2015 guide to the “cmo technology blueprint for midsize b2b companies” infographic

Contributing Analyst(s): Ian Michiels

2015 Guide to the “CMO Technology Blueprint for Midsize B2B Companies” Infographic

DEEP DIVE

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Entire content © 2015 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction is prohibited.

2015 Guide to the CMO Technology Blueprint for Midsize B2B Companies

HOUSEKEEPINGYou have permission to reproduce or distribute this asset (and the infographic) unaltered and with attribution.

We intend to publish annual or bi-annual revisions to the infographic and the guide, so we encourage any form of feedback - negative or positive.

Special thanks to the ChiefMartec and LUMA Partners for creating insightful and powerful infographics featuring thousands of vendor logos organized by categories. These can and should be used in conjunction with Gleanster Blueprints to help navigate the complex marketing technology ecosystem. As Marcel Proust once said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Executive SummaryThe Midsize B2B CMO Technology Blueprint is designed to be a tool for mid-to-early enterprise business-to-business companies with between 50 and 1,000 employees. While there are a variety of ways we can cut the market, including revenue, the complexity of managing go-to-market strategy grows exponentially as employee headcount expands to over a thousand - so this was our threshold for classifying mid-size organizations.

While interesting and widely referenced, many of the logo-centric infographics are not all that useful for determining which technologies to invest in – and, more importantly, why. This Deep Dive will provide practical and detailed advice about the technologies recommended in the 2015 CMO Technology Blueprint for Midsize B2B firms. You’ll notice that a tiny subset of the available technologies are actually recommended in the blueprint. That’s because not all technologies are appropriate or realistic for the vast majority of midsize B2B firms. (Yes, we may have missed some, so shoot us a note at [email protected] if you’re passionate about something we missed.)

In fact, you should make a special note of technologies we have classified as “mission critical.” These represent tools that are 1) widely adopted among Midsize B2B Top Performing organizations from our survey data and 2) good sources of competitive differentiation

RESOURCES

Marketing Catetgory Research Portal

BLUEPRINT PUBLICATION AGENDA

2015 Marketing Technology Blueprint for B2B Small Businesses

2015 CMO Technology Blueprint for Enterprise B2B Companies

2015 Marketing Technology Blueprint for B2C Small Businesses

2015 CMO Technology Blueprint for Enterprise B2C Companies

2015 CMO Technology Blueprint for Midsize B2C Companies

http://www.gleanster.com/category/marketing

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How Should You Use the CMO Blueprint? As you are probably well aware, there are a dizzying variety of marketing technologies you could invest in. But should you? As a CMO there’s no doubt your inbox is flooded with outreach from vendor sales reps peddling the “next big and unique software for B2B marketing firms just like yours.” It’s okay to roll your eyes at these pitches.

We will highlight a handful of “featured sample vendors” in each category as examples – and you are encouraged to use the existing supergraphics or the Gleanster.com vendor directories organized by topic area to explore a vendor landscape further. Featured vendors did not pay us to be featured, but we fully intend to charge them in the future, because we want to showcase vendors who display a serious interest in paying to get in front of targeted industries and company sizes. These are the firms you should focus your finite time on. If they are investing in brand exposure with you in this targeted study, they probably do have viable solutions that can address your company size and industry

NAVIGATING THE TECHNOLOGY BLUEPRINT

From a business value standpoint, your job as a CMO is threefold: cost savings and efficiency, revenue growth, and customer satisfaction. All of your management objectives, incentives, and variable compensation metrics can be directly or indirectly linked to these three areas of business value. In a B2B environment a CMO is typically tasked with maximizing customer lifecycle engagement. Although according to research over 70% of CMOs are evaluated and compensated based on customer acquisition metrics. (Don’t forget that you can automate retention and expansion efforts with the same technology that is used to drive customer acquisition revenue.)

