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Everything you want to know about Marketo’s product roadmap 2017 & 2018

I sat in a review of the Marketo product roadmap to the Boston Marketo User Group earlier today, led by Frank Passantino, Senior Product Manager at Marketo.

BMUG-Frank-P-Marketo

Since starting out as a Marketo partner in 2010, this was by far the best product presentation and plan that I’ve seen from Marketo. So props to Frank and team, and clearly we are seeing the influence of structure Steve Lucas is bringing to the business since taking over as CEO last October. (Things have come a long way since the SEO release in 2014.)

I’ll highlight each area Frank walked us through, a total of 11, in the order he reviewed it – and provide my take on the impact to Marketo users.

#1 – Bulk APIs

Frank got us started with a topic near and dear to my heart at Bedrock Data – Bulk APIs. In Frank’s words, up until now, “There’s never been a good way to get activity data out of Marketo.” That changes with Bulk APIs.

There are two Bulk APIs: one for lead records, and one for lead activities, which open up the API to the entire activity log on a lead record – every granular detail Marketo has logged on that lead including web pages viewed, data updates, emails sent/opened/clicked and much more.

My Take: Frank gets off to a great start by addressing a long-time product gap. There are powerful applications here. Look for large enterprise customers with their own development teams to take advantage of these APIs, as well as Marketo partners with integration products like Bedrock Data. 

Kudos here to Marketo for showing an appreciation for the value of helping customers getting data out of their system to best use it, and not restricting analytics of Marketo data to within its walled garden.

#2 – Campaign Throughput

Frank clarified Marketo’s definition of the original Project Orion (Marketo's internal code name) and what was delivered with the release of Marketo's Engagement Platform last March.

Per Frank, the revamp of the Marketo Engagement Platform was centered primarily on the ingestion of activities to Marketo, and solving for customers with 2 million+ individual activities per day. Prior to this work, this level of activity volume could not get into Marketo – now it can.

So now going forward, the campaign throughput development in the works is about extending that same level of scale and performance to campaign execution via Marketo.

My Take: This was interesting, as a reminder of Marketo’s flawed product communications of the past. The past developments in this area will go down as a case study of how not to communicate a new product offering – as the stories from Marketo personnel to customers on it would be were all over the map. I don’t want to re-hash it here, but just check out the CMS Wire story arc to see how this went from major over-hype in 2016 (May 17 & May 22) to major confusion in early 2017 (Feb 28) to major attempts to smooth over in March (March 1 & March 17).

It’s best to just move on, but the key takeaway here is that Marketo is still very much in progress on major product scalability to support larger and larger B2B enterprises.

#3 – Marketing Performance Insights

Frank shared new set of Marketo reports dubbed Performance Insights which is now in Beta.

The reports give a customer a view into performance using the two most important closed loop metrics – Pipeline and Revenue. There are breakdowns by programs and marketing channel.  Pipeline and revenue data will be based on opportunity sync from CRMs using Marketo’s Salesforce or Dynamics connectors, or third party connectors like Bedrock Data for any Marketo-CRM connection.

Frank was clear that this would be a powerful overview tool, but would not get as deep into drill-downs or attribution as do tools like Bright Funnel, Bizible and Full Circle Insights.

My Take: This will valuable for a lot of Marketo customers. Marketo has lacked a clean overview dashboard on performance, and this will fill that gap. It looks like they took a fresh approach to building it, outside of the RCE Reporting Engine – which is a good thing to keep it simple.

I also like Marketo’s approach here – they built something that is going to be applicable to all their customers to get value from quickly. And for the customers who want to go deeper into attribution reporting, they can turn to third party providers for much deeper functionality. This is a win for both Marketo customers and the greater Marketo partner ecosystem.

#4 – Web Performance Insights

Website reports, aggregated in Marketo.

My Take: I didn’t see much incremental value here and Marketo appeared to be leaving the big opportunity on the here.

What these reports should do (but don’t) is connect web site analytics to the same performance metrics in the performance reports – pipeline and revenue.

Marketo could answer a question for customers like: which of my blog posts have the greatest influence on creating pipeline, or deals? That would be a game changer for Marketo's web site analytics.

#5  – Account Snapshot Chrome Plug In for Sales Reps

Frank then spoke about how Marketo’s “account-based” focus up until now has been on account-based marketing, and now going forward they will be incorporating account-based tools for sales. The first example is a Chrome plug-in which aggregates key account info (including scoring).

My Take: Getting sales user adoption from a tool is a whole 'nother animal. I’d prefer to see a comprehensive strategy to do that, then a one-off plugin like this. I would have put engineering resources elsewhere (like my Web Performance to Pipeline/Revenue idea from #4, or enhancements addressing customer feedback) ahead of this.

