0 Optify Lets Agencies Provide Small Business with Marketing Automation, Distributed Marketing, and Sales Enablement

In case you were wondering, I see four themes emerging today in B2B marketing automation:

• services: vendors are bundling their systems with services to help marketers use them, either by offering the services themselves (LeadLife, MakesBridge, Ontraport (formerly OfficeAutoPilot), RightWave, SalesEngineInternational) or by creating versions that agencies resell to their clients (Optify, MindFireInc, many others).

• sales enablement: systems to share marketing information with sales (Genius, SalesFusion, LeadFormix, RightOn Interactive, Optify)

• distributed marketing: systems shared between central marketing organizations and local branches, dealers, distributors, sales agents, etc. (NitroMojo, Marketing Advocate, OptifiNow, Optify, Balihoo)

• new options for small business: systems targeted at very small businesses (Venntive, Optify, Vocus)

The first three trends strike me as defensive: small vendors need niches to compete against the huge resources of the big general purpose marketing automation products, who are all now part of larger companies (Eloqua, Pardot/ExactTarget), public (Marketo) or heavily funded (Act-On, HubSpot). By contrast, the fourth trend seems to be driven by recognition that small business presents a huge opportunity.

I only mention this because I’ve recently been looking at a lot of new (to me) vendors and haven’t been able to write about many of them. Placing them in the larger industry perspective gives me a chance to at least drop all their names and makes it easier to decide which to profile next. I’ll use the extremely scientific approach of selecting Optify, since it appears in all four categories.

Optify was founded in 2008 and launched its original product, a search engine optimization (SEO) tool, about a year later. Its primary clients were then, and still remain, digital marketing agencies. Both the agencies and their clients have been mostly small businesses – in the survey for our soon-to-be-published VEST report, Optify reports that 60% of its clients have under $5 million revenue. This makes it a system for both small business and service vendors: two of my four themes. Its distributed marketing capabilities stem from its agency roots, since the fine-grained, hierarchical permissions needed to let one agency manage installations for multiple clients are similar to the permissions needed to distribute permissions between central marketers and local affiliates. That's theme number three.

Finally, Optify has expanded into conventional marketing automation over the past 18 months and most recently added basic contact management and distribution of lead information, scores, and alerts to sales people. This is enough sales enablement to complete its sweep of the four themes.  I guess I should send them a t-shirt or something.

You can also think of Optify as having worked its way down from the top of the funnel (SEO) to the middle (marketing automation) and towards the bottom (CRM). This will remind marketing automation aficionados of HubSpot, which has made a similar journey. The biggest obvious difference (if you ignore HubSpot’s $100 million or so in venture capital funding) is that HubSpot offers its own blogging and Web content management, while Optify provides WordPress and Drupal plug-ins for visitor tracking and landing pages.  This is the standard approach among marketing automation products – as Optify says on its Web site, “We know you already have a website and a favorite marketing CMS.” The system can also create Facebook landing pages and track visitors to them.

What Optify does offer inbound marketers is extensive support for search engine optimization.  This includes detailed research into keyword rankings for the client and competitors, analysis of Web pages for features that improve search ranks, an inbound link manager, and a Twitter client to publish posts and embed trackable URLs that measure campaign results.

Moving towards the middle of the funnel, Optify offers reasonably powerful email and landing page builders, based on templates or HTML. Landing pages can be attached to an auto-responder email, while standard fields on forms are automatically mapped to Salesforce.com. Emails are delivered through ExactTarget. Users can create lists and segments based on all contact properties, activities, email history, and custom fields. There are no real multi-step campaigns, however.

Sales enablement includes lead scoring, with multiple scores per lead; alerts based on search keywords and lead scores; a live ticker showing current Web site visitors with companies identified via reverse IP lookup; and appending of company data from Dunn & Bradstreet. The system can send each salesperson a daily email of newly qualified leads, selected with shared rules or separate rules for each salesperson.. Salespeople can view their contact list, drill down to individual profiles, aand drill further to see behavior details – even as far as each page viewed during a Web site visit. Users can send the contact a system email or add it to a list.

CRM integration is currently limited to sending data to Salesforce.com. A proper API for bi-directional integration with any CRM system is under development.

Reporting is a particular strength.  Optify can build a unified contact profile by connecting names, email addresses, social accounts, and multiple cookies for the same person, using site log-ins, email clicks, and form submits on different devices. This lets reports show Web visits, conversions and other subsequent activity from search, social, and email campaigns.  A dashboard lets users pick widgets to display selected information.  Data can be exported to Excel, which is what many of Optify's agency clients prefer.  The company is planning an API to let clients export data directly.

