“We started as a Get Found App helping you get more visitors and convert leads,” said Brian Halligan, Hubspot CEO and Co-Founder. Now we need to convert those leads to customers which is the basis of our Marketing Suite.”

The first step in the process was the launch this week of an enhanced contact database, segmentation tool, and email marketing engine. This functionality was demonstrated by Chris O’Donnell, Director of Product Management who came to Hubspot as part of the Performable acquisition last year.

Contact Database
- Universal marketing database that is integrated with landing pages, email, and other features.
- Track your contact’s online browsing history, email history, form submissions, and social media information.

Segmentation
- Create static and dynamic lists (which automatically update) based on any contact field, previous list membership and form submission.

Email
- Salesforce integration allows the email to come from Lead Owner and will automatically track the campaign.
- Track overall opens and clicks and then drill down and to see the actions of each individual contact.
- Social network sharing.
- Email results update on your screen in real time.

Automated Workflows (Available Later this Year)
- Automated emails sent in sequence.
- Modify the Contact record, send email, change list status
- Lifecycle Stage is a drop down.

Social In Box (In Beta Test)
- This feature improves upon user experience of more established players like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite.
- Adds LinkedIn and Google alerts with SEO grade to Twitter and Facebook feeds.
- Information listed in relevance verus chronological order.
- Single versus multicolumn approach.
- It also includes Google Alerts. SEO Grade of Google Alert (NY Times or Blog).
- LinkedIn people can sort based on job title (CMO or Marketing). You can watch them.

Much of this functionality already exists in other marketing automation vendors but Hubspot is not concerned they are late to the party. “We see the market as largely untapped,” said Christopher O’Donnell. “We want to find the right features and really put together a user experience that is Apple easy. We are trying to set the design higher and create a modern application that feels as good as anything on the web.”

CTO and Co-Founder, Dharmesh Shaw, concluded the event with a vision of the future in his presentation, How to Make Marketing Automation Better.

Humanize

Make Marketing People Love. “I would like to see marketing become a noble profession,” said Shaw. “Create engagement, not an email list. Create a community of users. We want to create a relationship with all these customers in one platform.”

Simplify

“The industry kept adding knobs & dials. Most execs that have purchased marketing automation will admit behind closed doors that it has become glorified email marketing software. The recent innovation has been how to improve the workflow process. The real answer is that you should not need those things at all. The software should do all the work.”

“We need Intelligent Lead Scoring. Is the fact someone downloaded a white paper a higher value versus an eBook. 10% of lead base is not called because your point structure. The dream is to allow everything to be compared in the system. Every customer we add to the mix adds value to other customers.”

Integrate

Use the web as input. “Website crawlers that will identify email URL and take information from website like what industry, B2B or B2C.

Timing is money. “Optimize email sends based on when users past email activity or tweet times.

Write great headlines. Rule the world. “A/B Testing of subject lines that  will automatically send the better performing headline.”

Personalize the entire experience and increase happiness. “We know when a person visits a website and blog and it looks the same for each visitor. Why not have message pop up on a website when a specific person visits the site. Most blogs are chronological and that is not logical for all companies.”

All Hubspot employees are posted on wall in order of hire date.

“This stuff is only possible if everything is on the same platform. We love WordPress but it would take forever to make this happen,” said Shaw.

On average Hubspot customers get a 32% increase in leads per month and the company has over 7,000 customers with $28M in revenue in 2011. The first 3 years of growth came from small businesses with no marketing staff and 1 – 20 employees and has expanded to companies with 4 – 5 marketers and 20 – 200 people. The next target audience would be 200 – 2000 employees where Hubspot believes 70% of their needs are met on with the current Hubspot feature set.

“The ultimate goal is to grow an anchor company in Boston like amazon.com, salesforce.com, ebay, Google, Zappos,” said Halligan. A number of companies have tried to purchase Hubspot but Halligan has turned them down. “I want this company to stay in here for 100 years.”

Mantra that drives the Hubspot brand.

The restaurant industry has slowly embraced certain aspects of the food truck phenomenon, delving into social media and marketing at a hyperlocal level. But the food truck trend has lessons for industries of all kinds, even outside food services.

For marketers with ever-shrinking budgets who are under constant pressure to deliver results, food trucks are unconventional role models for using limited resources, finding new opportunities and embracing new media. The following are just a few of the ways you should be modeling your marketing department after this exploding industry.

Stay lean

One of the reasons food trucks can be so bold with their menu options and marketing techniques is that they have streamlined risks. A traditional restaurant risks millions of dollars with any major change. That financial risk is lower with food trucks, due to the much smaller overhead, and this in turn fuels creativity and innovation.