#6 – More ABM Features

Frank bucketed Marketo’s upcoming ABM developments into three categories:

  • Account hierarchy: supporting the build-out of a company hierarchy to support regional or business line structures for organizations.

  • Multi-dimensional scoring: Greater customization around building your own account scoring rules.
  • Extensibility: Here, Frank gave the example of using APIs to push out target account lists or enrich target account data.

My Take: A solid set of tools to deepen Marketo’s functionality here. Just like the attribution example, Marketo is trying to build an ABM suite to meet the needs of many or most customers, so that only the “power ABM marketers” need to turn to additional third party ABM orchestration tools.

#7 – Marketo's Next Generation UX

This got a lot of excitement and attention at the Marketo Summit in May.

This is all about making Marketo’s interface faster, more usable and more consistent.

Frank broke to project down into three areas:

  • Universal design language: making the interface consistent with re-usable components (he gave the example of a date selection widget)
  • High velocity and enhanced usability: making Marketo’s interface perform better, especially areas such as Marketo’s tree when navigating hierarchies such as programs)
  • Value-add features

For value-add features, there are many in the works. Highlights include:

  • An incredible amount of detail around details like calendar reminders, which shows the importance to Marketo users of managing programs through Marketo and I’ve written about. Features include supporting text tokens within a calendar token so that an event name can be dynamically added into a calendar reminder. Another one was the ability to set the reminder prompt time for ICS files.
  • Supporting URLs as a token type – so that they are tracked properly in emails (I remember encountering this issue years ago!)
  • Saved rules for a smart campaign which allow for easier re-use of rules from program to program
  • A stream view of an engagement program, incorporating performance data
  • More flexibility in managing the cadence of engagement streams

Frank talked about a parallel roll-out for this next generation UX – that users will be able to toggle between the new and old interface for a period of time, which will be important since not everything will be available in the new UX right away.

My Take: The incredible detail involved in some of these features shows that Marketo has listened to its users on key usability areas. That said, the creation of this new UX has been a painful one for Marketo users to live through, as there’s been a very long time gap here with minimal improvements on the existing interface in lieu of building this new one.  Let’s hope the interface pains of the past few years will be worth it as Marketo's Next Generation UX hits the user base.

#8 – Ad Bridge !!!!!!!!!!!

For me, this was the “sit on the edge of my seat” moment of the session. It astounded me just how much ad bridge functionality is already available, of which I know many, many customers are not yet taking advantage. 

The features – most of which are already in place – offer powerful integration between a customer’s customer and prospect database and online advertising.

For a guy who’s been doing both marketing automation and online advertising for way-too-long, this was awesome stuff.

Frank broke it down into three categories, covering what Marketo supports or will soon support across Google (Ad Words, YouTube & Gmail), Facebook & LinkedIn.

Matched Audiences: You can build a list in Marketo, and feed it as an audience for a specific campaign in Facebook or LinkedIn (today), and adding Google by end of the year. These audiences can be targeted (imaging a customer cross-sell offer, or targeting those same companies in a targeted outbound program with relevant ads) and also used as the basis for lookalike targeting (finding like companies, through those platforms).

Offline Conversion: You can use your closed loop tracking via Marketo to feed data into Google or Facebook for closed loop revenue reporting directly in those platforms. Very powerful for anyone managing ad spend via Google or Facebook, so that you can optimize for the right metrics.   

Lead Ingestion: Facebook and LinkedIn ad units that capture leads directly in them (one click response) can be fed directly into Marketo. This is especially powerful for mobile campaigns where users can easily click on an ad to opt in – large conversion rate improvements vs. anything involving a click through and landing page form-fill.

My Take: I had two huge takeaways here. Every Marketo customer whose spending money on online advertising or PPC should be using this. And that Marketo needs to step up its customer success and customer education efforts, as they should be working directly with every single customer to help them take advantage of these exciting capabilities.

#9 – “Adaptive”

Frank got futuristic here –talking about potential future AI-based innovations. Marketo already has some adaptive capabilities built into the platform with Marketo Predictive Content, and sounds like they are thinking about more to come.  

My Take: This is definitely futuristic. There are going to be many keys to success here, and having ad bridge in place is going to be one of them (to reach new audiences and more potential media locations). So step 1 should just be getting as many customers as possible using ad bridge.

This is several years away – but probably smart for Marketo to at least be alluding to it as part of it’s road map so customers know where they want to go – and don’t get sucked into AI plays from other vendors.