 All told, this is a pretty reasonable package for a small business marketing system. It’s broadly similar to the scope of small business leaders Infusionsoft and Ontraport, although those products offer more elaborate campaigns and process flows. Pricing is also competitive with other small business systems if not especially cheap: company marketers pay based on page views and emails sent; starting at $350 per month for 10,000 views and 25,000 emails, . Agency pricing is based on the number of Web sites and email volume. Distributed marketing also has its own pricing.

Optify has more than 400 agency clients and many more individual sites using the system.

0 Social and Mobile Features Head the List of New Marketing Automation Capabilities

I’m getting ready for the next edition of the B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST). This is based on nearly 200 questions to vendors, mostly about product features. The first step in the process is to update the list of questions. This is based on a review of recent vendor announcements plus my own feeling for what’s important. What emerges is an interesting portrait of industry trends in product development.

You won’t be surprised to learn that most of the changes involve social and mobile marketing, today's two hottest areas in marketing in general. We’ll get back to those in a bit. But first, I’d argue the single most important result is just how few changes there really were. B2B marketing automation is far from mature in terms of market penetration, but the mix of product features is pretty well set. Most of vendor announcements I reviewed were about common features that particular vendors had been lacking or were enhancing.  Social and mobile are the exceptions, but both are still very small contributors to most B2B marketing programs. I saw much more activity around features that were new last year, such as dynamic content and integration with Webinar systems and with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

So exactly what new social and mobile features are now on my list? The previous report already included basic social capabilities including sharing marketing content to social media, tracking responses generated from social media, and monitoring social media activity. The new VEST expands that list to include:

- track social media influence: individual-level tracking mechanism that can identify the number of times a recipient has shared a promotion to social media and the number of responses generated the shared promotions. This information is part of the contact profile of the individual.

- create social media posts: deliver messages through social media, such as Twitter posts and Facebook updates. These messages can be created and then scheduled for future delivery.

- create social forms: create forms that are delivered within a third-party social media system such as Facebook.

- create social promotions: create social promotions such as contests, polls, ratings, etc.

- social sign-on and data capture: recipients can register using third-party social credentials, such as their Facebook ID. This gives access to information stored within the third-party social media system and allows communication through that system.

- build social profile: capture information about a specified individual by searching public information across multiple social media systems. This information includes social media handles and social activity such as posts, comments, and questions answered. The information is added to the individual profile and activity history.

The broad range of these features represents both a maturation of B2B social marketing and uncertainty about what will ultimately prove useful. We can expect more social features in the near future, although I suspect some will later be abandoned when it turns out they’re not especially effective in a B2B context.

On to mobile.  My previous list of mobile features was limited to text messaging. I’ve expanded that to add:

- mobile formats: generate Web and email versions in formats tailored to delivery on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

- mobile CRM: salespeople can access the system on mobile platforms such as smartphones and tablets.

- mobile reporting: users can access reports on mobile platforms such as smartphones and tablets.

- mobile administration: users can set up campaigns and create content on mobile platforms such as smartphones and tablets.

Only the first of these, mobile formats, is about delivering marketing messages. The others are all about marketers and salespeople accessing the system on their own mobile devices. That’s clearly the current focus on mobile marketing automation, although it’s safe to expect more mobile marketing in the future – such as location-based promotions, which are notably absent so far.

I also added three entries in other categories. These were:

- app marketplace: the vendor has a formal app marketplace that lets third party applications connect to its product without custom integration.

- real time recommendations: rules and/or predictive models can recommend the best treatment for a customer as an interaction takes place within system-managed content such as a Web page.

- real time interactions: rules and/or predictive models can recommend the best treatment for a customer as an interaction takes place within an external platform such as a call center or Web site. This requires features to collect information about the interaction from the external platform, to match this information against the system's own database of contacts profiles and history, to make recommendation using the available information, and to deliver the recommendation to the external platform. .

These features all expand the scope of B2B marketing automation, mostly be connecting it with other systems. In one sense that's the opposite of the previous new entries, which were about adding features to marketing automation itself.  But both approaches aim to place marketing automation at the center of a company’s customer management infrastructure. Since other products, including CRM and Web sites, are also reaching for that position, we’ll see how widely these features get adopted. My sense is they’ll be more successful at small companies, where the labor savings of a unified system are most important because technology resources are most constrained.

None of the features I’ve added are currently available in more than a handful of systems.  Some may not yet be present in any. Few marketers this year will choose a system primarily because these particular features are present.  But we'll find over time which are really important.

0 Marketing Vendor Selection: Trends You'll Need to Support

As I wrote yesterday, no one knows exactly what we’ll want from our marketing automation systems in the future. But it's still worth taking a guess at what looks likely.  Here are some trends I expect will be important.