There are only four areas of strategic investment you can focus your budget, time, resources, and energy on: marketing operations, brand awareness/customer acquisition, customer retention/customer expansion, and customer loyalty. All marketing technologies directly or indirectly address one of these four areas – or they are virtually useless to you from a return-on-investment perspective. That makes it a little easier to segment the vendor landscape. However, as you can see, lots of technologies are actually quite good at addressing multiple priorities, and we had to make some tough decisions about where to draw the line. That also means there may be some overlap in the features and technologies you invest in to support marketing. That’s okay and you probably can’t avoid it. But you do want to avoid having multiple systems that clearly deliver identical functionality – for example multiple email tools, an email and marketing automation tool, etc.

PLATFORM IS THE NEW P IN THE MARKETING MIX

Over the last 5 years there was a great deal of consolidation in the marketing landscape, largely among best-of-breed providers, and it had an impact on midsize B2B companies. You probably experienced vendor relationships that suddenly turned into Oracle or Salesforce.com relationships through acquisitions. Today the concepts of a “marketing cloud” and “customer experience” are common terms for defining consolidated portfolio offerings among large suite providers like Salesforce.com, Oracle, and Adobe. The truth is, we are probably 7-10 years from widespread adoption of comprehensive suite offerings that are currently positioned as

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“marketing cloud” platforms. To complicate things further, there is actually no standardization among features and solution offerings in marketing cloud portfolios; it’s a catch-all term for whatever acquisitions the vendors have made.

Should a midsize CMO be worried about this marketing cloud stuff? Yes and no. It’s very unlikely you have the resources or budget to rip and replace existing legacy solutions with a comprehensive marketing cloud stack of technologies from a single vendor. It’s also unlikely that the single vendor solution will actually deliver a solution that’s integrated at this point. Integration among acquired offerings leaves much to be desired – despite what the vendors tell you. It still requires a ton of customization that your limited budget and IT team probably can’t support without investment in consultants and systems integrators. In most cases from a cost perspective the marketing cloud as a comprehensive offering is really only accessible to large enterprise early adopters at this point.

But you should be thinking about your organization’s marketing cloud, which is more than likely a mishmash of vendors and solutions, some hosted and some on-premise, that support your go-to-market channels. From this perspective you do want to look for gaps in how you support the four pillars of strategic investment on the technology blueprint and consider filling those to round out your marketing cloud. Likewise, you may want to swap out some legacy solutions for next-generation tools or offerings that don’t support all the channels you want or integrate with existing CRM, finance, and IT systems.

We recommend you print the blueprint and highlight all the tools you currently use, then take a look at what’s left over to see if it makes sense for your organization from a business value standpoint. The remainder of this report will provide additional detail about each category of technology, specifically evaluating the benefits relative to a midsize B2B organization.

Exploring the Categories on the Midsize B2B BlueprintCORE PLATFORM TECHNOLOGIES FOR MARKETING

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

CRM is a no brainer for midsize B2B firms. You want a solution that is flexible to customize, mobile ready, and can integrate with other marketing technologies like marketing automation. As a general rule, midsize firms use CRM as the system of record for all customer data (you can then create bi-directional feeds to other systems).

Featured Vendors: Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle

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EMAIL MARKETING AND CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT

We combined email and campaign management for midsize companies because standalone email platforms for midsize operations are almost extinct. Virtually every midsize-class email marketing platform delivers multi-channel digital marketing capabilities (and of course email marketing). This is marked as a mission-critical tool because in the absence of marketing automation it can deliver stand-alone value. But you really should be looking at a tool that includes deep CRM integration and lead prioritization capabilities via business rules. When midsize firms invest in both email marketing and marketing automation it’s usually for customer lifecycle engagement in separate stages; sending newsletters versus lead nurturing.

Featured Vendors: Salesforce Exact Target, IBM Silverpop, Lyris

MARKETING AUTOMATION

To compete effectively in 2015 a midsize B2B firm needs marketing automation. These are out-of-the-box solution that allow you to automate relevant and personalized engagement based on customer behavior at any stage in the customer lifecycle. No, they aren’t just for acquisition marketing either; Marketing Automation should be used to automate engagement with customers to maximize cross-sell and up-sell revenue. It also allows you to easily embrace inbound and outbound engagement from a single solution – although most vendors have cracked down significantly on outbound non-opt-in communications to purchased lists.