#10 – “Customer Love”

Frank spoke about how Marketo will address the top ranked request from the customer community every year. This year, it’s the option to send emails in person’s time zone. Marketo is going to leverage Country/City/State/Zip data to populate this, or their own inferred location data if those fields are empty, while also giving customers the ability to overwrite that if they choose.

My Take: Any features addressing mass Marketo user feedback from the Community are a good thing. Would like to see some more investment in these requests in the near term (listen to Gregoire Michel, he knows what he’s talking about!).

#11 – Sales Enablement

I was excited to wrap up on this topic, as I got to see where some of the areas I had speculated about from the ToutApp acquisition in May were headed.

Frank spoke about Marketo’s now hodge-podge of sales offerings – from ToutApp to the new aforementioned Chrome plugin, to their Gmail and Outlook plugins, and the views within Salesforce. Frank said these all would be packaged under a common packaging, and with integration between ToutApp and Marketo (for example, removal from a marketing campaign, if in a ToutApp sales campaign).  

My Take: It's not yet clear if the ToutApp brand will remain or be rolled under the Marketo brand like Insightera and CrowdFactory have been in the past. Either way, we will see a set of packaged products emerge, let's call them "Marketo’s sales products." This is going to get more and more investment but it’s going to take time.

Wrap-Up

Frank just dove right in to the roadmap (which was probably appropriate for this group of hungry power users), so I’m going to take a moment here to net out the key themes that probably served as inputs to what we saw.

#1 – Continue to scale the product, moving up enterprise – bulk APIs, campaign throughput

#2 – Massive UI improvements – although going to be a transition period for about a year

#3 – Lots of listening to customers – although only so many resources that can be put into (still a long backlog to go via the Community)

And my 3 overarching takeaways from seeing the road map:

#1 – Marketo’s going to add functionality, but still lots of room for surrounding ecosystem partners. The addition of activities to the API is actually going to add more potential to leverage Marketo data outside of Marketo. Within Marketo’s roadmap, there’s still ample opportunity for LaunchPoint partners to thrive, whether you’re talking about Bright Funnel or Bizible or Full Circle for attribution, or Bedrock Data for Marketo-CRM integrations.

#2 – Ad Bridge is a huge asset to Marketo customers, and Marketo’s customer success teams needs to be focused on enabling customers to take advantage of it now.

#3 – Marketo is here to stay. The roadmap was rock solid, and confidence instilling. Marketo’s had some bumps along the way here but the path seems a solid one to support their customers and help them take a big step forward in cross-channel digital marketing.

Did you find this useful? I also wrote an expert guide on Marketo Integrations. Check it out here (it does require short registration): The Marketer's Mega Guide to Marketo Integrations

Marketo buys ToutApp: What we know, don’t know & the biggest looming question

It’s a fun time of year for MarTech.

We’re on the eve of both Marketo’s Marketing Nation and Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience, and three weeks out from Scott Brinker’s MarTech Conference.

And, who doesn’t love a little MarTech M&A, like we saw last week with Marketo’s acquisition of ToutApp?

The acquisition was greeted with a lot of press release repackaging – and that’s it – so here we’ll provide the first real analysis of this big industry news.

There are things we know, and things we don’t know. Some questions we’ll get some insight at Marketing Nation this week, but most of the answers that matter will take longer to develop.

Here’s what we know and don’t know, and the biggest looming question, about Marketo buying ToutApp:

#1 – Marketo is ALL IN on Engagement

Since the arrival of Steve Lucas as CEO last October and the promotion of Chandar Pattabhiram to CMO two months prior, Marketo has put its bet on positioning itself as the “Engagement Platform.”

As part of its seemingly continuous push to move upmarket to the enterprise, the pitch goes something like this:

In today’s dynamic and diverse media landscape, marketers must effectively engage their buyers, across all marketing channels and all stages of the buying process. Great storytelling is the key to effective engagement. Marketo is the platform to deliver those stories – and engage – across the buying process. 

 We heard a lot of this earlier last week, before the acquisition news hit, in AdAge’s profile of Pattabhiram’s self-described “brand transformation” of Marketo.

Which gets us to the ToutApp news.

The ToutApp news was literally all about engagement.

Of the 304 words in the press release, more than 3% were that word ‘engagement’ – 10 in the body copy, plus one in the headline and two in the boilerplate.  ‘Engagement’ trailed only the word ‘Marketo’ which had just 2 more mentions.

Marketo, the Engagement Platform, acquired ToutApp, the Sales Engagement Platform.

Got it?

#2 – A prominent voice from Marketo’s past isn’t buying in

Jon Miller matters to Marketo.