Social Media. The first wave of marketing automation features for social media is now several years old.  These included making it easier to share emails and Web pages, tracking shares through embedded URLs, and monitoring social media conversations. The second wave is just starting.  It includes more sophisticated features for working within social media platforms, such as delivering forms and personalized ads within Facebook, using social sign-on to capture more data, and building more detailed profiles based on activities, consumption, connections and influence. Beyond the execution technology itself, these features will require substantial increase in analytical horsepower to make sense of the results.

Mobile. Many marketing automation vendors have added mobile interfaces for the marketers and salespeople who work with them.  But the focus is now shifting to marketing campaigns that are delivered by mobile.. The first change is to create standard materials in mobile-friendly formats. But this will soon be followed by more profound adjustments for touch screens, shorter view times, QR codes, special-purpose apps, gamification, social interactions, location awareness, and other mobile-specific possibilities. Third party developers will probably pioneer these capabilities, so look for marketing automation vendors who are good at integrating with outsiders and, eventually, have the money to acquire their technology.

Video. Plenty of video is used already in marketing promotions.  It's particularly useful as a way to generate lots of content at relatively low cost. But marketing automation vendors haven’t built many special features to make video easier to use. One big need is better tagging to make video more search-friendly; others are better upload and content analysis to support user-generated content. This may be another area where marketing automation vendors rely on external developers rather than pioneering for themselves.

Benchmarks. This is a hot topic among vendors, both because clients love benchmarks and because there are now enough clients to supply sufficient data. Benchmarking requires standard definitions to allow comparisons across program types, funnel stages, responses, and industry groups. It also needs ways to present the information so marketers can easily understand it. Eventually, benchmark systems will start making recommendations on what to try next – although I've yet to see that happen.

Testing. Too few marketers have a rigorous testing program, and, perhaps for that reason, most marketing automation vendors have focused their energies elsewhere. This may be changing, as marketers see simple and effective testing in other areas like Web landing pages and paid search. Speaking as someone who trained in traditional direct marketing, where testing is an absolute religion, I can only hope so.

Automation. Let’s face it: most marketing automation today is still pretty darn manual. The automation I'm talking about here is having the system make choices so marketers don’t have to. Think about lead scoring, where the traditional approach is for a team of people to sit around a table and negotiate a set of scoring rules. An automated approach would eliminate that by using techniques like regression analysis to derive the formulas directly from the data. Other automated applications could be matching contents to user behavior and choosing the optimal timing for campaign messages. This type of automation is a way to overcome the skill shortage that has slowed the growth of the automation industry. In that sense, it’s an alternative, or at least a supplement, to better training (creating more skilled people) and easier interfaces (making the few skilled people more productive). Delivering this automation requires major investments in statistical technology, standardized definitions, and process monitoring to avoid the “sorcerer’s apprentice” problem of uncontrolled execution.

External data. Marketing automation systems are increasingly gathering data from external sources like social media, list compilers, and online behavior tracking. They’re also moving past CRM to tap other internal systems like accounting, manufacturing and order processing. This poses a major challenge for some marketing automation vendors, who didn't design their system for sources outside of CRM. It requires more flexible data models, APIs for smooth data exchange, and often a substantial increase in total data volume. More complex data also implies much higher implementation and maintenance costs, making marketing automation tougher to sell.

Pay per Result. This is the ultimate extension of external data: instead of buying information, marketers can just buy qualified leads directly. It's also another way to compensate for the skills shortage. Of course, some pay-per-lead programs have been around for years. But as marketers use them more aggressively, the marketing automation systems will need to get better at merging their inputs, identifying duplicates, estimating the value of new names, and analyzing long-term results.


Analytics. Many marketers claim they want better analysis but few have made the investment. Perhaps this will finally change as data becomes more widely available, CEOs press for clearer return on marketing investments, and the exploding complexity requires better measurement to keep marketing under control. We’re seeing two specific applications: revenue analytics that look beyond marketing to track the entire customer life cycle, and optimization to allocate resources across the many different marketing opportunities. Both require substantial investments in new data structures, reporting tools, visualization, dashboards, information distribution, and user management. Marketers who are serious about analytics need to look closely at which vendors have created the necessary foundations and will continue build on them.

No one vendor will be top of all these trends and neither will any one marketer. My advice is to pick the areas you feel are most important and study what each prospective vendor can do in them today and has planned for the future. Beyond that, take a look at yesterday’s suggestions on finding a future-safe vendor, and pick one you feel reasonably comfortable will adapt to whatever tomorow may bring.