0 Social Media Features in Marketing Automation Systems: Who Does What?

Social media is arguably overhyped as a marketing trend: it gets well under 10% of marketing budgets (different surveys have figures from 3% to 8%) and results are questionable (it was rated the least effective content marketing tactic in a recent MarketingProfs study).  But social is clearly growing fast and has great potential. So marketing automation vendors are understandably eager to support it in their systems.

I recently took a quick tour of vendor sites to see what social features they’re offering. Results are summarized in the table below. I need to stress that I’ve only credited vendors for features they list on their site. I strongly suspect that the data is incomplete, especially for basic features that are so common the vendors simply don’t bother to mention them. (Note: the table has been updated after the original post based on vendor feedback, so it's a bit more reliable than it was originally.)

The features fell into four broad categories:

• Basic posting and sharing: the most common features and the simplest level of social media marketing. As I wrote above, most vendors probably have most of them even though the chart doesn’t show them.

• Social media monitoring: watching social media for mentions of the company or other topics and responding when appropriate. Plenty of third party applications can do this, so providing it within the marketing automation system is mostly a matter of convenience.

• Importing social data: loading social data into the marketing automation database so it can be used for segmentation, analysis, and sharing with salespeople via CRM integration. This is harder than monitoring since it requires linking social identities to marketing leads and connecting to the social system’s API.

• Social platform integration: using native features of the social platforms by writing to their APIs. This can be tricky for the marketing automation vendors to build but it lets their clients take greater advantage of social media possibilities.


Looking at the chart as a whole, what stands out is the sheer variety: once you get past the basics, no features are common enough to consider them standard. This contrasts sharply with mature categories like email, landing pages, and nurture campaigns, where dozens of features are shared by most systems.  The reason is obvious – social media is still very young – but the disparity still provides interesting insights into what different vendors feel are most important to their clients.

The variety also illustrates that a great number of social media applications are possible (with plenty more to come). Naturally, the vendors will borrow features from each other, so we can expect some convergence over time..  A standard set of features will emerge as the industry figures out what’s really important.

The list below presents each vendor with a brief explanation of the table entries. Links on the vendor names go directly to the vendor Web page or press release that described their social media capabilities.  In cases where the data came from different sources, I've put the link on the items themselves.

Neolane
- posting: central panel to post tweets and Facebook updates
- sharing: place sharing buttons on emails
- tracking: measure clicks on links in system-generated posts.
- Facebook forms: use forms within Facebook pages and apps to gather customer permissions
- social sign-in: use social media sign-in services to replace marketing automation forms
- personalized Facebook ads: display different ad versions on a Facebook page based on the user’s profile, including both Facebook and non-Facebook data


Marketo
- sharing: place sharing buttons on landing pages
- tracking: measure visitors from the shared pages
- load Twitter feed: connector to load Twitter conversations to lead profiles and use the conversations in campaign rules


Eloqua
- sharing: place sharing buttons on emails and other marketing materials
- social sign-in: use social media sign-in services to replace marketing automation forms
- Klout segmentation: add Klout scores to lead profiles and use them in campaign rules
- show Twitter feed: let salespeople see a lead’s Twitter posts on their Profiler dashboard


IBM/Unica
- social monitoring: use CoreMetrics Social to find social media mentions of company


Aprimo
- posting: manage blog posts with review process and SEO recommendations
- sharing: place sharing buttons on email and microsites
- tracking: integrate with third party web analytics to track social referrals
- monitoring: integrate with third party social listening tools for monitoring


Pardot
- posting: central panel to schedule and send social messages
- load social profile: use Qwerly to import social media profiles and add to marketing automation lead profile
- show social profile: show social profile data in CRM


Silverpop
- posting: send posts to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and/or RSS feeds along with email sends
- sharing: place sharing buttons on email
- social sign-in: use social media sign-in services to replace sign-in forms
- Facebook forms: add registration forms to Facebook and blogs
- badges and buttons: embed buttons and badges in email for Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, StumbleUpon, XING


Act-On Software
- tracking: embed trackable links in system-generated posts
- social prospecting: find relevant social conversations and send to in-box; send template-based responses


SalesFusion
- sharing: place sharing buttons on email and landing pages
- tracking: embed trackable links in system-generated posts and online documents


TreeHouse Interactive
- sharing: place sharing buttons on email and landing pages
- tracking: embed trackable links in system-generated posts
- Facebook forms: build advanced forms that can work within Facebook pages


Net-Results
- load social profile: find data about visitors on Jigsaw, Linkedin, Twitter and post to marketing automation lead profile


Genius
- tracking: embed trackable links in personalized web promotions and chat messages


Loopfuse
- social monitoring: use Collecta realtime search to find social media mentions of company


HubSpot
- posting: send social media messages and blog posts
- sharing: place sharing buttons on blog posts and other content
- social monitoring: find social media mentions of company and respond
- Facebook forms: build ‘welcome’ app to capture leads on Facebook page

0 LeadLife Bundles Services with Marketing Automation

LeadLife released a completely rebuild version of its marketing automation system last month.
The new system features a cleaner interface and revised capabilities that reflect what LeadLife has learned about the needs of small to mid-size companies since its original product launch in 2008. This involves a careful balance between complexity and power.

