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 Unica Strategy Stays the Course

I recently caught up with Unica Vice President Andrew Hally as part of my review of developments at the major marketing automation vendors. It’s been a good year for Unica, which will break $100 million in annual revenue for the first time. On the product front, they continue their long-time strategy of offering all the software a marketing department would need. This has mostly meant incremental development of existing components, including continued assimilation of past years’ acquisitions in Web analytics, email, marketing planning, lead management, and event detection. The one major acquisition in 2007 was Marketing Central, which provides hosted marketing resource management. This was well within Unica’s traditional scope, although the “hosted” part is a bit of a change. It will help Unica serve smaller companies in addition to its traditional enterprise clients. But since Unica must penetrate this segment to continue growing, this is less a detour from the company’s primary strategy than a logical extension of it.

Hally did say that Unica still sees substantial growth potential among large enterprises. He said the company still frequently finds itself replacing home-grown systems at big companies, not just earlier generations of purchased campaign management systems. This surprises me a bit, although I suppose many firms never saw the need to replace systems that were already working. I do wonder how many of the holdouts will change their minds each year. If the number is small, then Unica and its competitors will be mostly selling into a replacement market, which can’t be very large. On the other hand, continued demand for new capabilities in Web and mobile marketing should lead companies to replace even relatively new systems. So perhaps the replacement market will be bigger than it seems. Certainly Unica has added features for email and Web analytics. But it still has gaps in ad serving, keyword management, and mobile. Acquisitions in those areas would not be surprising.

Probably the most interesting development Hally reported was a sharp rise in sales for Unica’s Affinium Detect, an event-detection system based on the Elity software acquired with MarketSoft in 2005. Hally said Detect is now Unica’s third-best-selling product, with one to two dozen installations. This compares with the handful that Elity had sold when it was independent. He attributed the growth both to increased demand and to the reduced risk marketers see in buying from Unica. He also reported the product has been sold for telecommunication and credit card applications, in addition to the traditional retail banking.

While at NCDM, I also took a look at Unica’s newest module, an ad hoc reporting package called Affinium Insight. This provides some basic visualization and analysis capabilities for non-technical users. It is designed to free up marketing analysts for more demanding work by giving business users a simple graphical interface linked to data marts assembled with standard Unica technology. The interface resembles the NetTracker Web analytics system Unica acquired with Sane Solutions in 2006.

0 AOL Enters Mobile Advertising with Third Screen Acquisition

More news from the mobile marketing front: AOL yesterday announced it had acquired Third Screen Media, which will operate as part of its Advertising.com www.advertising.com subsidiary. Third Screen runs a mobile advertising network and provides tools for advertisers, publishers and carriers to research, place, administer and report on mobile ads.

Basically this illustrates the continued convergence of mobile with other digital advertising. It doesn’t explicitly address the unique capabilities offered by mobile—individual (tied to a person), local (tied to current physical location), continuous (always-on). Nor does it address interactions across those channels, such as using email, Web and mobile in the same campaign. In other words, it’s about advertising, not messaging.

Ultimately, messaging is likely to be more effective than advertising. By messaging, I mean two-way interactions with customers. Messaging is more work for marketers: they have to develop useful programs and keep them running, and probably change them fairly frequently to keep customers involved. It might help to look for messaging programs that add real value (e.g., price alerts, online coupons) rather than simple marketing promotions that attract participants largely by being entertaining.

Advertising is still needed to find customers to join messaging programs. So the two are complementary, not competitive. But it would be easy for marketers to consider advertising enough by itself. That would be a huge waste of the potential of the mobile medium.

0 Enough About LTV: Let's Talk Mobile

One final thought on last week’s string regarding LTV vs. product-based metrics. The precise relationship between LTV and conventional measures such as profit and cash flow is this: profit and cash flows are constraints, while LTV is what you optimize.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, I’d like to point out that today’s New York Times has not one but two articles on mobile marketing. One is on the front page of the business section (“Hollywood Loves the Tiny Screen. Advertisers Don’t.”, The New York Times, May 7, 2007, Business Day, page C1) and the other is inside (“Cellphones Tailored for Any Organization”, The New York Times, May 7, 2007, Business Day, page c7). This follows a piece last month in BusinessWeek (“The Sell-Phone Revolution”, BusinessWeek, April 23, 2007).

