Marketing Automation Podcast with Jon Miller from Marketo (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download).

Our guest for this episode of the Marketing Automation Podcast is Jon Miller, the VP of Marketing of Marketo.  Before co-founding Marketo, Jon held positions at Epiphany, Exchange Partners, and Gemini Consulting.

The interview covers the following topics…

- Background on Marketo

- What makes Marketo different

- The biggest mistake marketers make with marketing automation

- Jon’s take on IBM’s purchase of Unica

- Jon’s new role with Marketo Demand Center

Here is an excerpt from the interview…

I see a lot of marketers who want to boil the ocean when they get started with marketing automation.  They have these grand visions of all the lead nurturing they will be doing and all the scoring they will be doing and how they are going to be transforming the lead to revenue process.  As a result of all the stuff they want to do they get into an analysis paralysis.  They end up doing white board session after white board session and hiring consultants on how to do all of these things before they deliver the first drip of value.

I think it makes so much more sense to get started.  My phrase is think big, start small and act quickly.  So have that big vision but then just do something.  Build five lead scoring rules and just get started with that.  Then tomorrow do something more.

I have been using the Marketo for 2 1/2 years and we are still evolving and adapting the system.  We are still making it better.  So it is not something you should just think of as an implementation but think of it as a journey. And what is great about that is you are going to end up in a much different place than you would have if you would have built everything up front because you are going to be learning along the way.

Click here to listen to the entire interview.

Last week IBM announced that it will purchase marketing automation software maker Unica for roughly $480 million.  IBM is a Unica customer and shares a number of clients like Nordstrom’s and Best Buy.

Unica now joins IBM’s stable of recent acquisitions to join it’s WebSphere platform like…

• Cast Iron Systems – SaaS integration software
• Coremetrics – Web analytics
• Sterling Commerce – B2B integration, community management, secure file transfers, selling, order management, and logistics management.

IBM’s stated goal is “to help customers generate a consistent and relevant cross-channel brand experience to promote cusotmer loyalty and satisfaction”.  Adobe gave a similar rationale after purchasing web analytics provider, Omniture and content management vendor, Day  Software.

So what does all this all mean for the marketing automation space?

1. Marketing automation is a key function to the overall enterprise software environment. Aprimo CEO, Bill Godrey put it best when he said, “…this acquisition validates our position that marketing must become a top priority for businesses and is in the midst of a revolutionary change. The market for marketing solutions and integrated marketing software is hot and growing.”  IBM is one of the most respected technology companies in world and they clearly see the value that marketing automation adds to their services business.
2. Consolidation will continue in the marketing automation. The marketing automation space is crowded and it makes sense for smaller companies to merge in order to get economies of scale.  Also, look for larger software companies like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce.com, Netsuite, or Microsoft to aquire a marketing automation company to complete their product line.

CRM expert David Taber provides some good perspective on how to properly track leads in his recent article, How to Improve Your CRM Lead Tracking.

Taber notes that almost every CRM system can track a lead source through conversion and close.  While this sounds good on paper, most customers don’t make their first purchase as a result of one marketing tactic (email, trade show, banner ad, etc).  This is even more true for B2B transactions that require a complex sales process.  Taber advocates creating campaigns to keep track each time there is a customer touchpoint….

In B2B companies, it’s not at all unusual to have at least one outbound e-mail a month to every lead or contact in the system. And hopefully there will be some customer response, such as registering for a Webinar or doing a download. Every single one of these actions or responses is recorded as a separate campaign member “event.” If you’ve got long sales cycles or long-running customer relationships, a contact’s campaign history can grow to 100 records or more. This gives your sales reps tremendous insight into the state of the customer’s knowledge (and hopefully the evolution of their interest/attitude) before they pick up the phone.

More importantly, these records provide the basis for much more intelligent CRM automation. Each lead and contact will have a more detailed profile, so marketing can segment them better. You also have a record of what each individual has done over time, so your marketing automation system can do a much better “behavioral scoring” of the lead for filtering and prioritization. If you have a customer support solution-suggestion system, it will have much more complete keywords to narrow the documents it suggests in your customer self-support portal.

I agree with David’s article and thought it would be fun to show some screen shots of Salesforce campaign structure.

Here is an example of campaign detail.

You have the ability to nest campaigns under a master campaign like this.

Here is an example of how Salesforce tracks campaigns at the lead and contact level.

This all leads to a handy dandy marketing ROI report that can be segmented various ways.

