The Rebirth of Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is a mature technology. Yet, marketing strategies are rapidly evolving due to new technologies and new buyer behaviour. ABM has displaced lead generation. Multi-channel has become the new normal. Despite all this, the basic capabilities of marketing automation platforms have barely changed. That has led to a widespread feeling that marketing automation is stagnant. Many marketers appear to believe that Eloqua and Marketo are designed to deliver the marketing strategies of a bygone era.

Plenty of new martech solutions have been launched in recent years. CDPs and ABM platforms are now commonplace, and their feature set definitely overlaps with marketing automation. Five years ago, I wrote about the evolution of ABM platforms and the threat they posed to marketing automation. Even back then, people were asking if Demandbase or 6sense could replace Marketo or Hubspot. The question has come up more recently. It was asked several times during the recent launch of 6sense's intelligent workflow engine. The answer is still the same: not yet, but it probably could eventually.

Overlapping Questions

Fundamentally, marketing automation is still a lead-centric database in an increasingly account-based industry. The marketing capabilities within MA are still based around events and outbound email, even though the majority of budgets are directed to advertising. That's even before we consider the overlap with the kind of sales engagement capabilities seen in Outreach and Salesloft. It's no wonder people are asking about the future of MA technology.

Yet, we've been here before. Once upon a time, CDPs threatened to become the central system for lead scoring and data integration. Ultimately, though, CDPs never delivered on that promise in most organisations. They were simply too complex. Marketing automation is good enough for most demand generation needs. While ABM platforms are too limited, acting instead as a complementary technology, filling the gaps left in the tech stack by other platforms.

Beyond Email

Marketing automation vendors have made half-hearted attempts to diversify their platforms beyond email. Yet, marketers simply weren't interested. The leading MA platforms all have media integrations, which are only really used for LinkedIn and Facebook Lead Gen forms. However, this is due to a political divide as much as a technological one. Ad budgets are often controlled by media agencies who have their own platforms. Advertising capabilities wouldn't be used even if marketing automation did have the audience targeting capabilities to match dedicated adtech solutions.

The leading MA platforms do have a real dilemma, though. Where should they be focusing their development efforts? Many marketers associate marketing automation with email marketing. Yet, outbound email campaigns are a relatively unimportant part of the overall marketing automation feature set. It's certainly not why marketing operations places Marketo or HubSpot at the centre of the martech stack. From an ops perspective, the form management and data integration capabilities are far more important. Marketing automation is the gateway to CRM, even for companies following an ABM strategy. We are seeing vendors try to target both sets of needs.

Feature Updates

So far this year, we've seen Adobe release a new modular email designer for Marketo. That grabs the headlines because it finally integrates generative AI into the Marketo email editor. Yet, many Marketo admins are much more interested in the improved integration and journey builder capabilities arriving later in the year. The Salesforce sync will be significantly upgraded this quarter, and a new visual workflow editor based on the existing engagement maps feature has also been promised. That should make it easier to build sophisticated campaign journeys, which then integrate with CRM and ABM platforms for further follow-up.

We're also seeing similar developments from HubSpot. Last week's Spring Showcase focused heavily on sales agents and customer service agents. For marketing, the most interesting announcements focused on Marketing Hub Enterprise. HubSpot are not the first MA vendor to introduce lookalike lists, journey orchestration or multi-account management. However, they are significant upgrades for a platform that historically hasn't been flexible enough for enterprise use cases.

Marketing automation was supposed to deliver personalised customer experiences. Yet, in practice, the segmentation capabilities were not sophisticated enough to actually deliver this. Instead, they became a tool for automating field events and drip nurtures. AI offers an opportunity to achieve that original promise by calculating each prospect's journey stage and buyer interests. Combined with the hyper-personalisation capabilities of Generative AI, it may finally allow marketing automation to become more than an integration engine.

HubSpot Pitches for Enterprise

HubSpot's Spring Spotlight had a heavy AI focus, with new capabilities announced for both the content generation agent and customer service agents. Admins managing multiple HubSpot accounts will be more interested in the multi-instance management features. This allows for templates, assets and data to be mirrored across HubSpot instances when needed.

Demand Agents: Do Customers Want AI?

AI has been pitched as a technology to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Has anyone considered whether their customers want the AI option? In a recent article on my personal blog, I examine the major use cases for agents in B2B and consider whether customers will accept the replacement of human workers with AI.

Marketing Operations Roadmap Matrix

A Marketing Operations Roadmap is an essential strategic tool that aligns marketing priorities with your overall business goals. Any roadmap begins with understanding where your marketing organisation is right now, and then defining where you want to get to. This free Marketing Operations Roadmap Matrix from CRMT Digital allows you to do exactly that.