Miller co-founded Marketo, contributed hugely to inventing the product and their go-to-market, and was the top non-executive officer shareholder with 527,871 shares of stock when Marketo went public in May, 2013. Miller is now founder and CEO of Engagio.

So it caught my eye last Monday, two days before the ToutApp news, when Miller came out with a blog post on Engagio’s blog titled “What’s the Difference Between “Engagement” and Account Based Everything?”

I asked myself, “Why is Jon coming directly at Marketo’s messaging, so strongly?”

Even the touch of putting the word Engagement in quotes in the title, it was clear this was a Marketo takedown point of view.

Miller went on to point out that first of all, engagement is in the lineage of Engagio’s name -- something I’m sure Lucas and Pattabhiram considered, and, ultimately fueled them to double down on Marketo owning that term.

A couple of the key points from Miller are:

“A sequence of automated interactions is not engagement.”

and

“Sales spam is NOT engagement.”

The first comment above is a shot at how most Marketo customers use Marketo – as a drip email tool.  Miller knows this all too well.

The second comment was a lean-in against ToutApp – if ToutApp is used for low quality sales touches, that’s not engagement, that’s just spam.

Of course the truth lies somewhere in between.

What’s most interesting to me about this exchange is there has been a lot of “frenemy” language used by Marketo and Engagio over the past couple years, but with this latest run directly against Marketo’s positioning, the “fr” in that phrase should be dropped.

#3 – Marketo will put more $ around the strategic bet / opportunity cost / integration than the acquisition cost

ToutApp touts (I had to do it) 400 customers, but it’s in a competitive space with SalesLoft, Outreach and others. ToutApp trails both in its G2 Crowd ranking.

There apparently was some dancing between Marketo and ToutApp a couple years back, - when the offer didn’t make sense, but the timing is right for ToutApp now.

My spider sense says this acquisition is an eight-figure deal; where in that range, I’m not certain.

What I do know is that this being Lucas’ first deal since joining Marketo, and it representing a big step forward for Marketo into sales products – the real cost here to Marketo is not the acquisition $, it’s the need to make this a success.

The marketing automation space is getting more and more crowded with HubSpot, Pardot, Eloqua (now Oracle Marketing Cloud) and Act-on all going strong, plus new entrants such as Mautic and SharpSpring. Most significant to Marketo is their focal point for so many years has been Salesforce customers, where Pardot continues to go aggressively after that base leading with extremely aggressive bundled pricing.

The point is – at a time of crossroads for Marketo, this is a key bet Lucas is making to drive Marketo forward, and he needs to make it a success. There’s going to be a lot of wood behind this arrow. The cost of the acquisition is just the beginning.

#4 – Marketo doesn’t have a good track record for integrating acquisitions… but there’s a new management team in place

There’s no existing internal blueprint for acquisition success at Marketo. The blueprint will come from Lucas’s SAP experience in dealing with multi-product enterprise software portfolios.

There are two acquisitions on Marketo’s books – social media marketing company Crowd Factory in 2012 and website personalization engine Insightera in 2013. 

The positives of those acquisitions were incoming talent, including Crowd Factory CEO Sanjay Dholakia who was Marketo’s CMO prior to Pattabhiram. There were many challenges, however. The challenges highlight areas that need to be better addressed by the Lucas regime this time around, including product packaging, product integration, impact on the sales organization, and ability to upsell existing customers.

#5 – The ToutApp acquisition closed a gap between Marketo & HubSpot… but there’s still a ways to go when it come to Marketo’s breadth

I bring this up because it’s noteworthy that for the first time Marketo is dipping its toe into sales solutions. Marketo’s Sales Insight is used by sales but has always been sold as an extension of the marketing automation product.

HubSpot is well ahead of Marketo in the sales department as they have built and market their own CRM product as well as sales suite. On the other side of breadth – digital – HubSpot also has its own website content management platform which Marketo does not have a parallel tool.

Marketo still has a ways to go in terms of getting to the full breadth of HubSpot. And given the enterprise / upmarket focus, this may not even be a goal of theirs if they see their current functionality set as the sweet spot they want to focus on and build around.

#6 – There are many questions around what comes next…

I posed the question on LinkedIn to Marketo users on their sentiments around the acquisition. I heard from several Marketo power users including Pierce Ujjainwalla, Dan Radu, Gregoire Michel, and Tim Cerato – and the consensus was positive, with questions on how this would impact the Marketo Sales Insight product, the interface Marketo provides today to salespeople who use Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics.