Read entire article, How To Improve Your CRM Lead Tracking

Learn more about Salesforce Campaign Management

Manticore Technology recently published a downloadable ebook called The Quintessential Marketing Automation Guidebook.  This is essentially a collection of articles by industry thought leaders.  In order to save you time, I have summarized the table of contents to see if you would be interested in learning more…

1. Candid Letter from Sales to Marketing – Jill Konrath, Selling to Big Companies
2. Process, People, and Content: The Keys to Success with Marketing Automation Technology – Craig Rosenberg, Focus
3. You Need Good Technology, But… – Jeff Erramouspe, Manticore Technology
4. Supercharge Your Demand Generation with Marketing Automation – Sue Hay, BeWhys Marketing Inc. and Cari Baldwin, Bluebird Strategies
5. Focus on the Marketing Metrics That Matter – Andrew Gaffney, DemandGen Report
6. Use Content Intelligence to Drive Pipeline Momentum – Ardath Albee, Marketing Interactions, Inc.
7. Why Marketing Automation is a Must-Have For Every B2B VP of Sales – Robert Walmsley, Tailwind Strategies
8. Conversion Stack: Marketing Automation for Performance Marketers – Brian Massy, Conversion Scientist
9. 6 Steps to FInd Untapped Revenue in Your Marketing Database – Jep Castelein, LeadSloth
10. A Roadmap to Marketing Automation Success – Jonathan Block, SiriusDecisions

Download the ebook here

Example of Dukky Landing Page for Gamefly

Entrepreneur magazine recently featured a marketing platform called Dukky which promises to generate ‘viral campaigns with print, email, social media and mobile marketing platform that will increase customer response by eight times more than traditional marketing.

While it is not a pure marketing automation play, Dukky’s solution features high level campaign management, customer landing apges, viral peer sharing and real time analytics.  Within months of launching in January 2010 it has landed more than 100 clients like Chik-fil-A restaurants and Stein Mart department stores.

“This is going to be a game-changing technology,” says Richard Birt, senior vice president of customer analytics and insights at KSL Media, an agency that buys advertising for clients. “In 30 years’ time, I consider it one of the top three groundbreaking technologies in database management.”

Dukky uses a PURL with an offer on the mailer that  requires a visit to a microsite created exclusively for the individual customer. It mirrors the direct-mail campaign and is where a coupon can be found for print out. But before the payoff, the customer is required to share more information which is then collected and tracked via Dukky’s platform. The final step is to offer a way for customer to share with friends via social media.

Other direct marketers have used these tactics together but Dukky’s value proposition is having the entire platform all under one roof.

Read the entire article.

Infusionsoft announced a new set of features and enhancements that include:

• Email Builder (BETA) – The Email Builder is a new tool with drag-and-drop functionality.
• Getting Started Guide – Infusionsoft’s ‘Double Your Sales Success Path’ is now built inside the application in a widget that guides users through each and every step to launch email marketing 2.0 campaigns.
• Outlook® and iContact® Import Tools – In addition to making the data import wizard in the application easier and faster, Infusionsoft has expanded the pre-configured vendor profiles. Now users can save time moving data over with one-click imports of people from their Microsoft Outlook® address book and iContact® email marketing provider lists.
• Real-Time UPS Shipping Integration – Users can now automatically calculate shipping rates when using the Infusionsoft shopping cart feature.
• Free Trial: No Credit Card Required – Anyone interested in Infusionsoft can sign up for a free 15-day trial with no credit card required.

Read more

The U.S. Patent Office has issued a Notice of Allowance for Genius.com’s “deep clickflow” tracking server technology. The technology enables customers of Genius.com the ability to instantly track prospect visits and behavior on their corporate websites without modifying the website.

Genius.com expects that a first patent will be issued relating to this technology in the summer of 2010. The technology was co-invented by the company’s co-founders David Thompson and Robert Seidl, as well as engineer Khai Doan.

In addition to instant tracking of visitors to the website, the patent also covers the company’s dynamic content insertion technology. This technology enables the proxy server to insert customized messages for visitors, as well as collaboration “widgets” such as chat clients onto the web site as a visitor browses through the site.

Read more

Enterprise software giant, Oracle, has acquired the intellectual property assets of marketing automation provider Market2Lead for an undisclosed sum.  What makes the purchase interesting is that Market2Lead has never been considered a  leader in the marketing automation space.

Which begs the question, why would Oracle want to roll Market2Lead’s technology into Oracle’s CRM software?  This is a question that we will try to answer in a later post.

This announcement comes on the heels of news that CDC Software is making a major investment in on-demand marketing automation company Marketbright.  Once again, no details for the investment were released.

I have posted several times that CRM rival Salesforce.com may buy a marketing automation company.  The only thing I see stopping them is the backlash that it would get from current marketing automation partners.

Christopher Doran, Manticore Technology VP of Marketing, had an interesting take on key questions to determine if your company would benefit from a marketing automation solution…

1. Do you have more inbound leads than your sales team can contact in a timely manner?
2. Do you or someone on your team spend a significant amount of time manually sending leads over to sales?
3. Do you have enough content (or the time and resources to create it) to implement functionality, such as lead nurturing?  If your answer is yes to any of the these questions, you would probably benefit from a marketing automation platform.  If you don’t have any of those pain points and are more interested in using it for lead generation campaigns and customer communication, you could probably just use a less expensive email marketing tool for the time being and implement marketing automation down the road.

Read more