Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 22, 2014

I’ve been gearing up for the next edition of our VEST report on B2B marketing automation systems, which involves catching up with established vendors and chasing down some new ones. Here are highlights of several vendors I’ve looked at recently. I’ll write about some others next week and then offer some general observations.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Small Business Marketing Marketing Automation Automation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 4, 2010

A few weeks back, I wrote about social marketing features from consumer marketing automation vendors. However, the value is so obvious that I expect many other vendors will soon follow. To the current topic, it has also added a “Twitter Prospector” to reduce the labor required to mine Twitter for leads.

Act-On 120

Act-On Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services Features 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MARCH 13, 2014

I recently caught up with the folks at Teradata, which had its own marketing automation system for a decade before it acquired Aprimo marketing automation in 2011 and added Munich-based email vendor eCircle in 2012. The three products overlapped significantly, especially in campaign management, and it took Teradata a while to sort things out.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Marketing Automation Services Resource Management Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 22, 2011

The exhibit hall was enticingly crammed with unfamiliar vendors, although I saw enough to identify a few general categories: offer aggregators who bring together products for affiliates to sell; network providers who assemble audiences for affiliates to sell to; and technology providers to support both groups.

Churn Rate 120

Churn Rate Paid Search Agency Ethics Aggregators 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JULY 10, 2013

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. This makes it a system for both small business and service vendors: two of my four themes.

Demand Generation Agencies 120

Demand Generation Agencies Marketing Automation Services Paid Search Agency Small Business Marketing 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JULY 15, 2013

If you’ve heard of Vocus at all, it’s probably as vendor serving public relations professionals. Recommendations” finds conversations on client-specified topics across 130,000 online outlets, 10,000 print outlets, 35 million blogs, and posts on Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites. Buying Signals” draws on Twitter only.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Marketing Automation Marketing Management Social Marketing 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 5, 2010

Summary: Social media and access for sales people were the two big trends among demand generation vendors last year. Even though this is limited to the vendors in the Guide, it's a pretty representative sample of the industry as a whole. The vendors also charged additional per-user fees for these modules. Social media.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Manticore Market2Lead Marketing Automation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JUNE 19, 2015

Mautic certainly has an appeal for service vendors, since it removes the cost of payments to a HubSpot or Infusionsoft. It apparently could have imported more social data if I had connected with my own Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts. There are about twenty of these, including major vendors in each category.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Marketing Automation Work Management Automation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JULY 16, 2009

Marketing automation vendor Alterian yesterday announced its acquisition of social media monitoring company Techrigy. Even though the Techgrity deal is the first direct acquisition I recall of a social media monitoring system by a marketing automation vendor, it strikes me as an obvious step. microblogs (Twitter, Friendfeed , etc.),

Marketing Management 120

Marketing Management Acquisitions Social Media Marketing Automation Services 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 25, 2012

I had an intriguing demonstration yesterday from social CRM vendor Nimble. You can do a Twitter search for messages on that keyword, scan the Twitter profiles and Klout scores of people sending those messages, and push a button to add the interesting people to your contact list.

CRM 120

CRM Work Management Paid Search Agency Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

DECEMBER 14, 2016

In addition to Web pages, BlueVenn can send batch and triggered emails, text messages, file transfers, and direct messages in Twitter and Facebook. The vendor is also integrating with the R statistical system for predictive models and scoring. Next year it will add display ad audiences and Facebook Custom Audiences.

Marketing Management 120

Marketing Management Bundling Marketing Automation Services Personalization 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 3, 2013

Users can build matching processes with system graphs, although the vendor recommends connecting to other products to load reference data or do advanced "fuzzy" matching. The social listening features can monitor Twitter for keywords and Tweets by specified individuals. The system can also monitor and post messages on Facebook.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Marketing Management Paid Search Agency Wikipedia 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JULY 23, 2009

Marketing automation vendors should take heed. A vendor very proudly showed me their new Adobe Flex -based user interface the other day. I found the new interface a bit confusing, so I asked whether the vendor had done any usability testing. It’s something I hope more vendors will keep in mind. Fair enough.