Featured Vendors: Act-On, Salesforce Pardot, Marketo

WEB CONTENT MANAGEMENT & CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT

These days most organizations actually support multiple web content management platforms – a combination of packaged solutions and open source. You’re definitely going to need a blog, and it will likely be hosted on an open-CMS platform like Wordpress or Drupal. This is a mission-critical technology. You should be looking to upgrade your site to responsive design (mobile optimized) and have deep integrations with marketing automation, web analytics, and email marketing platforms. Most of this integration is fairly easy through pixel and tracking codes. If your organization has a large volume of products to manage you should look at packaged WCM solutions because they usually have built-in workflow and approval that will simplify keeping the web updated by product and marketing managers.

Featured Vendors: Sitecore, Kentico, Wordpress

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OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE MARKETING TECHNOLOGIES

ADVOCATE MARKETING

Advocate marketing and loyalty marketing are not the same thing. Advocate marketing technologies are designed to engage customers who are already loyal. These platforms help engage the tiny subset of your customers who are not only loyal (and regularly doing repeat business with the brand) but willing to offer their time and resources to champion your brand – often through points, rewards and other incentives. In a sense, advocates become an extension of your internal workforce and will share, promote, and validate your unique brand promise and value propositions. Advocacy technology provides the infrastructure for this engagement and allows marketers to measure success. Be mindful of the vendors you engage; most of the advocate marketing platforms are for B2C, not B2B.

Featured Vendors: Influitive, Zuberance, Marketo (Crowd Factory)

CHANNEL MARKETING

Channel marketing technology (also commonly referred to as partner relationship management (PRM)) is largely designed for lead management and collaboration for B2B organizations with a large volume of partners or value-added resellers. As your organization grows it quickly becomes too cumbersome to try to manage these relationships within your core CRM, and one-off shared drives or email processes aren’t scalable. These solutions generally offer partner portals, shared resources, collaboration, lead management & tracking, market development fund management, training, and workflows.

Featured Vendors: Treehouse Interactive, Channeltivity, CSG Openline

CONTENT CURATION

There are a lot of “content-related” technologies and acronyms out there. Content curation is ultimately about finding content related to a theme or topic. Content curation platforms are subscription-based services that essentially use keywords or RSS feeds to crawl the web and help you sort through the hellish volume of “relevant” content to share via social media or create your own perspective on the topic. You use content curation so your blog and social properties aren’t overwhelmed by self-serving promotional banter. These tools are NOT designed to automatically post content to your blog, but they can be configured to automatically post things to your social media properties (automation is dangerous on social and often too robotic). More sophisticated curation platforms actually use algorithms to learn what type of content you like and highlight the best content for you to focus on.

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Content syndication is not the same thing as curation. Syndication is about republishing your content on other sites or accepting content on your site. There are open-source and paid platforms that will allow you to repost a blog from another site within a blog on your site, but they are designed to add the blog as reference inside your blog post so you can provide commentary or perspectives. These platforms will automatically add attribution text to the syndicated post (“Originally posted on…”) so Google doesn’t flag you as an aggregator. Remember it’s all about originality, so if you’re going to syndicate or curate, ALWAYS link unique copy and creative to the curated content. You don’t exactly need to pay big money for content curation capabilities; there are plenty of low-cost or free solutions that will be more than sufficient for a midsize B2B firm.

Featured Vendors: Curata, PublishThis, Feedly, Pocket

CONTENT MARKETING OPERATIONS

Content marketing operations (CMO) platforms are designed for mid-to-large enterprises, and they may be overkill for most midsize B2B companies unless content marketing is a large focus of your marketing strategy. For brands with high volumes of content and a network of fulfillment vendors (freelance writers, agency, creative, globally dispersed internal contributors or marketing teams) it’s pretty complex to manage these processes across multiple channels. CMO platforms are sort of like project management tools designed exclusively for content marketing processes. You can configure tasks, workflows, and approvals for each type of content (ebooks, whitepapers, blog posts, case studies, etc.) and centralize collaboration inside the system. You can also configure alerts and view a central calendar of all content that is in production or planned. These systems come pre-configured to integrate with most marketing automation and CRM systems. Some can even track engagement with content via social, mobile, and email.

