more and more platforms being built. Each of them will have something slightly different for a different type of business, a different size of business, a different industry, a different vertical and so on, so forth. This makes it quite difficult to research which one is right for you and your business. You should be using services like Trust Radius and G2 Crowd and other independent review sites to select and test which one is best for you. You should do free trials where possible, getting demos, and having extensive conversations with the sales people in these companies before you decide to commit to one. There may be one out there that’s not on this slide that’s better for you.

Single-function marketing automation tools

What are single-function marketing automation tools? Consider the example of Buffer, which is a social media automating tool. It automates social media through scheduling, through suggested content, and also through a visual imagery system it has called Pablo. This is one of many social media tools out there. It only works in social media. It is a very specific and very high-quality tool.

Another example is MOZ. MOZ started off as just an SEO tool. It has now become a content optimization and localization tool. These are both excellent tools, but the problem with single marketing tools is that, well, they’re not connected. They go extremely deep into one part of your marketing, but that’s where they’re limited. If you only need one, if there is just one part of your marketing that you feel requires a deep dive like just an email marketing tool, this might be a solution for you, but you will have to understand the limitations.

Other samples are Unbounce for landing pages, Campaign Monitor for email marketing, Optimizely for A/B testing personalization, or Mix Panel for conversion funnels. You should spend your time looking into what you really need. Do you need the full suite, or will two to three smaller tools fit better into your budget and your requirements?

Pros and cons

The pros and cons of complete tools and single-function tools are probably becoming clear to you now.

Time

When you are using a complete marketing automation platform, you’ll save a lot of time by pulling all of your data together in one place from all of your marketing efforts. You will have all of the channels at your fingertips. You will have a contact profile complete from where they’ve been active in social, which emails did they engaged with, did they arrive as a source from organic, and so on and so forth. So the amount of time it will take for you to understand the complete picture of this contact history with your business will be very easy. However, a con on that would be it can be very complicated if you’ve had your properties or your sources set up incorrectly or if there are flaws in the system. Or if you do not understand how some properties, combined, tell you a story. So that’s where it gets complicated. However, the time saving element is usually what wins over people.

Money

A positive element of marketing automation platforms is that if it is built off of a rock-solid marketing and sales alignment strategy, you will have an amazingly effective and an efficient marketing and sales funnel. Marketing automation platforms can be expensive. However, in the long run if you look back after implementing it, the amount of work hours that you will put in and the amount of time saved for your team overall will often be a benefit that you will see. The downside is that it’s rare to find the complete marketing automation platform for under $1,000 a month if you have more than 5,000 or 10,000 contacts, which a lot of businesses would. So you need to seriously consider the balance between budget and time saved in your team.

Training

With every marketing automation platform, you’re going to have a dedicated customer service rep or an account manager who is deeply knowledgeable in digital marketing strategy related to their particular tool. They will be at your fingertips to help you out when you need, as much as you need based on the package you’ve bought. This can be extremely helpful to have someone to lean on while you’re setting up. However, the training and onboarding from the tool can take quite some time, sometimes three months, sometimes three weeks. It really depends on the scale of what you were doing with the tool.

Reporting

With a complete tool such as HubSpot, you can easily and quickly report per channel, per campaign, quarterly, annually. It’s all right there at your fingertips. One of the downsides of that is sometimes, because all the data is combined together in one single place, you may not be able to always identify exactly what caused a win and what caused a loss.

Transparency

With marketing automation software, your historical marketing data lives right there for you at any time, ready to access, ready to analyze, so that you can create predictive analytics based on your past performance. However, this open and transparent kind of atmosphere may not suit every kind of business and some places would prefer to keep their historical data more private, so permissions will be something you have to discuss.

Integrations

With these large marketing automation platforms, you can have a lot of integrations from a lot of different tools such as the single ones, like Optimizely, like Mix Panel, and so on and so forth. And MailChimp is a popular one, actually. And you can have them integrated into your marketing platforms so the data all lives there together. So if there’s a tool outside of it that you prefer to use, perfect. All that data will flow in. However, if you have one of the lesser-known tools, a custom integration may not be possible. The data may not flow well or it just may be not something that the company can provide for you. It’s really a case-by-case basis.

Further considerations

Time

While the full marketing platform saves you time by giving you complete overviews of contacts, single-function marketing tools save you time by looking deeply and quickly into a single part of your marketing automation. They can complement your marketing automation platforms by filling in gaps where they may not have a capability that you’re looking for. Often, the complete suites will have good general functions, but may not always deep dive into that area that you need particular to your business, so you should really look into that.

A downside of this is the lack of consistency of properties across these different tools that you’re using, and different terminologies in different tools. You may have difficulty, particularly when you’ve got a new person joining the team, training them into all these various different tools and various terminologies, all the different logins, etc., etc. It’s very difficult to then pull all that data together to make something sensible for a single campaign.

Money

Single tools are often much more affordable than full marketing suites. However, you may need multiple of those and they can add up to the same price as a full marketing automation suite in the end of the day. So it is important to actually count up the cost of using five separate tools and see, could you actually just buy a single place for them all to live? Single-function tools can actually be much easier, training-wise. They go deep down, but they go into a single channel so it’s quite consistent. It’s quite easy to focus in and learn these. However, on the down side, your account manager for your single tool may not be able to help you understand your strategy across other tools. They will be able to help you with the one you have with them. They won’t necessarily know how it mixes with the rest of your marketing tools.

Reporting

With reporting within each individual tool, you can do reporting on the function of that particular tool and it will be very detailed and very in-depth. However, trying to pull the data from all these different tools, if your email marketing is over here and your social is over here and your SEO is over here, can be quite complex and takes a trained eye to really understand how to bring that together, possibly in Excel or another spreadsheet tool.

Integrations

You may be able to synchronize the data between all of these different singular tools using a service like Zapier or another integration service. However, they could be quite messy to set up, quite technically challenging unless you have someone on your team who can do that, and may not even be possible at all.