Studies 120

Studies Marketing Automation Services Case Studies Vendors 120

Customer Experience Matrix

DECEMBER 19, 2011

Marketing automation vendors have mostly worked on making it easy to post and share messages and to capture social data. managing awards, and API-level integration to pull profile data ( LinkedIn ), record completed challenges ( Quora , Twitter , Facebook , LinkedIn) and announce completed challenges ( Salesforce.com Chatter).

Work Management 120

Work Management Peer-to-peer Marketing Management Planning 120

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 21, 2009

If you read that list quickly, it sounds pretty much like every other marketing automation vendor. Both sets of vendors generally do a decent job with asset management, Web analytics and other reporting, although only the consumer-oriented systems tend to offer serious support for planning, workflow and detailed financial analysis.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Digital Asset Management Marketing Management Paid Search Agency 120

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 4, 2009

My new obsession with Twitter (follow me as @draab) has led to several messages from people who seemed to have trouble choosing between Eloqua and Marketo. I do recognize that they are the best known vendors in the space (with apologies to Vtrenz , whose identity is somewhat blurred since its purchase by Silverpop ).

Demand Generation 120

Demand Generation Cost Marketing Management Demand 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JULY 27, 2009

The new feature is a desktop widget that creates short versions of such links so they can be added to social media responses such as a Twitter post, Facebook page or blog comment. This is major progress, and a capability that I haven’t yet seen from other demand generation or CRM vendors. This both is and isn’t a big deal.

Social Media 120

Social Media Marketing Automation Services Work Management Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

APRIL 28, 2009

As of April 29, I've received 40 responses, of which I've discarded two as incomplete and two because they related to vendors I considered irrelevant ( Zoho and Ad Giants PitchRocket). The survey was promoted on this blog and the Raab Guide site, but primarily via posts on Twitter.

Demand Generation 120

Demand Generation Customer Surveys Demand Marketing Automation Services 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MARCH 9, 2011

a “Twitter prospector” that executes automated searches, weeds out spam posts (identified by third-party links within the post), sends the remaining results to an in-box for review, and lets users apply standard templates to create replies. - tracking within Act-On emails sent through Microsoft Outlook.

Act-On 120

Act-On Marketing Automation Services Work Management Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MARCH 19, 2010

Socialnomics blog by Erik Qualman offers a dynamic video with 33 “salient examples and data points” about social media ROI. The company expected this to yield at least one sale which would cover the entire annual cost of the program. million in tech spending by helping users share ideas on how to solve their problems more cheaply.

Social Media 120

Social Media ROI Examples Media 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 27, 2009

Prospect Profiler’s claim to fame, so near as I can tell, is that it also presents summaries and trends of the prospect activity, per this very nice screenshot from Eloqua: I don’t recall the other vendors doing that. These are already assembled by various vendors, so all that’s needed is a relatively simple integration.

Eloqua 120

Eloqua Paper Profiling Marketing Automation Services 120

Customer Experience Matrix

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Another key feature is that Spredfast supports multiple “voices” of actual or constructed individuals, each having accounts in multiple channels ( Facebook , Twitter , blogs, etc.). The system is a vendor-hosted service. Spredfast supports on-demand posting too. This helps users tailor their posts to encourage coverage.

Social Media 120

Social Media Paid Content Enterprise Management Work Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

Apparently (and I’m taking Acxiom’s word on this), this data is publicly available from most social networks ( Twitter , Facebook , MySpace , LinkedIn , Plaxo and some more specialized ones) once you know someone’s email address. In a way, it seems rather old-fashioned to use social media data as a basis for outbound marketing.

Social Media 120

Social Media Segmentation Marketing Management Media 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JULY 30, 2009

Marketing automation vendors entering this market are essentially betting that they can make their systems powerful enough to be useful and easy enough for a small business to run. If the vendors fail, the business will go to consultants, ad agencies, and other service firms that do the clients’ marketing for them.