The best example of this balance, and the most notable change in the system, is campaign design.  LeadLife originally used a linear sequence of steps, while the new system uses a branching flow chart. This is a somewhat unusual choice for a small business-oriented system, whose clients tend to find flow charts difficult to work with. But LeadLife – like many other marketing automation vendors – found its clients tend to design campaigns as flow charts. It therefore chose to build the flow chart interface but to exclude the more confusion-inducing features, like the ability to send leads back to previous steps in the same flow or to start new flows in the middle.

On the other hand, the system does include some features not usually found in small business systems.  These include rule-driven, dynamic content blocks within emails, which LeadLife found many clients applied fairly easily. The system rule-builder also combines power with simplicity: for example, rules can reference specific links within an email (powerful) and the system automatically presents a list of links within the specified email (simple).

Probably more important, LeadLife has also bundled marketing services with its software. For example, vendor staff will design the campaign flows for the client, further reducing the risk that the flow chart will cause confusion.  Vendor staff will teach the client best practices such as building several small campaigns instead of a single complicated one.

Services are provided with every level of the product, including the lowest price of $750 per month. Specific options include marketing strategy, content creation, design, lead nurturing campaigns, lead process definition, and analytics. Most are performed by LeadLife’s internal staff although copywriting and design may be sent to subcontractors.

Bundled services are LeadLife’s solution to the skill gap that keeps so many companies from adopting marketing automation or using it fully. Other companies have taken a similar approach.  Still others have tried alternatives including keeping the system very simple, providing extensive training to use more complex systems, and using automation to handle complicated functions. Although most vendors apply them in combination, their emphases do vary.  It's not clear which choice will prove most effective -- but a lot of money is riding on the outcome.

Back to LeadLife. The scope of the new product includes typical marketing automation functions: campaigns, email, landing pages and forms, lead scoring, behavior tracking, CRM integration, sales alerts, segmentation, and reporting. Reports and some other features are still a work in progress but the basics are in place. LeadLife is migrating its existing 70 customers to the new system over the next few months. The system is sold on a month-to-month basis (no long-term contract) and prices are based on email volume and services.  Clients at all levels get the full set of system features.

0 SDL Buys Marketing Automation Vendor Alterian for $107 Million

So, it turns out that while I’ve been obsessing over vendor selection workbooks, our friends at marketing automation vendor Alterian up and got bought last week by language technology vendor SDL for about $107 million. Why didn't somebody tell me?

I’m most familiar with SDL as a Web content management vendor, although their financial statements show that just over 75% of their revenue comes from manual and automated language translation. The company had more than $300 million revenue last year and is nicely profitable.

Alterian hasn’t been doing so well lately, with about $55 million revenue for the past year and cash-basis loss around $6 million. Management has also been in flux: CEO David Eldridge resigned in April, a new CEO Heath Davies was named in July, and president and co-founder Michael Talbot resigned in October. The company was nearing the end of a 100 day restructuring plan that dropped its headcount from 440 to 260.  It had also taken several red-flag accounting actions including restating revenue, changing its revenue recognition policy, and taking large asset write-downs.

You math whizzes out there will have already noted that the purchase price is just under 2x revenue, compared with the 5x-ish prices paid a year ago for Unica and Aprimo. Whether this puts a damper on the prospective valuations of other marketing automation vendors is hard to say: Alterian was obviously struggling, and its main business model was to license its software to marketing service providers rather than selling it directly or via Software as a Service. On the other hand, Alterian did have some SaaS components to its business, notably SM2 social media monitoring (formerly Techrigy).

Alterian also had a bold vision of extending beyond traditional campaign management and analytics to include marketing resource management and web content management as well as social media. I’d still argue the strategy was correct, but that Alterian didn’t have the financial resources or market clout to execute it. Certainly its costs got ahead of its revenue: at 440 employees on $55 million revenue, it had just $125,000 revenue per employee, compared with the $200,000 I consider standard (see my post from last January on revenue ratios -- even at that time, when Alterian had just 370 employees, it was already below par.)

SDL’s chairman is quoted as saying that “The marketing analytics, campaign management and social media were the big attractions” of Alterian, so presumably the company will keep those businesses. The content management piece, about 27% of Alterian sales, will presumably be merged with SDL’s much larger Web content management business.

The big question for the marketing services providers who are Alterian’s primary customer base is how SDL will treat them, since they are not SDL’s current core clients. That’s more than a little scary, especially given the dearth of alternative mid-priced marketing automation systems for consumer marketers. (See my list of B2C vendors from September and my discussion of the differences between B2B and B2C marketing automation from October.)

On the brighter side, I can argue that the Alterian acquisition supports my long-standing contention that marketing automation and Web content management will eventually coalesce into a single system. Any gloating is restrained by the fact that Alterian had already combined the two and didn’t succeed. But this probably just shows that deep pockets will be needed to pull off the combination in a world where the competitors are heavyweights like IBM, Oracle, Adobe, SAS and Teradata.

