A modular approach to marketing automation and post-click marketing

It’s a wonderful time to be a marketer.

Not only are you at the dawn of a plethora of exciting new vehicles and media — search marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing, etc. — but the software industry has finally turned its attention to helping you leverage technology in your work. Arguably, the coolest and most competitive software developments these days are created expressly for the marketing department.

And because so many of these software solutions are now offered as on-demand software-as-a-service (SaaS), you can quickly adopt them — without risky capital expenditures or the overhead of massive IT development and integration.

The only downside is that, at times, it might seem like too much of a good thing. There are now so many software offerings for marketers — often with overlapping features — it can be a tad overwhelming to sort out how they best fit together in your own organization.

Here’s the strategy we take with our customers.

The power of loosely-coupled architectures

Generally speaking, there are two competing philosophies in marketing software:

• an integrated approach where a vendor attempts to create one package that does everything, rolling up search management, email management, lead tracking, analytics, social media management, etc.;

• a modular approach where a vendor specializes in a particular component — such as we do with post-click marketing and landing page management — but designed in a way to easily work and exchange data with other components.

We’re big proponents of the modular approach.

The siren song of one single integrated package — which vendors in the marketing automation and enterprise marketing management space are all gunning for these days — is that it kills many birds with one stone and includes built-in connections between the different pieces. These solutions are great for “checking the box” on a laundry list of features: Email marketing, check. Lead scoring, check. Landing pages, check.

The problem, however, is that these solutions are the classic jack-of-all-trades, master of none.

Each of these new marketing fields — email marketing, search management, post-click marketing, etc. — are evolving and expanding rapidly. It’s almost impossible for one vendor to maintain expertise in all of them simultaneously. For instance, in the case of post-click marketing, the state-of-the-art in landing pages now involves multi-step paths, behavioral segmentation, dynamic Flash and video content, interactive social media components, mobile experiences, and more. And as ion’s CTO, I can attest that the list of amazing things that can be added to post-click marketing is a near bottomless mug of goodness waiting to be tackled.

Since all we do is focus on landing pages and post-click marketing, we’ve kept our platform at the leading edge of these developments. And, more importantly, our customers have reaped the performance benefit of doing things their competitors can’t — and winning higher conversion rates in the process.

For the things we don’t specialize in — such as remarketing programs or email marketing — we don’t pretend to do a half-baked job of it. Instead, we make it seamless to hand-off respondents from post-click marketing into any other software that the marketer wants to use for post-conversion marketing. This open philosophy is known as a “loosely-coupled architecture” because it’s easy for people to mix and match components with a best-of-breed strategy.

In contrast, most integrated solutions that claim to include landing pages are still stuck on single-page experiences with no awareness of these new capabilities. Similarly, most of them are behind the curve on the latest capabilities in email marketing, social media management, etc. Just because you check the box, doesn’t mean you’re good at it.

I don’t mean to pick on anyone, it’s just the nature of the trade-off: the benefits of an integrated approach are counterbalanced by the lack of specialization.

Three key stages of the funnel

So what’s the right choice between integrated versus specialized?

It depends on a lot of things. The size of your company and your marketing department — if you’re only one person trying to do everything, having a single integrated package is probably more practical. It also depends on what aspects of the marketing funnel are most important to you, and which have the greatest opportunity for leveraging competitive advantage.

In the places where you can have a significant edge — where you need a significant edge — that’s probably a good place to look at specialization.

Generally speaking, for mid-size and larger organizations, we see three distinct stages of the online marketing funnel:

• pre-click marketing, including advertising management and social media efforts;
• post-click marketing, including landing pages, conversion paths, and microsites;
• post-conversion marketing, including email marketing, remarketing, and lead nurturing;

In that structure, we see a great opportunity for vendors to specialize at each respective stage.

By way of reconciling with my marketing automation colleagues for rattling the all-in-one myth, I actually think many of them are great at the post-conversion marketing stage. We’ve had customers work with Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, and many others with excellent success. But a key part of that success is not “checking the box” on landing pages, but really leveraging post-click marketing to feed the post-conversion marketing with high quality, high quantity respondents.

Phenomenal post-click marketing experiences and deftly executed post-conversion marketing automation are complementary, not competitive.

Adaptability for the future

In addition to the performance benefits of specialization, a modular approach offers increased flexibility for marketers as their online marketing universe continues to expand and evolve.

By adopting open software packages that support these loosely-coupled architectures, marketers are not beholden to a single vendor. If ever a vendor were to stop innovating, or unfavorably change their pricing or policies, or if something better were to come along, a modular structure enables the marketer to swap them out with someone new.

That’s not as easy to do when everything is bundled into a single package. There’s no incentive for those vendors to provide migration capabilities, as they want to keep you locked in.

In contrast, the very nature of open, modular solutions is that they make it easy for data to go in and out — because that’s how they operate on a daily basis. The incentive remains very clear for those vendors to keep being the very best at what they do, making their customers ecstatically happy, because they know if they don’t, those customers can quickly vote with their feet.

Strategically, we believe the days of a single vendor providing all the software for an entire marketing department are gone and aren’t coming back. There’s not going to be a grand ERP that runs all of marketing from a single black box. There’s simply too much velocity in digital marketing innovation, distributed among too many people, scaling across too many domains in marketing.

But that very innovation is what makes marketing so exciting these days — and presents tremendous opportunity for competitive advantage.