Marketing Lesson: By locking your marketing into a traditional large budget line item such as a commercial or major newspaper ad, you’re putting yourself in the same position as the restaurants. Instead, try investing in newer, cheaper content channels such as blogs or video. The smaller financial investment allows you and your team to invest elsewhere–such as with new product selection or channel strategies.

Do your research

Because of their smaller scale, food trucks are often a labor of love for one or two people. With so much individual stake in the venture, food truck owners place considerable effort into researching their industry and clientele to offer unique and/or personalized offerings. This is why the variety in food items offered across the industry is so vast – each truck has to be well branded and differentiated from the competition in order to succeed.

Marketing Lesson: If you are not doing constant research on your industry, your customers and your competitors, you’re likely slipping behind the competition. In the technological age, industries can change rapidly. Customer tastes are fickle, competitors come out of nowhere and new products can quickly leave your business irrelevant. You must constantly assess the success of your marketing initiatives to determine if your strategies are still effective. Marketing automation solutions have made understanding campaign effectiveness and return on investment much easier for marketers in the last several years through closed-loop reporting, competitive SEO analysis, and detailed analytics.

Embrace New Media

From the start, food trucks have been champions of new media. They use social media to build demand, promote their products, and build communities. Sites like roaminghunger.com have even been established to aggregate food truck tweets to help local foodies track down their favorite truck.

Marketing Lesson: You’re probably already using social media in some way for your marketing efforts. But make sure you’re using it for activities that deliver maximum effect. Posting for the sake of posting is the fastest way to lose your followers and subscribers. Use social channels for activities consistent with your marketing goals and in ways that provide value for your audience. Companies like Deloitte are giving their customers a voice by using twitter for fast customer service and insight.

Create a sense of community

Food trucks often create a friendly experience for their customers. Trucks become social gathering spaces for the communities they serve–building their brand, fostering loyalty and creating personal connections with customers. Developing this unique community around their businesses has helped food trucks thrive across the country.

Marketing lesson: The modern customer expects a more personal experience with brands. Marketing can no longer be “pushed” onto customers. Your marketing efforts should focus on developing customer relationships on multiple levels. Even large companies like Coca-Cola have begun to swap their traditional marketing methods for strategies focused on providing value to their customers through relevant content and social media engagement.

Streamline Operations

Food truck owners readily experiment with new technology such as mobile payments in place of more expensive POS systems.

Marketing Lesson: In the age of big data, marketers have no excuse for not delivering accurate ROI numbers for all marketing activities and comprehensive analysis of how consumers move through the sales funnel. Marketing automation platforms have become incredibly powerful and cost effective for companies of all sizes to accomplish this measurement.

These strategies have allowed food trucks to create business models that are more adaptable, agile and better suited to rapidly changing times and trends. Taking a similar approach to your marketing by operating leanly, fostering creativity, developing community and streamlining processes will help make your marketing a better business partner. The marketing department with the most impact is no longer the one with the largest budget and ad spend, but the one willing to shake off  traditional marketing paradigms and take their message directly to their customers.

About the author:  Adam Blitzer is co-founder and COO at Pardot.  He is responsible for product management,marketing, and operations. He is a frequent speaker at industry events such as Dreamforce, SugarCon, and American Marketing Association panels.

“As marketing undergoes a sea change, there’s no company more exciting to jump on board with than Eloqua,” Ms. Melin said. “I’ve been an Eloqua customer for many years and I’ve seen firsthand the transformative impact the technology and processes can have on a company’s revenue. Eloqua is raising the bar for marketers everywhere, and I’m thrilled to continue that work.”

Ms. Melin has led marketing and demand generation efforts at several successful businesses throughout the Bay Area. She comes to Eloqua from Taleo, which was recently acquired by Oracle Corporation, where she was CMO. Prior to Taleo, she served as CMO of Polycom Inc., where she helped turn the brand into a leader in unified communications. Before joining Polycom, Ms. Melin was CMO at Hyperion Solutions Corp. (now Oracle Hyperion), where she led a brand strategy that led to renewed recognition within the Business Intelligence space. Prior to Hyperion Solutions, she led marketing services at PeopleSoft.

“Marketers of Heidi’s caliber are hard to find, and we’re more than excited to have her on board,” said Mr. Payne. “For years, she’s been both a source of inspiration and expertise at some of the fastest growing companies in the Bay Area, where the pressure and need to stand out is intense. We know she’ll continue to drive the Eloqua brand forward as we work to bring our customers the best products, services and people in the market.”