0 Assess Marketing Automation Vendor Services Before You Buy - Another New Workbook

I wrote yesterday about our new workbook for marketing automation cost estimates. Today I’ll describe the other one: evaluating vendor services.  Both are available free at the Raab Guide Web site.

The problem with services is simple: you won’t use them until you’ve already bought the product. So the trick to evaluating them is to ask lots of questions in advance to understand whether they’ll meet your needs.

Of course, there are two parts to that mission: building a clear picture and knowing what you need. In terms of what you need, vendors offer three types of services:

• deployment: help with setting up your system
• support: help in operating your system after it’s deployed
• account service: help in growing your business.

Different companies have different needs in each area.  Buyers must understand those needs to know what they want a vendor to provide. I've written extensively about needs analysis in other posts and workbooks, so I won’t repeat those discussions here.

Similarly, the new workbook assumes you know what you’re looking for. It focuses on how to get it by providing suggestions for who to talk to, what to ask them, and how to interpret their answers.  Each service types involves talking to different people:

for deployment, talk to:

• deployment staff to understand their skill level, typical projects, and project management methods
• sales staff to understand deployment services and pricing
• references to understand the types of services provided and the quality of work

for support, talk to :

• head of support to understand services, staff qualifications, training, and reward systems
• front-line support staff to understand the kinds of problems they handle, internal systems that help manage their work, and how they’re motivated
• sales staff to understand support services and pricing
• references to understand service levels and satisfaction

for account service, talk to:

• head of account services to understand staff qualifications, measurement methods, and whether they have “success managers” separate from “account managers”
• account manager to understand their skills, training, workload, and objectives
• head of training to understand the kinds of training available, who delivers it, and if they understand how customers use the system
• head of professional services to understand the quality and scope of services
• head of partner relations to understand the types of partners and the company's investment in building a partner ecosystem
• sales staff to understand the types of account services and pricing
• references to understand the scope and quality of account services

The workbook offers dozens specific questions in each of those areas. I suppose you could just send each company the list and get back written answers, but you’ll get much more value from telephone and personal interviews. These let you listen to the replies and ask follow-up questions to drill into topics of interest. You probably won't need to ask every question to every person; the first few answers will often be enough to give a good idea of how the company does things in each area.

0 New Workbook: Estimating the Cost of Marketing Automation

We released two more vendor selection workbooks last week, both sponsored by Eloqua and available for free on the RaabGuide Web site. One is about estimating the cost of a marketing automation system and the other is about evaluating vendor services.

The cost workbook was a particular challenge because the subject is so complex. After much thought, I came up with four cost categories:

• direct system costs: the actual price paid for the marketing automation software itself. This is where most buyers focus their analysis, but it’s a tiny fraction of the value at play.  Background research for the workbook suggested that automation costs are from 1% to 5% of an average marketing budget. This means that the direct system cost is pretty much insignificant compared with the marketing budget it will help to manage. To put it another way: even a small improvement in the other 95% to 99% of marketing costs can easily pay for a marketing automation system.

• operations costs: other costs related to running the marketing automation system, such as staff time and costs of related systems. Most of these are marketing operations costs, and there may be others in sales and IT.  You’re already incurring many of them, so the analysis has to identify how much they’ll increase or decrease as a result of marketing automation. This is really hard since it takes a detailed understanding of your current processes and how they'll change.  But the stakes are high: operations costs are about 25% of a typical marketing budget.

• marketing program costs: the expenses for specific marketing programs, such as advertising, trade shows, email, etc. These are the other 75% of the typical marketing budget. Marketing automation can reduce these costs substantially, both through reduced waste and through shifting funds to more effective programs.

• revenue: many marketers shy away from building revenue gains into their marketing automation calculation, but revenue is ultimately the reason for their investment. From an analytical perspective, it’s important not to double-count revenue gains (assuming the same marketing budget) and cost savings (from a lower marketing budget).  It's also important to recognize that revenue isn’t 100% profit. The workbook describes how to do this.  To keep things in perspective: marketing costs are under 10% of revenue at most firms, meaning that direct marketing automation are under 0.5% of revenue.

Analyzing all four items in depth is a big job. The good news is you don’t usually need to assess them all at once. 

• building a business case for marketing automation needs only a rough estimate for direct system costs, since they’re so small compared with the revenue, marketing program costs, and operations.  

• comparing marketing automation systems lets you focus on the system costs and changes in marketing operations costs, since those may vary considerably from one product to another. The impact on program costs and revenues should be about the same unless you're considering systems with widely different capabilities.  But hopefully you identified your needs earlier in the process, so you'll only be comparing similar systems once you reach the final evaluation..

It's useful to understand these cost categories, but the real work is gathering the details for each component.  This is where the workbook comes in: it lists of specific items to consider, so you have a framework to help ensure your analysis is complete. This is important: to take a real-world example, one of my consulting clients recently received quotes from two marketing automation vendors, one of which included email delivery and one of which did not. Recognizing the difference made it easy to prepare a true apples-to-apples comparison, but we could have easily missed it until later the process if we had not used a formal framework.