These are the questions that will need to be answered in the coming days and months:

  • Will ToutApp continue as a separate brand or fold into the Marketo brand?
  • Since it’s the first acquisition under the Lucas regime, it will set a precedent… Does Marketo plan to operate as a “branded house” or a “house of brands” ?
  • How much further integrated will they make the two products? (There is already an integration in place today)
  • Will this and other factors such as Pardot’s Salesforce focus cause Marketo to target growth across a wider range of CRM systems?
  • Will Marketo phase out the existing Marketo Sales Insight product?
  • Will both the marketing and sales products be sold by the same sales team?

#7 – … Plus this, the biggest question

There’s one more question, the biggest question resulting from all of this, in my eyes.

What’s next for Lucas?

There are two possible paths.

Path #1 is: We’re still going through a major management transition following the Vista buy-out. We’re playing catch up to ensure the Marketo platform has the right technical foundation and Project Orion is implemented and proven at scale amongst our customers. And now we have the ToutApp acquisition. We don’t have a proven track record of acquisitions at this company, so we’re going to spend the time to do this right, and make it successful. That’s the focus for the next 12 months.

Path #2 is: This is just the beginning. We bought ToutApp because we saw it as an underperforming asset and a complimentary product. We’re going to opportunistically add MarTech products under the Marketo house of brands. The LaunchPoint ecosystems gives us a bevy of companies to consider. We see Marketo as a holding company of sorts to acquire, develop and co-market a range of MarTech products.

Lucas gave us a clue into the strategy earlier in the year. In this Silicon Angle interview, he stated “massive consolidation is coming to MarTech.”

Re-reading that article now, Lucas told us this was coming! He said we’d see “significant growth in M&A.” Three months later we get Marketo’s first acquisition. I think we’ll find there’s more to come.

 

What do you think? Have I captured the key considerations around the acquisition? Which of these seven points do you find most interesting? How do you rate the move? And what do you see coming next? Please share your thoughts below. 

Finding common ground on closed loop reporting via Boston Marketo User Group

Today’s Boston Marketo User Group (BMUG) featured three presentations and Q&A on closed loop reporting from Paul Green of Extreme Networks, Lauren Brubaker of NetProspex and yours truly and well chronicled on Twitter by many of the Marketing Automation-erati including Jarin Chu, Jeff Coveney, Ed Masson and OpFocus.

The presentations and conversation spanned a wide range of topics and perspectives, but these were my top overarching takeaways:

#1 - EVERYONE is trying to improve their closed loop marketing effectiveness

Companies may be at different stages in their journey towards closed loop reporting, but every business spending money on sales & marketing is trying to better understand the payoff on their investments and how to leverage those investments to scale their business performance.  Many companies are in the early stages and trying to head in the right direction, while the ones who have been working on it for several years continue to strive for more.

#2 – The skills of marketing technologists as in demand as ever

With a room full of some-70 marketing technologists, the conversation was clear that everyone is looking for more talent in this area. It’s a great time to be a revenue marketer and specialized in technologies such as Marketo.

#3 - Closed loop, revenue marketing takes partnership between marketing, sales and IT

This was one of Paul’s summary points but it applied to all of us --- all three of these departments need to contribute to the closed loop engine. IT teams can be a great ally for marketers looking to connect data and systems and ensure they have the real time dashboards and reporting required to enable close loop reporting. In Paul’s case, he also noted that his sales and marketing teams are now seen as a single organization reporting into a Chief Revenue Officer.

#4 - Tracking revenue stages is now broadly adopted

Whereas everyone has different approaches to where data resides, what is tracked and how reporting is performed, and one common denominator between everyone in the room was the underlying fundamental of using revenue stages to track lead progression through their buying process e.g. MQI to MQL to SAL to SQL.

For those who attended (or even if you didn’t), these are some related resources to the topic:

And as there were multiple requests for the slides here is a download of my PPT deck on closed loop reporting:  Closed Loop Reporting Slides

 

BMUG.jpg

Predictive lead scoring and your targeting stack – making sense of the options for reaching your target buyer

Targeting. Retargeting. Firmographic… demographic... behavioral… psychographic... targeting.

We see more and more technologies and techniques to reach a target audience emerge, seemingly by the minute.

The crossover between these different options is becoming overwhelming – how are they the same, how are they different, and how should a demand generation marketer figure out which ones to use?

I set out to bring some order to this mish-mosh of targeting options that demand generation marketers have today. And here’s what I got (so far).

Why has targeting become all the rage?

While there at least a dozen solid reasons, here are four I see driving it:

1. Content marketing best practices are demanding it

As companies build personas and target strategies to specific roles and verticals, the next logical step is to build programs that reach those target audiences in the most efficient way.

