0 Microsoft Buys Marketing Automation Vendor MarketingPilot: Start of Something Big?

Microsoft today announced the acquisition of marketing management system vendor MarketingPilot, which will become part of its Dynamics CRM group. Financial terms were not disclosed.

MarketingPilot is best described as integrated marketing management for mid-tier companies. It has a pretty low profile in the B2B marketing automation world, partly because it serves a mix of B2C and B2B clients but mostly because it started as a marketing operations management system. It only recently added standard B2B marketing automation features including a customer-level marketing database, outbound email, landing pages, lead scoring, Web behavior tracking, reporting, and Salesforce.com integration. Still, with more than 500 clients, including many ad agencies, MarketingPilot is a significant player in the larger marketing software universe. (I profiled them in a February 2011 post.)

The acquisition is significant on several levels. Most obviously, it’s another example of an adjacent vendor finding the marketing automation attractive: following Pardot’s acquisition last week by email vendor ExactTarget, and earlier acquisitions of Leadformix by CallidusCloud (sales effectiveness), Alterian by SDL (Web content), SmartFocus by Emailvision (email), and Demandforce by Intuit (small business accounting). More specifically, it’s a major acquisition by a CRM vendor, helping to fulfill everyone's favorite prophecy that marketing automation and CRM will eventually merge. I still doubt Salesforce.com will get the message any time soon, but maybe they'll listen a little more closely.

But the real significance may be greater. It’s no coincidence that MarketingPilot, like three of the five other deals I just listed, involves a B2C rather than B2B marketing automation product. The B2C products are generally built on a more powerful foundation than B2B systems, in terms of having a more flexible database structure, deeper marketing operations support, and more powerful analytics. B2B systems strengths are concentrated in execution capabilities like email design, landing pages, multi-step campaigns, and social messaging.

The stronger foundations of the B2C systems make them easier to extend throughout the marketing department, which would benefit from tightly integrated collaboration, planning, analytics, and database management. There’s less value to sharing B2B strengths in execution, since each group builds and deploys programs independently. (In other words: acquisition and nurture campaigns are built by separate groups that create their own emails and landing pages, but do want common planning systems, customer data, and analytics.)

This foundation technology matters because it’s pretty clear that the future of marketing systems is to have a shared platform – think Salesforce.com AppExchange, or the similar marts created by Eloqua, Marketo, HubSpot, and indeed Microsoft Dynamics itself – supporting a variety of plug-and-play applications. B2B marketing automation systems are built for lead nurturing and provide a foundation adequate for that purpose. But marketing departments also need acquisition (or, if you prefer, inbound marketing) and customer support (or whatever comes after a lead is handed off to sales). A B2C platform can support those other functions. Even a good B2B platform might not.

I’m not saying that a B2C platform could extend all the way to running CRM. This might be possible but so far it seems that marketing and sales still need separate physical databases for adequate performance. But I can imagine a marketing platform that provides some services to a CRM system, such as predictive modeling, data enhancement, and reporting. Like users throughout marketing,  users in both sales and marketing would benefit from sharing them. So, at least for now, that is the degree of marketing automation / CRM consolidation I expect.

Fulfilling even this somewhat limited vision will take a lot of resources. B2B marketing automation vendors will need to rearchitect their systems on the more sophisticated platform. They’ll also need to significantly enhance their execution layer to take advantage of the platform’s greater power. I discussed some of this in last month’s post on ways to dominate the marketing automation industry: my preferred strategy, of radically easier execution, specifically depends on better analytics to make the systems automatically do more of the work in campaign design, execution, and optimization. That Microsoft of all companies will create a revolutionary advance in simplicity is a bit hard to imagine (snark alert!), but they do have the resources.  Even the potential for that result may encourage other deep-pocketed vendors to try the same thing. That could be the greatest significance of all.

0 MarketingPilot Offers Integrated Marketing Management for Mid-Size Companies

Yesterday's acquisition of AssetLink by SAS has prompted me to finally write about MarketingPilot, a vendor I've been following since its launch nearly ten years ago.

MarketingPilot started as an operations management tool for mid-size direct marketers, with features for project management, list and media buying, source code tracking, expense capture, and vendor management. Since then it has expanded steadily to encompass the full range of marketing resource management and then gone ahead to add marketing database management and campaign execution. The technology has evolved from Windows-based client server systems – using the Borland Interbase engine, if you want a real whiff from the memory jar – to a mix of on-premise and hosted options.

Average price and client size have also increased steadily, although the focus has remained on mid-size rather than enterprise clients. The company also created special editions for ad agencies, which now provide about 40% of its business. MarketingPilot has about 40 employees and 400 installations with over 15,000 end-users.

With AssetLink (60 employees) now owned by SAS, MarketingPilot also may be the largest remaining independent MRM vendor. I can’t say for sure because there are several companies in the field that I’ve never researched. But it doesn’t really matter, because MarketingPilot is now positioned as an integrated marketing management product. That puts it into roughly the same class as much larger firms including Neolane (200 employees) and Alterian (370 employees).

I say “roughly” because Neolane and Alterian are rooted in the campaign management side of marketing automation, while MarketingPilot is based on marketing resource management. Although the overlap between these products is growing, they are still quite different.

To give you an idea of the scope of MarketingPilot, here is a set of headings from its Web site:

Alerts - Analytics/Performance Measurement - Approvals - Budgets - Calendars - Campaign Management - Collateral Management - Contract Management - CRM - Digital Asset/Document Management - Direct Marketing - Direct Response - Editions - Email Marketing - Enterprise Edition - Enterprise Marketing Management - Estimates - Event Management - Expense Management - Financial Management - Internet/Online Marketing - Inventory Management - Lead Management - List Management - Marketing Automation - Marketing Database - Marketing Plans - Marketing Resource Management - Media Buying and Planning - Multi-currency - Purchasing - Print Production - Reports - Scheduling - Social Media - Solutions - Strategic Planning - Supply Chain/Vendor Management - Time Slips - Trade Shows - Web Portal

This is broader list than you'll see from most marketing automation vendors – a group not known for modest product claims. But even MarketingPilot isn’t all things to all people (yet). Here's a quick inventory of strengths and weaknesses:

- just about any MRM feature you can imagine: planning, budgeting, project management, vendor management, media buying, content management, creative mark-up, approval workflows, etc.
- email, landing page and Web form creation
- high volume email delivery
- social media execution and tracking
- lead distribution and lead scoring based on attributes, but not behaviors
- integrated CRM, with an future option to synchronize with external CRM systems
- marketing database management with separate company and contact levels
- a highly tailorable interface that shows each user only the features they can access (critical in a system with so many options)
- multiple languages, currencies and time zones
- segmentation on contact and company data, with plans for a visual query builder that allows more complex queries against additional tables
- single-step campaign execution, with multi-step campaign flows due later this year
- response reporting, with plans to add ROI calculations
- Google Analytics integration, with expanded Web visitor tracking and analytics using MarketingPilot’s own tags due later this year.

That’s an impressive list, even after recognizing that key marketing automation features are not yet available, including multi-step campaigns, advanced segmentation, Web behavior tracking, behavior-based lead scoring, and ROI calculations. But they’re all promised fairly soon. Once they’re delivered, MarketingPilot will be a viable mid-market option for integrated marketing management.

If somebody doesn’t buy them first.