Marketing Automation and Circular Saws
Posted by Terry Hedlund | Posted in Demand Generation | Posted on 16-03-2009
Marketing Automation is hot. As a tool, it is as important to a Marketer as a saw is to a Carpenter. But, as a Carpenter wanting to purchase a saw - the most difficult decision he or she may have to make in choosing one vendor over another is what the color should be. Why? Because standards have been established in the tool industry. If I decide I need a circular saw, I know exactly how the product should work - I pull the trigger, the blade spins and then I can cut my material. If I want to purchase a circular saw, I go to the tool isle of my local hardware store and check the specifications on each vendor’s product. After I do a comparison I see that the products are virtually identical… except for the color.
Not so in the Marketing Automation industry. There are at least 85 vendors that claim to offer some form of a Marketing Automation product. Check out the list for yourself. Each vendor defines Marketing Automation a little differently. Some say personalized emails and auto-responders qualify them as a Marketing Automation product vendor. Others say landing-pages with contact forms make them a contender. Some are CRM vendors trying to morph their product and others are simply email service providers. As a Marketer trying to decide the best Marketing Automation product to purchase (because of course we want to purchase the best for the budget we have), it is almost impossible to make a really well informed decision.
Forester Research recently published a report that narrowed the list of vendors down to 10. I think they did a good job. Check out the report here.
In an effort to try and further understand what we should be looking for in a Marketing Automation product and how to better define a “standard” for what a Marketing Automation product should offer - we did a small experiment. We visited each of the 10 vendor’s web sites from the Forester Research report and gathered a list of their product features as described by them. The list contained a total of 350 words which we then entered into a word cloud. Here is the visual representation of those words (the most frequently mentioned words are those that are most prominent):
Then we adjusted the word cloud to only show the 10 most frequent words. Here are the results:
Maybe these 10 words can serve as a starting point for a “standard” on what qualifies as a Marketing Automation product. If your product does not offer these 10 features, maybe you should be in different isle of the marketing tool store?
Nice stuff! I like the word cloud — despite being a vendor, anything we can do to bring clarity to the segment, the better. Another way to find out the top vendors is to Google the words “marketing automation”.
One minor point about the Forrester report you mention: it is actually a Jupiter report, and Forrester has removed it from their site. They’re working on a new one as we speak.
I feel another aspect that makes any marketing automation solution ideal is the 3rd party integration. That is, through API or other backend coopoeration with third-party services.
API would be another core feature I would look for in software. Many successful Infusionsoft clients have really run our marketing automation solution through its paces via the API.
To match the metaphor of circular saws… I would put it like this:
A circular saw is great, but when you need to change blades, you can do it, or if you need an extension cord, you should have an easy way to plug it in and go so you can work anywhere and cut any kind of wood without dulling. An API is no different, it supplements the power of your software.
~Joseph
I blog here: http://www.infusionblog.com/
for Infusionsoft: http://www.infusionsoft.com/
[...] Automation, have a look at this insightful post by Terry Hedlund on the Demand Gen Biz Blog titled Marketing Automation and Circular Saws keywords or dfeatures to look out for in a software to identify if it’s really a marketing [...]