2. Email isn’t enough

Email is just one marketing channel and has significant limitations, the biggest one being that you can only email those you have in your database. Additional marketing channels are required beyond email to reach new audiences, extend your reach and meet demand generation requirements.

3. Closed loop marketing systems optimize for effectiveness

As marketers build closed loop marketing systems, they can hone in on the elements of what makes their most effective marketing investments. This drives the insights that feedback additional targeting requirements to make future investments more effective.

4. Vendor innovation

VC investments in marketing technologies continue to grow  -- many of the companies mentioned in this article have received significant investments as they look to capture their share of the marketing budget.

What are the different ways to target?

I have split these out as five techniques to reach an external audience, three techniques to target visitors on your website and then a final emerging category all to itself.

External Audience

1. Retargeting Via Cookie

How it’s done:  Visitors to a website are cookied and then targeted with banner ads as they visit other sites.

Advantages: Tend to be cost effective compared to other techniques.

Disadvantages: Limited to those who have already visited your website, so it’s really a method of conversion optimization and not reaching a net new audience.

Examples:

 

2. Targeting Specific Database of Prospects, through Publishers

How it’s done: Provide the publisher with your prospect database and then target programs to those specific individuals. 

Advantages: Can supplement active nurturing programs to laser target those participating in nurture streams with additional content impressions in a credible context – reach your audience where “they spend their time.”

Disadvantages: Limited only to those only in your database, so it’s a method of enhanced nurturing not reaching a net new audience.

Examples:

I could not find specific examples but I have to believe publishers today are offering this by requesting “house databases” from marketers; in addition I wonder if any of the social networks allow for this 1:1 targeting. If you are aware of specific offerings that fit this profile, please share that info in the comments section and I’ll update

 

3. Targeting via Demographic (e.g. Vertical)

How it’s done: Marketer provides target information and programs focus in specifically on those targets to take best advantage of spend.

Advantages: Now we are getting to the sweet spot of this list where the targeting capabilities should offer significant advantages to marketers.

Disadvantages: Not so much a disadvantage, but if leveraging display ads you will need to invest in message/creative for the display ads and the content for the landing page conversion to maximize the effectiveness of these investments.

Examples:

 

4. Targeting Via Named Account

How it’s done: Supply a specific named account list to a publisher, and run programs directly to that set of companies.

Advantages: Phenomenal way to align with sales programs by targeting to the specific accounts sales is going after and supporting outbound efforts – so for example we have a outbound calling/email program targeting the same named accounts supported by targeted display ads to those accounts – integrated with a capital I!

Disadvantages: I haven’t seen these programs offered with a role-based targeting overlay, so they tend to target via company and some level of page content but not guaranteed to be reaching the right roles within your segmentation.

Examples:

 

5. Targeting via Contextual Content

How it’s done: Targeting an audience based on contextually relevant content, Google has been doing this for years with ads through their content/display network, and now the latest fad has evolved to distributing blog & article content via a similar manner.

Advantages: Can be a cost effective way to reach a new, relevant audience. In the case of the contextual content promotion, it provides a means to grow traffic to supplement traditional SEO efforts.

Disadvantages: Google’s content network has long been plagued with quality issues, and that same issues applies to contextual content promotion. Marketers can grow their traffic but is it above your quality bar?

Examples:

  • Google’s Display Network – banner ads based on page content
  • Reactor Media – editorial posts as “you might also like” boxes based on contextually relevant content  
  • Outbrain – contextual content promotion via publishers through

 

On Your Website

6. Targeting Anonymous Visitors by Industry or Company

How it’s done: These companies have mapped IP addresses to companies and then categorized those businesses by industry to allow for real-time targeting of content by industry or other company based demographics such as revenue.

Advantages: For a first-time visitor without even being cookie or registered on your site, content relevance by industry can lead to significantly higher engagement and conversion.

Disadvantages: Not so much a disadvantage but a challenge – requires close work with content creators to ensure the right industry-specific content exists to leverage these capabilities. You can create industry-specific versions of your website – messaging, case studies, content and offers all industry specific.

Examples:

 

7. Targeting Known Visitors

How it’s done: This requires a personalization engine to be directly connected to the marketing automation platform holding the lead specific data. So for example, if you had customers identified and wanted to communicate with them a certain way on the website. The possibilities are endless.

Advantages: Truly powerful, only limitation I suppose is that you need to have the individuals cookied via your marketing automation which means having them click an email from you or fill out a form to get the cookie down.

Disadvantages: Again, not so much a disadvantage but with all the possibilities need to have strong internal know-how to prioritize what you are trying to accomplish and manage it.