Small Business Marketing 120

Small Business Marketing Bundling Work Management Paid Search Agency 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 31, 2010

For more on vendor classifications, see my list of demand generation vendors from last November.) Rather, it has conceded the lower tiers of business marketing to simpler systems and aimed Marketing Studio at marketers who need greater sophistication and will accept higher cost and complexity to get it.

Paid Search Agency 120

Paid Search Agency Work Management Marketing Management Resource Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JUNE 4, 2012

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. This is based on a review of recent vendor announcements plus my own feeling for what’s important. I also added three entries in other categories.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Mobile Marketing Marketing Automation Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 3, 2013

On days when I have nothing else to be cranky about, I sometimes fuss at how business-to-business software vendors hijacked the term “marketing automation” despite its long and relatively honorable history describing systems for consumer marketing. One vendor taking advantage of this opening is RedPoint.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Enterprise Management Resource Management Work Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 31, 2014

MindFire Studio grew out of MindFire’s original Look Who’s Clicking software, which is used by more than 1,100 printers and other graphics arts vendors to add personalized URLs to print promotions. The system supports email, print, SMS, Twitter, and voice messages, typically delivered via integration with third party systems.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Digital Asset Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 28, 2016

Real Magnet , an email service provider turned marketing automation vendor with over 1,000 clients, doesn’t position itself as either. It also stores social media handles for Facebook and Twitter, can send messages through those systems, and can create scores based on social media behaviors such as retweets and likes.

Marketing AI 120

Marketing AI Work Management Campaigns Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 11, 2011

The system can publish directly to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. Given subsequent breaches at other firms, most recently Epsilon and Sony , it's possible that vendors and marketers will start paying more attention to security issues. social sharing. Content can include sharing buttons for a wide range of other systems.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Marketing Automation Lead Ranking Automation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

NOVEMBER 29, 2010

This might foreshadow attrition problems at other vendors. The messages will be sent under the recipient’s own identity in systems including Facebook, MySpace , Twitter , LinkedIn and Digg. Although many demand generation vendors now offer some type of social sharing, Treehouse introduced this feature back in May 2009.

Features 120

Features Marketing Automation Services Marketing Management Salesforce.com 120

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 23, 2009

Marketers and the vendors who support them are working feverishly to harvest the opportunities created by social media. Probably the most common are products that make it easier to post comments or share links via Facebook , LinkedIn , Twitter and other public forums. But social media are for interactions, not broadcasts.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Social Media Work Management Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

SEPTEMBER 27, 2014

There are standard integrations with Twitter, Facebook, and Salesforce.com, as well as a system development kit for integration with mobile apps. The system has about 70 current customers and is sold both directly and to partners such as ad agencies, other software vendors, and marketing service providers.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services Advertising Channels 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 29, 2009

Other vendors in this space apparently use more proprietary approaches. A quick bit of poking around was enough to scare me off: there are many vendors in the space and it is a highly technical topic. The system can also accept streams of XML data over HTTP, which includes RSS feeds, Twitter posts and other Web sources.

Process 120

Process Work Management Marketing Management Vendors 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 6, 2010

For other small business systems, see my list of demand generation vendors from last November.) The commenting system captures a URL, link text and Twitter name in addition to the usual first/last name and email address. Over all, it’s an option worth considering for businesses with limited funding and limited needs.

Small Business Marketing 120

Small Business Marketing Marketing Management Planning Paid Search Agency 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 24, 2015

I’m revving up for the next edition of our B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) report, which will include six first-time entries. I’ve already written about two of those, Inbox25 and AutopilotHQ (formerly Bislr). Here are thumbnails of the others.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Small Business Marketing Paid Search Agency Marketing Report 120

Customer Experience Matrix

NOVEMBER 17, 2010

The new release also adds real-time social media monitoring (directly for Twitter and Facebook , and through Collecta for blogs, YouTube and other sources). So far as I know, most (but not all) marketing automation vendors use same approach as LoopFuse. These features are certainly useful.

Loopfuse 120

Loopfuse Traffic Work Management Paid Search Agency 120