As we talked to Marketing Automation experts to prepare our recent white paper 52 Secrets to Marketing Automation Success, we saw an outpouring of fascinating predictions and analyses of the industry. Some discussions were simply too good not to share in full. Case in point, Jonathan Block and Jay Famico of SiriusDecisions prepared an extensive amount of research, all very enlightening about the future of the industry.
When asked to provide their predictions on what will impact Marketing Automation in the next twelve months, Jonathan and Jay offered the following landscape evaluation: Expect to see changes to marketplace dynamics, technology, and customer behavior.
Marketplace dynamics: During the next 12 months the MAP market will continue to consolidate, especially in regard to those MAPs that cater to the small and midsized business (SMB) market. Non-traditional MAP offerings will also enter the fray, as content management systems (CMS) continue to incorporate MAP functionality into their product offerings. Given the growing revenue opportunity in the channel marketing and management (CMM) software category and the degree it aligns with the MAP space, we expect many vendors to expand their MAP offering to channel organizations through acquisition or by directly building-in this functionality.
Technology
Dynamic Web sites: Dynamically aligning high-value Web site content to Web site visitors increases conversion rates. For example, imagine a contact from a pharmaceutical company will see different calls to action and messaging on an organization’s corporate Web site than an individual from a manufacturing organization. By optimizing a Web site’s calls to action and messaging based upon what’s known or inferred about the site visitor, significant conversion improvements may be obtained. Several vendors currently provide this functionality including HubSpot, Neolane and Unica.
Basic workflows: The development and execution of MAP programs often requires the orchestration of many resources and mandatory approval steps. To support this process, we are noting that several vendors are focused on incorporating basic workflow and approval processes into their product offering and/or partnering with workflow management vendors.
Customer behavior
Advanced scoring: Currently, only a handful of B2B companies use a statistical approach for lead scoring. Most still create a scoring model from an assumptive experience-based scoring development process. This noted, we have observed a growing trend in organizations where there’s both strong marketing and sales alignment as well as the application of advanced statistics (e.g. curvilinear regression) to create more precise scoring models. We believe this trend will continue given the increased focus of data capture, data management and data utilization in B2B marketing organizations.
Customer marketing: Currently, only 8 percent of B2B organizations leverage their investment in MAPs to drive cross selling. As organizations mature in their use of marketing automation, we are seeing a growing trend of those organizations leveraging their MAP investment beyond net new demand generation to go deeper into the demand waterfall. We call this lifecycle marketing.
For more great insights from Jonathan and Jay, as well as thought leaders from HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, Social Media Today and Third Idea Consulting, download our free white paper 52 Secrets to Marketing Automation Success.
Marketers, have you yet adopted a Marketing Automation platform in your business? How has it benefitted your marketing efforts? Tell us on Twitter.