Examples:

  • Marketo Real-Time Personalization (formerly Insightera and now referred to by Marketo as "RTP") – Individual personalization based on lead record data from the Marketo Lead Management platform. RTP syncs this data to enable real-time personalized website content based on that known lead’s data. (I confirmed this with David Myers, the Product Manager for RTP).

8. Behavioral Targeting

How it’s done: An engine which collects history of click patterns by prospects and connects it to at least one outcome (e.g. Page View, MQL, Opportunity) to then determine relevant related content or next action for future site visitors  

Advantages: Can be a powerful addition to a website to drive engagement based on past data

Disadvantages: Behavioral targeting based on past click patterns (e.g. most popular next content from past visitors to a specific piece of content) does not connect the viewing of that content to a positive outcome, so the most effective engines will also factor in attaining a marketing goal such as MQL or Opportunity.

Examples:

  • Marketo Real-Time Personalization (formerly Insightera) – This can be accomplished both with the content recommendation engine as well as leveraging the RTP platform for targeting rules. For example a targeting rule could be based on behavioral segmetns e.g. clicks, visits, referral, search term or specific page visits - powerful stuff.
  • Evergage – Also Website Personalization- although hard to tell exactly how they do it from their website and what the targeting is based on - need to learn more about these guys.
  • I’m sure there are more out there but I can’t place any right now, so this is another area where I’d welcome feedback

 

Predictive Lead Scoring

9. Predictive Targeting aka “Predictive Lead Scoring”

How it’s done: Such a hot topic that I gave it a category all to itself, these “big data” vendors are collecting some aforementioned data (marketing automation, CRM, website) and coupling that with additional data sources including product usage logs, customer support history and social websites to then predict high probability qualified leads for targeting purposes. At that point, what happens? Most likely the data is then fed into a marketing automation tool to trigger a campaign or program to target that lead or in some cases these vendors own web personalization engine to target web content based on these predictive models.

Advantages: Instead of guessing at a lead scoring model which ultimately misses many key factors, the promise of these systems is achieve the benefits of lead scoring to your demand generation without the pain and hassle of building your own model.

Disadvantages: If these leads are being handed off to Sales or Teleprospecting team, need to build confidence in the “black box” so that these predictive scored leads are pursued with the same belief in the leads as others.

Examples: These companies are all “talking the talk” and at the same time SiriusDecisions is seeing adoption of these technologies accelerating.

Conclusions & key takeaways

Having sifted through this, three key points stand out:

#1 – Options are plentiful, consider your needs and choose wisely

The more integrated your solutions, the more you will be able to ensure you are managing a closed loop system with clear measurement and reporting. It’s okay to use multiple platforms but where you can, standardize on a smaller set of vendors, and ensure you have a marketing automation platform which can serve as the hub of your targeting tools.

#2 - Marketo Real Time Personalization stands out as an emerging player

Looking at the options for web personalization in this way helped show the true potential of Marketo’s Real-Time Personalization platform, formerly Insightera. Tying web personalization to the Marketo database can be a truly unique capability, and on-site behavioral targeting based on content consumption is another area where Marketo can stand out.

#3 - Predictive Lead Scoring will become a must-have for mature marketing automation users

I don’t love the name, but when you consider that these companies can serve as an engine incorporating many of these aforementioned targeting criteria – web history, content consumption, demographic data plus purchase data, product data and social media – the possibilities are powerful. One of the questions I intend to explore here is understanding how these vendors enable targeting actions – is the standard to simply feed information back to marketing automation that indicates the lead is a key target, or do the capabilities extend beyond that? It may turn out the predictive lead scoring systems only specialize in the data processing and predictive targeting, and that information then feeds into the targeting mechanisms we’ve outlined here.

This is a rapidly evolving space, so please leave additional ideas, comments or corrections via feedback, and I’ll continue to update this post with the latest information.

Marketo’s Latest & Greatest - a Tale of Two Products a.k.a. Some lead and some follow

At the August 12, 2014 Boston Marketo User Group (BMUG) meeting, Marketo representatives shared two areas of their latest product development – Real-Time Personalization (RTP) and Marketo SEO. 

Leaving the session, I was struck by the stark contrast between the two:

  • How they fit into Marketo’s DNA
  • Their origin & motivation (my guess)
  • Their positioning of Marketo as a leader or follower within the category

Product Functionality #1 - Real Time Personalization (in the “Lead” Category)

Marketo’s Real-Time Personalization came across as THE natural extension to everything we have seen from Marketo so far. Take Marketo’s ability to capture user specific data and deliver relevant content, and evolve that from email nurturing streams to contextual messaging during a website visit.