Featured Vendors: Kapost, Compendium

DATA MANAGEMENT & SALES INTELLIGENCE

The days of data being a proprietary or unique competitive advantage are over. If you have money you can pretty much fix any data problem for your organization. That includes purchasing lists of target leads, augmenting customer records, and linking email addresses to IP addresses. Today, most data providers are buying data from each other (even the big guys). You’ll also notice many data or sales intelligence vendors are shifting their strategy to focus more on dynamic personalization for known and unknown prospects or to uncover new leads that look like existing customers. So you basically pay them to give you information on website visitors, augment customer records, and maximize conversion online. While list data is available, you probably can’t use it on email or marketing automation platforms unless your list is opt-in – hence the sudden shift in business models for the list providers.

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Sales intelligence providers have proprietary and sophisticated crawling tools that will mine the internet for changes in data and determine how accurate a record actually is. You can also turn the data on inside of CRM to give your reps a leg up in finding accurate contact information. When augmenting or scrubbing customer records, keep in mind that there are no 100% accurate databases out there. What you are hoping for is that a provider can scrub or augment about 30-40% (at a minimum) of your data – which translates to real revenue if your marketing and sales teams practice best practices in B2B customer engagement.

Featured Vendors: LinkedIn (Bizo), NetProspex, Salesforce Data.com, Demandbase, LeadLander

DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT

Most of the time midsize B2B organizations don’t have requirements for a robust stand-alone DAM for marketing. Google Drive, DropBOX, and SharePoint still provide for the vast majority of asset management requirements in B2B. If content marketing is a focus, you’ll want to look for a DAM or a WCM with a DAM that can export assets in different formats. There’s no reason to be formatting 5 different versions of an image for use in print, web, email, and social.

Featured Vendors: Elateral, Sharepoint, Canto Flight

LOYALTY MANAGEMENT

Loyalty management is an eclectic topic in B2B. Despite how critical this is, there aren’t turnkey solutions devoted to B2B. In most cases you would actually be buying both services and technologies from a vendor because most loyalty programs are going to require a custom touch. There are customer feedback management platforms designed to capture net-promoter score, reviews, and feedback but they aren’t loyalty–specific. Honestly, your best bet is to sit down and have marketing create some automated campaigns in marketing automation and trigger them off of customer records or purchase history.

Featured Vendors: ConfirmIt, Aspect, Fuel Rewards

MARKETING ANALYTICS

In a way, every vendor can check the marketing analytics box. Probably the closest thing to turnkey marketing analytics solutions is coming out of the evolving on-demand business intelligence space. Data visualization and BI tools are getting easier to use, and there are a

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litany of tools that you can use to create dashboards for marketing. You will of course want to look for tools that can deliver simple insights across any platform – desktop, mobile, and tablet. Unfortunately, the nature of what you want to analyze will dictate the best solution. For generic dashboards look at on-demand BI. For lead analytics, check out Predictive Sales & Marketing solutions. For core digital analytics, check out Web Analytics, Social Media Monitoring, and Mobile Analytics.

Featured Vendors: DOMO, Klipfolio, Chartio

ONLINE CUSTOMER COMMUNITIES

Online customer communities are typically powered by enterprise social networking solutions, which combine collaboration software, community software, and social applications to provide the infrastructure for a customer community. Customer communities and user groups can actually offset some of the demands on your customer service department. You can of course use online community tools for internal collaboration, and many early enterprise organizations use them like an intranet for marketing and sales collaboration.

Featured Vendors: Jive, Lithium, Socious

PREDICTIVE MARKETING & SALES

Predictive marketing and sales solutions are ideal for B2B firms with HIGH volumes of leads. These technologies use millions of data points on your customers and prospects via CRM and other external sources (data that is often collected and never fully acted upon) to optimize customer engagement, target new audiences, and improve sales effectiveness. Predictive marketing unlocks the potential in existing customer data. These solutions will mine your existing customer records and marry them with external data that could be pertinent to a buyer’s propensity to purchase. Vendors essentially sell you a predictive model to determine how you should segment your database or focus sales efforts. Some solutions provide not only insights but also the B2B contact records or lists of companies in line with what the model recommends. While the promise of big-data and data-driven decisions weighs heavy on the marketer’s mind, these tools must do two things well to work.

