One of my earlier blog posts entitled Personalizing Mass Communication with Marketing Automation touched on the value of marketing automation programs. Now with a basic understanding of how marketing automation operates, let’s now compare the solutions top marketing automation vendors have to offer. Marketing automation software is a red-hot product geared toward sales and marketing teams that has an abundance of competitive suppliers to match demand. Three of the industry’s top leaders are Marketo, HubSpot and Pardot, each of which are aimed at different target audiences.Each of these programs are designed for specific kinds of businesses.
For the Corporation: Marketo
The one setback people tend to have when using Marketo is the difficulty of implementation. The tradeoff in this scenario, however, is after successfully implementing Marketo, you have access to extremely in-depth analytics to help you look at a business challenge from several vantage points. Marketo is the industry leader for in-depth and predictive analytics, making analyses of corporations larger samples sizes of data more statistically significant.
For the Small Business: HubSpot
If you have a small business of roughly 50 employees or less, the chances are you do not have the technical customization proficiency to effectively use Marketo, unless your company is tech-oriented. Small businesses don’t usually have the massive client base compared to a corporate enterprise that might require intense lead nurturing capabilities found in Marketo and Pardot. Additionally, HubSpot is a single system, one-stop-shop program with the most cost-effective user-friendly features.
For the Company Looking to Maximize Lead Conversion: Pardot
Like Marketo, installing Pardot does require some technical expertise. Pardot also encourages sales and marketing cohesion by making lead nurturing an integral part of the conversion process. Pardot is heavily reliant on its drip marketing feature, and based on where your potential customer is clicking, Pardot presents you with future marketing options to help your customer feel engaged, not overwhelmed.All three of these are excellent choices, and any one of them can do wonders for a business, given that you have a sound marketing strategy in place. Purchasing any of these marketing automation software programs alone will not solve your business challenges, though. First, you need to understand how to use and implement these products with your existing databases; and second, you need a solid business rationale and marketing approach. While the latter is the purview of your company’s decision makers, the former can be handled by Affirma’s marketing specialists.
More and more solution specialists are taking note of marketing automation’s meteoric growth and are looking for entry into the industry. Surely, these three top marketing automation vendors will face more competition in the near future. Let Affirma help you decide which might be right for your business.