I also envision this evolving even more in the future to incorporate personalized ad retargeting and social marketing, either via further Marketo product development or partnering or purchasing someone like Demandbase, ReachForce or Bizo (although not Bizo themselves because they were just purchased by LinkedIn).

These are just two of the use cases that seem possible (disclaimer: I am concluding this from a 45-minute large projector demo standing in the back of a poorly ventilated second floor of Papa Razzi, not from actually using the product).

Greatly improved targeting of anonymous traffic – The strongest broad use case for anonymous traffic initially is industry-based targeting. Marketo identifies the anonymous visitor’s company based on IP lookup and categorizes them by vertical, so page content can be tailored by vertical.  Banner messaging, case studies, content and calls to action can be tailored by vertical, without asking for anything from the site visitor. This relevant content should lead to increased engagement (lower bounce rates), deeper site visits (assuming the content to support it) and higher conversion rates.

Tailoring of content for identified users – For any identified traffic (you can become identified based on filling out a form or -- don’t forget, Marketo users -- clicking an email from Marketo), whereby a cookie ties that visitor to a lead record.  Making this connection means marketers can now tailor web content based on any information they have captured around the visitor. Some ideas that come to mind here which can be made possible based on ‘tagging’ users based on their content consumption from previous program interactions:

  • Tagging users based on Key Topics /Issues, so banner messaging can be tailored to solutions to those issues
  • Tagging users based on Buying Stage, so content offers can be tailored by stage (offer an Educational asset to Early Stage; a Solution based asset to Middle Stage; and a Trial Download offer to Late Stage)
  • Categorizing role data and tailoring content by role

We could be gone from the days of rotating five banner messages to see which ones is relevant – as now we already know the primary topic of interest of the site visitor.  And gone are the days of guessing which call to action is right, as it can be tied to their stage based on past behavior.

The excitement in the room was palatable as the Marketo team walked us through these features. The story they told as they presented flowed naturally, and for me it seemed that this product development strategy HAD to be driven straight from Marketo founders Phil Fernandez and Jon Miller. Not only is it a natural extension of everything Marketo has done to date, it matches concepts that Epiphany (Phil and Jon’s previous company) brought to market in the late 1990s when Web Personalization was first introduced.

The difference between what Marketo has now, and the Epiphany pre-Millennial engine is that this Marketo web personalization product can be run by the masses of marketers.  Once tracking code and content deployment code are installed on the website, then the personalization rules can be managed via a user friendly rules based interface that Marketo administrators are used to.

I really like how Marketo is NOT trying to place in the CMS market here, and rather presenting their content targeting more like embed code that marketers use in appropriate sections of the website for messaging, content offers and calls to action.

This has leadership written all over it and I see this extending into retargeting, social marketing and more.

Product Functionality #2 – Marketo SEO (in the “Follow” Category)

Whereas the RTE discussion was vibrant and natural, as the presentation shifted into the SEO topic, the “story” became forced. Should the Marketo folks be educating around SEO vs. SEM? How should they be advising customers to deal with issues like backlinks that are oh-so-important but oh-so-critical to handle correctly? Is this SEO tool to replace other SEO tools or is this an SMB starter kit? A good proof point of the Marketo approach towards this is one of the reps commented “This may be not be for you if you’re using tools like CloudEdge.”  Um, ya mean BrightEdge?  Let's just show it didn't show much understanding of the market they are playing in.

While the RTE presentation told an integrated story, this SEO walkthrough felt disjointed, a periphery tool to Marketo’s core capabilities. Do keywords have a place on Marketo landing pages? I suppose, but very low in priority since we know that the SEO value of sub-domains that Marketo landing pages usually reside on is very limited vs. core website content.

So why did the Marketo build this?  Here’s my guess:

Whereas RTE is driven from the founders and company DNA, Marketo SEO is driven by request from the sales organization.  “We need that checkbox in the features comparison”. They don’t want to show up with a blank in a column where HubSpot has a solid checkmark not to mention owning the concept of Inbound Marketing, and as the two lone marketing automation soloists continue on a Purple vs. Orange collision course, Marketo management wants all i’s dotted and t’s crossed.

So I do get it, it’s just that the contrast struck me hard. One Marketing Automation Platform, 2 Hours of Demos, 2 Product Feature Sets – 1 a strategic platform development, and the other a “me-too” tool.

And whereas I get why Marketo built the SEO tools, especially with INBOUND 2014 around the corner, I just wonder how much investment went into it and could that have been better spent on leadership and not a “me-too” product checkbox.