We reached out to former Eloqua CMO Brian Kardon and he is covered by a non-compete agreement with Eloqua and will not be staying in the marketing automation space.  According the Joe Chernov, “Brian is still a friend of the company.”

They provided a set of criteria for each element in the matrix and you can read their definitions here.

SEO

Ability to track keywords, approximate rank, track leads and customers by keyword, crawl a website and make on-page SEO suggestions, analyze inbound and competitor links.

PPC

Ability to track and analyze visits, leads and customers from paid search & manage bids.

Blogging

Full blog offering, including out-of-the box blog post SEO optimization, SEO suggestions, social media auto publishing and social media sharing.

(Note that WordPress and Tumblr do not have SEO or social optimization pre-installed, but do offer paid and free plugins that can be installed by advanced users.)

CMS

Full content management system, allowing marketers to create professional, dynamic, updateable websites without knowledge of HTML, CSS or JavaScript (although advanced users can make use of these coding languages).

Social Media

Ability to monitor, track, publish and schedule social media posts. Ability to track visits, leads and customers from various social outlets. Ability to easily integrate social media sharing with other marketing channels like website, blog and email.

Landing Pages

Ability to easily (without knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS) create advanced landing pages with forms that integrate with a marketing database or CRM. Ability to host those landing pages on your own domain or sub domain. Ability to A/B test different versions of a landing page. Landing page analytics that allowing users to track views, conversions and sources of traffic to their landing pages.

Marketing Database

Ability to collect or import leads and contacts into a central database, associate them with an online tracking cookie, and track their activity on your site. Ability to track the source of leads generated through your website. Ability to create a custom, dynamic lead score based on online activity. Ability to search and segment contacts inside your marketing database based on online activity. Ability to create static and dynamic lists. Ability to take action on those lists such as sending an email or enrolling leads into a lead nurturing campaign. Ability to connect with a CRM.

Email Marketing

Ability to send email campaigns and track email analytics.

Marketing Automation

Ability to send timed, drip campaigns, or behavior triggered email.

Marketing Analytics

Basic web analytics. Ability to associate visitors, leads and customers with specific traffic sources and marketing initiatives. Ability to do closed loop reporting in one system.

As well as the ability to track landing page conversion rates, email click through rates, blog post views comments and inbound links, SEO and paid search tracking and monitor social media conversations.

Let us know if you agree with their marketing automation comparison and how they have broken out the competitive landscape.

1. Marketing Automation Gets You Leads

This is the biggest misconception out there about marketing automation, so let’s clear it up right now. Marketing automation does not get you leads; inbound marketing does. In fact, 25% of your database expires every year, so it’s crucial to maintain inbound marketing efforts alongside marketing automation to ensure your database doesn’t slowly wither away. When done correctly, however, marketing automation does help you make the most of those leads by nurturing them and navigating them through the decision-making process until they decide they’re ready to buy (and even after they become a customer, to make sure they stay happy!).

2. Marketing Automation Means ‘Set It and Forget It’

This is one of the easiest ways to make sure your marketing automation investment is a complete waste. Marketing automation software can offer robust functionality, but without an insightful marketer behind it to continually analyze and tweak campaigns, all that functionality is useless. Is your click-through rate on an email low? Test a new subject line. Is one segment of your database opting out of emails at a faster rate than others? Perhaps your send frequency is too high, or your messaging isn’t quite hitting the mark. No one (and I mean no one) gets it right the first time. Keep coming back to check in on your data, adjust what didn’t work, and do more of what works well.

3. Marketing Automation Helps With Email Deliverability

You can definitely still spam people with marketing automation, and marketing automation software cannot help you get your emails through spam filters. Marketers still have to understand and implement email marketing best practices and avoid things like sending irrelevant emails, emailing too frequently, and emailing people who haven’t opted in to their communications. Between sophisticated SPAM filters, email overload, and advancements like Gmail’s priority inbox, marketers have to ensure lists are segmented and emails address something the prospect cares about. If not, messages will get weeded out of inboxes in a jiffy, no matter how sophisticated your marketing automation software is.

4. Marketing Automation Personalizes Communication

Marketing automation scales personalized communication; it doesn’t create it. The onus is still on the marketer to create buyer personas and interpret leads’ behaviors to align their needs at any given time in the buying cycle with the message they should receive. Marketing automation software is not capable of gleaning what to send, when to send it, and to whom it should be sent all on its own; it needs a marketer (usually with the help of the sales team) to tell it all of these things.