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One, they need to be transparent about the assumptions in the model; marketers need to be able to tweak assumptions or at least understand key criteria in the model. Two, they need to make the data they provide actionable via integration with CRM, Email Marketing, Web Analytics, and most importantly Marketing Automation.

Featured Vendors: Minigo, Lattice Engines, Infer

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Project management software has the capacity to help plan, organize, and manage resource pools and develop resource estimates. Depending on the sophistication of the software, it can manage estimation and planning, scheduling, cost control and budget management, resource allocation, collaboration software, communication, decision-making, quality management and documentation, or administration systems. Do marketers need it in a B2B environment? Maybe, but you may also be able to utilize packaged workflow and approval features in content management.

Featured Vendors: Comindware, Central Desktop, Project Insight

WEB & MOBILE ANALYTICS

For most B2B midsize firms, basic web analytics provided by Google Analytics will be more than sufficient, but honestly pretty much all the tools are going to give you the same benefits. The gold standard is Adobe Analytics, but it’s not cheap. Additionally, most of the B2B technologies you adopt are going to give you varying degrees of analytics through the website tracking codes they use. You should activate remarketing capabilities on the site and do some search remarketing to audience profiles that “look similar to” the existing visitors.

WEB & MOBILE DEVELOPMENT

There are hundreds of developers, agencies, and freelance resources who would love to take on your mobile app requirements. Keep in mind that in a B2B environment you may actually get more value from mobile apps designed for internal stakeholders like executives who travel frequently or sales reps.

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WEB OPTIMIZATION & TESTING

Probably the most underutilized and most important part of digital marketing is testing – especially on email and landing pages. The best B2B CMO in the world could NEVER predict every single nuance on a landing page that maximizes conversion.

Vendors: Unbounce, Optimizely

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT MARKETING TECHNOLOGIES

CUSTOMER FEEDBACK MANAGEMENT

CFM solutions help manage customer suggestions and complaints. These are going to be most valuable for B2B companies to monitor customer satisfaction.

Featured Vendors: Get Satisfaction, UserVoice, Foresee

EVENTS & WEBINAR PLATFORMS

You should be doing at least a couple webinars a year – even if they are recorded and made available via locked forms. Most webinar platforms are fairly commoditized these days, and unfortunately they have scaled back features to create price tiers. It’s still shocking how bad and unreliable webinar platforms are in 2015, but it’s the only game in town and the vendors know it.

Vendors: Cisco Webex, ON24, GotoMeetings, Join.Me, ReadyTalk, EventBrite

GAMIFICATION

Traditionally, gamificaiton platforms were designed for large-volume consumer engagement, and in fact most vendors don’t even want to sell a B2B company a solution unless they are coming with thousands of users in the system. But there are benefits to applying gamificaiton to non-traditional areas in B2B. You might gamify the online customer community to boost customer-to-customer frequently asked questions and reduce the load on the call center. You may also apply gamification to the sales environment to foster a more competitive culture in business

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development.

Featured Vendors: Badgeville, Bunchball

INFLUENCE MARKETING

Influence marketing is not the same thing as loyalty marketing. With influence marketing you are trying to activate, motivate, and engage anyone who has an influence over your target audience (bloggers, consultants, journalists, customers, etc.). You can do this through incentives and rewards but you need a way to track engagement and ensure that you incentivize the right behaviors. These technologies help engage and manage relationships with influencers.

Featured Vendors: TapInfluence

INTERACTIVE CONTENT

This is a catch-all category for a unique group of vendors that provide interactive digital media. These tools give you the ability to create interactive content to qualify or convert leads. You can survey a prospect and then offer an automated PDF findings report with analysis on their answer choices, calculations, or recommendations on products to look at. Generally interactive content gets much higher engagement than traditional forms of digital content, but of course you still have to promote the tool.

Featured Vendors: SnapApp

RETARGETING

A decade ago retargeting was not all that valuable for B2B companies. Traditionally these platforms were applied to B2C online commerce brands which allowed the investment to be linked to a return (shopping cart abandonment, etc.). But remarketing can be used to make a B2B brand look bigger than it is for a marginal investment. That’s because remarketing allows you to market to people who visit your website or online properties when they visit ancillary sites like Facebook, Forbes.com, and thousands of other popular websites. Ninety percent (90%) of the retargeting vendors sell to B2C and are looking for large volumes of unique website traffic each month.

