Marketing automation technology has a foothold in the US, yet European marketers have so far been slower to explore its benefits. Claire Weekes investigates its future on the agenda of marketers on this side of the pond
In the UK, marketing automation still has a way to go in becoming standard practice. When you consider that the leading vendors in the sector are all US-based this perhaps isn’t so hard to understand – trends that begin in one territory take time to cross to another, after all.
Marketing automation as a concept was still fairly new to UK B2B marketers as little as two years ago. We were in the grip of a recession as its benefits were being revealed. As Bryan Brown, director of product strategy at Silverpop explains, the process of embracing an automated platform meant, “creating a new budget line, because marketing automation as a category never existed before.”
Matt Hall, director of Profunnel agrees, “With sales and marketing having to squeeze more results from constrained budgets, they have failed to look at the new opportunities now open to them. Much of this is to do with fear of the unknown – where money is tight they have focused on the tried and tested, but with times changing this has often failed to deliver the results they need.”
Europe as an emerging market
Europe is considered an emerging market for marketing automation vendors. Of the two market leaders in the US, Silverpop says that just 15 per cent of its 1200 customers are based in Europe, while Bijan Bedroud, vice president of sales, EMEA at Eloqua reckons that the market as a whole is anywhere between two and five years behind the US in adoption terms.
“The UK leads this field with Germany, France, the Nordics and Benelux regions closely following. The US would probably argue they are out of the ‘early adopter’ phase and now well into the early majority while Europe varies between the two categories depending on where you look and who you talk to,” he says.
Post recession, more UK marketers seem to be finally embracing automation. “Firms seem to ‘get’ that they must up their game in terms of lead generation and management, to grow their sales pipelines and identify and progress the right leads through to conversion,” says Francois Laxalt, manager of marketing intelligence at Neolane.
“As marketing practices become more process-orientated and formalised, the move to marketing automation is a natural evolution,” agrees Eoin Rodgers, senior account manager at DirectionGroup. “We’re seeing more and more hype about the technology, while tangible ROI benefits are not so clear at this stage. The true benefits of implementing marketing automation will only be seen further down the line, when true intelligence and customer and prospect profiles have been built up. This is when the automation really comes into its own.”
Perhaps this wait to see how well some of Europe’s early adopters do out of investing in marketing automation technology is what is holding the mainstream back, as there is certainly a sense that so far, adoption rates here have been sluggish.
“Yes, it’s been a slower rate of adoption in the UK, but we’re not worried, we are still excited about the UK market,” says Brown. “Four years ago in the US we started with some brands adopting the technology – mainly financial service ones. The big break came along when agencies started getting on board – after that we saw an explosion in sectors taking up on marketing automation technology, from travel to entertainment to retail sectors.”
The CMO barrier
In terms of potential reasons for a lack of adoption, last year Joe Payne, CEO of Eloqua, suggested at the firm’s user conference that one of the problems vendors repeatedly faced was that of the company CMO being the biggest obstacle as they ‘don’t get’ the benefits of marketing automation adoption. Rodgers agrees that this can cause a problem. “The CMO can be a difficult sell for this type of technology. A CMO with little experience of campaign implementation may struggle to understand the intricacies, but should understand the benefits of a more sophisticated approach and better quality leads being passed to sales,” he says.
Low adoption rates so far indicate that it is unlikely that some of the other, less dominant players in the US market – Hubspot and Maticore, for example, will make a play for UK market share this year. “It is unlikely they will undergo the risk, diversion and expense to enter Europe during 2011,” suggests Laxalt. But there are lots of trends and developments in the marketing automation industry that indicate how demand for this technology might begin to grow quickly from here on in.
One new movement that may buoy the market is in organisations beginning to emerge that specifically help select marketing automation platforms for clients. Clever Touch and Annuitas are two such examples – both are companies that specialise in consulting B2B clients on beneficial marketing processes. Annuitas, until recently an exclusive partner of Silverpop, has become vendor neutral in order for it to advise clients on the marketing automation solution that best fits their needs.
Brown says that for SMEs, partnering with a company like one of these is “the perfect way to go – your partner will help you to adopt automation and all its processes, lend a strategic hand and offer training and advice to make sure you get the most out of the technology.”
Selling the benefits
Marcomms agencies are also increasingly becoming a primary channel for marketing automation vendors to gain new business from, as these agencies handle marketing automation activity on behalf of their clients.
Marketing automation vendor Intimis says that it now works with a number of agencies who ‘sell’ the benefits of marketing automation for them. One example includes Bristol-based agency, Proctor & Stevenson, who recently approached Intimis to help it drive sales for its client, Panasonic. A pan-European lead generation campaign to promote mobile PC the ‘Toughbook’ included orchestrated telemarketing for lead pre-qualification purposes and scheduled and triggered email activity. This was managed using bespoke Intimis software, which was integrated into Panasonic’s content management systems.
“Used in conjunction with a European banner and PPC programme, the campaign saw Toughbook’s marketing share of pipeline rise from 11 per cent to 25 per cent, while reducing budgets by 33 per cent,” says Intimis director Kevin Mason.
The race to hook in social media
Other developments in the industry are being driven by the way marketers communicate with their audiences. Social commerce, tipped to be big news in 2011, is having an impact on automation vendors’ offerings.
“Marketing automation platforms are falling over themselves to accommodate social media,” says Bedroud. “To date many providers have chosen to develop some kind of functionality within their own tool that tends to be only a partial solution. Typically, in the email marketing automation space, this takes the form of some kind of ‘share to social’ feature allowing the recipient of the email to easily share the content of the email to their preferred social media site.”
There is also evidence to suggest that as automation use becomes more widespread on this side of the pond, so future solutions will fall into two distinct camps. There are the off-the-shelf, highly sophisticated solutions such as those from Eloqua and Silverpop – great for brands with bigger budgets to play with. But simple, bespoke implementations will find resonance with those with less to spend, and may help more companies dip their toe in the water.
“We believe that the future will fall into two camps,” agrees Mason. “Those who buy into one proprietary ecosystem platform and those who deploy interoperable modules glued together with common strands and protocols. Many vendors are developing proprietary ecosystems to manage the entire marketing process. Each module – content management, email broadcast and data processing– is inter-dependant. However, most clients already have many of these components [and will prefer] a plug-in solution.”
Developments in the industry point to a healthier future for marketing automation vendors in Europe. “Different sectors will adopt at different rates,” says Bedroud. “But what is certain is that the UK, in particular, is not shy to adopt sophisticated marketing techniques and take advantage of developments in this new technology.”