5. Marketing Automation Sells For You

No, marketing automation software is not the salesperson of the 21st century. Marketing automation software simply helps bubble up the people that are inherently more “sold” on you because you’ve done a good job creating educational content and getting it in front of them. You still have to create and optimize that content, promote it in social media, drive visitors to landing pages with killer offers, and (this is the biggie) ensure your marketing automation software is running in such a way that it delivers the right content at the right time, and it understands how to identify those people who are ready to speak to a salesperson.

The major caveat to all of this (and if I haven’t emphasized this enough, here it comes…) is that marketing automation only works when done correctly. Approach marketing automation as a tool to improve your inbound marketing, not a replacement for it, and learn how to interpret visitor activity for effective use of the tool as part of your inbound marketing strategy.

What other misconceptions have you encountered about marketing automation? Have you implemented it as part of your own inbound marketing strategy?

Click here to read the entire article.

To learn about the differences between Marketo and Eloqua, I talked with four of the smartest people in marketing automation:

This post offers an in-depth look at the similarities and differences between marketing automation platforms Eloqua and Marketo. Marketo and Eloqua are the two dominant players in B2B marketing automation in terms of market share and in terms of product functionality.

Please note: if this marketing automation comparison is insufficient to help you make your vendor selection, feel free to send me an email with details about what you’re looking for and I’ll make a recommendation.

General Product Differences

Marketo
According to Gaurav Kotak Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Marketo, one of the key differentiators between Marketo and Eloqua is the cohesion of the product. “We haven’t had to do a major re-platforming,” he noted in our recent conversation. In his opinion, this has led to three areas of distinction compared with Eloqua:

Eloqua
I recently spoke with Jim Williams, Director of Product Marketing at Eloqua. Here’s what he had to say about Eloqua vs Marketo:

“I think of the differences between Eloqua and Marketo on two levels. First, the primary differentiator isn’t product based, it’s knowledge and service based. Eloqua’s model is to get our customers to success. That includes many different facets of the organization, such as our focus on teaching. Almost 100 people have graduated from Eloqua University, a program that is all about demand generation and skills. I think it’s a very different approach than that of Marketo.”

“The second differentiator comes down to our product. We have a deeper product; one that offers more features and more flexibility. It’s more robust, it’s more scalable. We’ve just been perfecting it for longer than Marketo.”

Marketo
“Two years ago, that statement was probably true,” said Kotak. “In the interim, Marketo has grown tremendously in terms of our product. I’m not going to say we have deeper functionality than Eloqua, but I’m going to say that where we win is on ease-of-use. However, the exception here is our revenue cycle analytics product, which we believe has far deeper functionality than the analytics tool Eloqua offers.”

“Another example of where Marketo really shines is in thought leadership,” continued Kotak. “Our definitive guides to marketing automation have been downloaded over 100,000 times. Our most popular guides are around topics like lead nurturing, lead scoring and metrics & analytics.”

“Finally,” said Kotak, “The third difference between Marketo and Eloqua is the transparency in subscription list pricing. We list our pricing for all contacts. At Marketo, we talk about our own cost per lead and channel distribution because we believe that transparency is good for the whole community.”

Support & Client Focus

Marketo
“We’re fanatical about customer support,” said Lori Bush Shepard, VP of Corporate Marketing at Marketo. “It’s so ingrained in the company, we see it as part of our DNA. The first Marketo employee, beyond the founders, eventually became the vice president of user experience. Everything is focused on customer success.”

Marketo seems to be putting their money where their mouth is, when in 2011 they hired a heavy-hitter VP of support – customers report high levels of satisfaction with Marketo’s support offerings.

Eloqua
Eloqua has one of the best support engines, from behind the scenes. They’ll pick up the phone right away and solve your problems. Their approach is very much around customer success and understanding a client’s business model.

I recently spoke with Brian Kardon, CMO of Eloqua, and asked him to explain what kinds of companies are best served by choosing Eloqua as their marketing automation vendor.

“We serve all types of customers – in different industries, in different countries, large and small, across a wide spectrum of sophistication,” said Kardon. “In general, if you want to get up and running fast, and have ambitions to report on marketing’s contribution to revenue, Eloqua is a great choice.”

According to Kardon, Eloqua is well known for the robustness and flexibility of its platform. “Eloqua’s focus is on customer success,” continued Kardon. “We have a dedicated team of success managers, world-class best practices, Eloqua University and the only “success guarantee” in the industry. Our rapid time-to-value means campaigns, lead scoring and nurturing, CRM and web integration – in days! Our customer service has been setting the industry standard for years. The most demanding customers in the world choose Eloqua.”

