At one point I could have given you a pretty clear, concise definition of what this term meant.  Now, as with CRM before, or “social” currently, it’s been adopted by so many different people that it’s been pulled into an unrecognizable shape.

Sifting through all the current vendor messaging one common theme that does emerge is the emphasis on data.  To enact any type of response or treatment, from a systematic standpoint, you need to have information to base it on.  Where a human can act on instinct, a tool is dependent on the data.

Overall, I think this is a healthy construct to be promoting into the marketing world.  We’ve all been educated and conditioned to depend on our intuition and a moment of inspirational genius.  In our socially connected, digital world, however, we now have better options.  As marketing interactions have migrated to online channels it has created an abundance of data.  Unlike any time before, we can now report on the impact of our marketing from customer, channel, or content perspectives.  This rounded view enables focusing on performance management, not just execution.

Another common concept, and where the differentiation begins, has to do with automated response.  Names range from “drip”, “lifecycle”, “nurturing”, “triggered”  and just about everything in-between.  Regardless of convention, however, they all focus on presenting a decision driven workflow where based upon a condition one action versus and another is taken.

The other major differentiator is then upon what, and the timeliness that a decision can be evaluated:

With traditional systems, that were developed to handle large scale direct mail and then email campaigns, the automation is usually separated from the campaign.  As such, they are usually dependent upon the batch movement of data and trigger on things like additions to a loyalty file, or coupon redemption at the POS.

Vendors:  Alterian, Aprimo, ExactTarget, Lyris, Neolane, Responsys, SAS, Silverpop, SmartFocus, Unica, etc.

The next generation systems are much more geared to digital channels and focus on things like page views, form registrations, and email.  These systems also are more real time (varying widths of grey here) and do not depend on batch processes.

Vendors:  ActOn, Eloqua, Genius, Loopfuse, Manticore, Market Bright, Marketo, OfficeAutoPilot, Optify, Pardot, etc.

While today there may be a schism, these two worlds are on a collision path.  Really what has separated them has been semantics.  Both camps are fundamentally based on the concept of leveraging data to drive marketing performance and take similar approaches to getting there.  Already you’ve seen some firms like Neolane, Aprimo, Eloqua, and most recently Alterian cross over and the rest, or the survivors at any rate, are sure to follow suit.

The future of marketing automation is bright and poised for wider adoption.  As the strengths of these generations, enterprise scalability and real time digital interactions, are united they going to unlock the ability to improve the efficiency of their marketing spends and most importantly the quality of interaction delivered to the customer.

Takeaways:

-          The core unifying concept of marketing automation is using hard data to make decisions

-          Support for digital channels and real time interactions is a big differentiator

-          A big factor in the success of a platform is ease and speed in which you can teach it to “think”

-          The next generation of marketing automation will narrow, if not eliminate the gap between the current generations

What do you see for the future of marketing?

About Marcus Tewksbury

Marcus Tewksbury has written 12 post in this blog.

Marcus is a respected author, speaker, and thought leader on optimizing marketing organizations to most efficiently, and effectively create value added experiences for high worth customers; a process that he has termed Customer Relationship Marketing, or CRM(arketing).

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