The marketing automation industry has reached an important inflection point. Before this time, B2B marketers had been underinvesting in technology, though the reasons were manifold (lack of perceived value, fit with B2B marketing processes, solution immaturity, etc.). During the last year, implementation of marketing automation solutions has moved beyond early adopters and gone mainstream in a big way. Although there are many reasons for this, hard evidence of significant ROI caught everyone’s attention. The Raab Report forecast has probably been exceeded, and the resulting inflection “elbow” on the adoption graph is sharp.
As with most new industries populated by many innovative players, the consolidation phase has started because larger companies without explicit solutions for this space recognized they need to fill an important gap quickly. Recent industry plays – most with at least some acquired products – are worth reviewing to understand the magnitude of industry transformation:
- The Salesforce Marketing Cloud focuses on social media. It may or may not suffice as a full solution for B2B marketers. Acquisitions: Radian6 and Buddy Media.
- The Adobe Marketing Cloud is aimed a digital marketers and emphasizes analytics and content management. Acquisitions: Omniture, Efficient Frontier and Day Software.
- If you want everything (including the kitchen sink) from a single source, then IBM Marketing Management is for you. Acquisitions: Unica, TeaLead and CoreMetrics
- SAP Solutions Marketing is also comprehensive toolset, but emphasizes a fully integrated, 360-degree view of prospects and customers.
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM beefed up their offering by acquiring MarketingPilot.
- Oracle’s offering is the Siebel Marketing Suite. Acquisitions: Market2Lead and Eloqua.
- And last (but certainly not least): CallidusCloud acquired LeadFormix.
There are other players who of course aspire to be bigger players in marketing automation:
- ExactTarget acquired Pardot.
- Teradata
- SAS
Last year we wrote about Gartner’s assertion that CMOs may have larger budgets than CIOs by 2017. All of these trends dovetail nicely and the momentum will continue. In the long term we’ll undoubtedly see more comprehensive offerings for marketing from a single source at the expense of architectures assembled with point solutions from multiple vendors. Expect to see some terrific innovations along the way.
We are delighted that marketing is becoming more of a science than an art; and at the same time is moving from a technology laggard to an automation leader in the enterprise.