Marketo
Gaurav Kotak has a similar vision of Eloqua’s ideal client. “While I think we’re more successful with smaller and medium companies than Eloqua,” he said, “we do require at least one (or half) of a marketing professional at the business. They need that person, if the company doesn’t have that person, we cannot cater to them effectively.”

Eloqua Pricing

Marketo Pricing

Problem #1: Lack of Proper Segmentation

We know that many of you struggle with the segmentation of your database due to incomplete data and you just don’t have the bandwidth to create highly segmented content. This is a huge issue that affects your ROI, your brand, and your ability to move leads through the customer lifecycle. If a lead opens an email and determines that the content isn’t relevant, your brand is affected and you will notice an influx of unsubscribes.

Tip: Even if your data isn’t 100% clean, you should still attempt to segment based on what you have. Have a brainstorming session with your team to come up with customer personas and build your content based on profiles that you develop. Each segment should have different messaging based on what you believe is relevant to them. Additionally, make sure that you are creating highly segmented lists in Eloqua or Marketo. For new leads coming in, this can be based off of asset downloads, Google Adwords etc.

Problem #2: No Reporting or Follow-through for Lead Nurture Programs
This happens all too often based on lack of knowledge, lack of resources, or a variety of other reasons. If you have developed lead nurture programs, do you know how they are performing? Creating a lead nurture program requires a lot of effort and skills. Once you have created your program and leads start being funneled through, it is easy to forget about it. Because the process becomes more automated, the analytics become secondary and leads become lost due to a lack of follow-through from sales.

Tip: It is important to have a lead nurture follow-up plan in place when you launch a new program. Report out on progress in a weekly metrics meeting and always work on further fine-tuning your emails. Make sure your programs have highly segmented content and assign a sales lead that is in charge of following up with potential prospects. Lead nurture programs always need to be optomized. It should be on your monthly to-do list to go through and assess the programs that you currently have live.

Problem #3: Confusing Calls to Action
There are so many things you want to get across in your emails — download a whitepaper, take a survey, or sign up for a free promotional product. But, what happens when you overload your lead with too many calls-to-action? Well, they don’t do any of them and you don’t get the CTR that you need to justify the campaign.

Tip: You need to really determine what the highest value call to action might be, and stick to that one. It is important that you direct a lead’s attention to only one thing so they know exactly what the email is asking them to do. For a lead nurture, spread your calls to action out over the life of the program — ask them to download a white paper in one email, ask them to fill out your survey in the next. We know that it is tough to reel yourself in, but by providing your leads with a specific direction, you will see the results you’re looking for.

Problem #4: Email Pacing
With an email program, pacing is very important. If you send too many emails, then you will turn off your buyer and they will perceive you as being spammy. And if you don’t send enough emails, then they will forget who you are and it will be more difficult for you to create a strong connection. Sometimes, in certain businesses, a segmented list of certain titles needs to be used by multiple business lines and it is challenging to work together to determine a proper email schedule.

Tip:  A lead should not be hit more than every 3 weeks or so, but every business has a different timeline. Schedule weekly calendaring meetings with your team to determine when blasts are being sent out and who they are being sent to. Also, don’t forget to take into account any ongoing nurture programs that are happening. The more organized your team is, the more control over your database you have. Collaborate to develop a calendar that works for everyone — different business lines and customers alike.

Problem #5: Lack of testing
Too often an email nurture program is created and not properly tested. You have spent so much time on it and you want to get it live NOW! But, you don’t want to wait for the program to run its course, as that could take weeks or months. But, because there is a lack of testing your programs might not be running right.

Tips: When developing a lead nurture program always make sure you test it. Add a few of your coworkers into the campaign so they can experience it from a lead’s perspective. When you are new to marketing automation, you might have missed a few important details that will come out only when you test. You want to make sure that your programs are running 100% before you go live with them.

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One has to wonder how much of the decision was driven by Saleforce.com’s decision to use Eloqua and their marketing automation solution or Salesforce.com’s investment in Hubspot.

The following interview with Jon Miller from Marketo was provided courtesy of the team at MASG.

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Lead Nurturing

There are two main reasons marketers struggle when trying to get started with lead nurturing:

1. Overcomplicating Lead Nurturing: They make it more complicated than it needs to be. There are a million and one different ways a lead can move through your sales and marketing funnel. If you try to create a customized nurturing campaign for each, you will be quickly overwhelmed by all the options.
2. Content Deficiencies: Many marketers don’t have enough content at their disposal to keep lead nurturing campaigns interesting and relevant throughout the sales and marketing funnel. This leads to emails that don’t add a lot of value to the sales cycle, preventing leads from moving further through the funnel.