The BusinessWeek piece was still in the “gee-whiz, they can do ads on mobile phones” stage of thinking. The two Times pieces were a little more evolved, addressing the business challenges in mobile content and the idea of private-label cell phones for affinity groups or businesses (being offered by Sonopia).

I could note here that the private-label cell phone concept is yet another example of monetizing a customer relationship: in this case, by getting a consumer to commit to carrying your own cell phone, which then gives you a channel to beam them messages—your own and other people’s. But I think I just talked about that last week, and wouldn’t want to repeat myself (unless the topic is LTV. Have I mentioned that lately?)

So let me make another observation: the idea of private-label cell phones leads to the idea of people having more than one. The Times article mentions companies giving their phones to employees; this might easily be extended to favored customers and suppliers. I’m not sure there’s much business sense in this, although of course companies do already often provide non-branded phones to employees as regular business tools. But if some sort of revenue base evolves that makes it profitable for groups to offer phones to consumers for next to nothing, I can certainly see consumers carrying multiple phones in the same way they carry multiple credit cards.

In fact, I rather like the concept because it will break the emerging notion that cell phones are identical with their owners: each person has one phone and each phone has one person. This is almost true today but will probably be less true in the future. So it’s good for marketers to think ahead about how they’ll deal with many-to-many relationships.

0 Channel-Specific Analytics Are Doomed: Doomed, I Tell You

Did you ever have one of those crazy dreams, not quite a nightmare, where unrelated things get mixed up together? I felt that way this morning when I was looking at the Web site for one of the mobile marketing systems and saw they had alliances with Web analytics vendors. That rang a bell, but it took a while for me to realize that I had been writing about consolidation in the Web marketing space separately from mobile marketing.

The confusion is compounded by my recent look at non-Web analytics system including ClickFox (which gathers interaction logs from call centers and other systems) and Skytide (which gathers all kinds of data; I haven’t written about it yet).

There’s an obvious connection between systems that gather interaction data and those that manage marketing messages. As the Omniture / TouchClarity hookup I mentioned yesterday illustrates, some of the vendors are themselves bringing the two together. It’s no surprise that this would happen for Web systems, which tend to be internally integrated but isolated from other media.

Of course, the Web should not be isolated, and the trend is in fact towards cross-channel integration. Does it make sense, then, for Web analytics vendors to integrate tightly with Web targeting systems? You can see why an analytics vendor would want to do it—as a revenue-generating line extension and a way to help clients who lack an existing targeting solution. But the vendors (and I’m sure Omniture recognizes this) must also make it easy to integrate their systems with any other targeting product. Otherwise, they risk losing sales to prospects who already have a targeting solution and don’t want to change it.

From a broader perspective, though, interaction data from many channels needs to be combined for marketers to do the best job of analysis and targeting. This can be done by physically copying the data into a traditional data warehouse or by using some sort of virtual or federated structure. What’s important is that data from many sources must come together into a single location, where it becomes accessible to many execution systems. In other words—am I beating a dead horse here? —you don’t want direct connections between single-channel source and execution systems, such as Web analytics to Web targeting.

This has technical implications. In the cross-channel scheme, the role of the analytics system is just to gather and reformat data so it can be presented to the central storage facility. The actual analysis would be done in the central system or by a cross-channel analysis system that draws from it. This means that products which combine data gathering and analysis, like current Web analytics systems, need to decouple those functions and build open interfaces to reconnect them. These interfaces would allow users to substitute other products on either side of the relationship. In addition, vendors with specialized data storage technologies might offer a storage component with interfaces at both ends, one to accept feeds from multiple data-gathering systems and the other to allow access by multiple analysis and targeting tools.

This is not an appealing proposition for many vendors. Breaking their systems into components opens them up to more competitors and risks each component appearing to be a commodity. It also eases switching costs, placing further pressure on prices. In general, as I’ve noted many times, vendors seek to expand their footprint and increase integration, not the other way around.

But vendors who specialize in systems for one channel will increasingly find themselves frozen out of multi-channel opportunities. There are already many products to provide multi-channel data store, analysis and targeting. Data gathering still tends to be channel-specific, but that won’t last as new channels become better understood.

In short, vendors who seek to remain channel specialists are likely to find their business shrinking over time. This may seem like bad news, but the sooner they begin to adjust to it, the better off they’ll ultimately be.