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But it’s worth exploring a small investment in retargeting if you want to brand or keep top of mind for website visitors. It’s money well spent if you assume it’s going to branding and may not be a directly attributable to ROI.

Featured Vendors: ReTargeter, Adroll

SEM & SEO

There are thousands of vendors who provide SEM and SEO services. The best thing you can do is tap your network for a recommendation on a good vendor. It is worth bringing in a good expert – they usually pay for themselves in the first year and the best practices are a moving target.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Social media marketing and social relationship management collided with social media monitoring over the last 5 years. What used to be an eclectic landscape of vendors in each category now includes a handful of midsize and enterprise class solutions. These tools allow you to link all of your brand’s social accounts to one platform to manage and track communications. They also allow you to monitor brand mentions, sentiment, and engagement with your target audience. Free or low-cost solutions like HootSuite, SproutSocial, or Buffer are commonly used in parallel with more expensive offerings. The good news is you have a lot of choices. Ultimately you pay for structure, workflow, integrated features, automation, and more robust analytics and monitoring.

Featured Vendors: Spreadfast, Hootsuite, PetaData Labs, SproutSocial, Sprinklr

SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING

Stand-alone social media monitoring tools (also called Social Listening or Social Intelligence platforms) are designed to do one thing really well: monitor keywords or phrases and aggregate every mention in one central interface. They do also provide a way to engage or do damage control from within the platform (for tracking purposes). The secret sauce that makes these vendors unique is how they interpret context from unstructured information to extrapolate sentiment, propensity to purchase, and other emotional cues from a target audience. Most vendors use proprietary algorithms that actually learn and refine the results based on user engagement or feedback from inside the system.

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Much like web analytics, these tools are capable of pulling massive volumes of data, and it’s not all that valuable unless the data is prioritized and presented in a consumable way.

Featured Vendors: Salesforce.com Radian 6, Brandwatch, Clarabridge, Converseon

TEXT & SPEECH ANALYTICS

In a B2B environment, text and speech analytics solutions are ideal for extracting value from unstructured customer feedback via email or call-center engagement. There is of course some overlap with social media monitoring solutions because the core technology is largely the same. With a stand-alone text or speech analytics solution you can usually embed the solution inside of internal systems like CRM or the call center.

Featured Vendors: Collective Intellect, Lexalytics

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Need help navigating the uncharted waters?If you’re overwhelmed by the number of technologies, fear not. We help hundreds of companies around the globe with technology selection, technology roadmaps, and recommendations. That said, we aren’t feet-on-the-ground-for-years-on-end consultants, were analysts. So if you need our help, we’re looking to rapidly deliver value in our advisory consulting via a 2-3 week IT audit or executive coaching session. Specific industries of expertise include: high tech, software, hardware, financial services, insurance, retail, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, franchises, real estate, and automotive.

We’re like Ferdinand Magellan for your marketing technology strategy and Botox for the frown lines you just exacerbated by reading this guide.

RESEARCH AND VENDOR LANDSCAPES ON GLEANSTER.COM

Each year we survey tens of thousands of companies to uncover best practices in the topic areas we cover. We publish these findings on our online research portal and link the research to comprehensive directories of relevant vendors. We also capture user feedback on the solutions we cover and provide this to you in the form of a Vendor Ranking FLASH chart; so you can see how vendors rank on ease of deployment, ease of use, features and functions, and overall value.

About Gleanster ResearchGleanster Research helps business leaders uncover best practices in technology adoption by benchmarking the successes and failures of Top Performing firms. We publish the results online so you can learn from the most successful CMOs on the planet. We do this through a proprietary benchmark research methodology that informs a library of best practice market research and a comprehensive directory of vendor showcases (complete with vendor rankings based on reviews from users).

CONTACT GLEANSTER:

4695 Chabot Dr Pleasanton, CA, 94588

www.gleanster.com

[email protected]

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