<img alt="" src="https://secure.leadforensics.com/143750.png" style="display:none;">
P1WS Internet Marketing Blog

"The Other Guys" of Marketing Automation Software

If you’re a marketer, business owner or just an online marketing enthusiast - chances are you’re familiar with a number of marketing automation tools and platforms. If you’re considering purchasing a marketing automation tool for the first time or thinking about switching from one to another, you should know what to look for. You should have a good understanding of which software would be a good fit for your type of business/company.  

For the purposes of this post, I’m going to sound pretty negative. This post will be #1 in a series of 6. In this post, I am simply summarizing a few of the disadvantages marketers commonly associate with each of these marketing automation platforms. In my subsequent posts, I will break down each platform in more detail and compare it specifically to HubSpot- my marketing automation software of choice. Image result for marketing automation softwares

We’re a HubSpot Partner Agency and having personally worked at HubSpot in the past, I can’t promise I’m not a little biased in my love for HubSpot. But, alas, they are voted #1 by you - the consumer!

We’ll be talking about some of the big guys that play in the sandbox like Marketo, Pardot and Eloqua as well as what I consider to be some of the newer, smaller guys (functionality and robust-ness) like Infusionsoft and Act-On.

Let’s get started!

Marketo:

  • Not truly an “all-in-one” platform - multiple tools are required, making it much harder to measure its effectiveness
  • Customers report multiple logins, bills and support lines (or no support line at all)
  • Very difficult to integrate - can take from 6 months to a year before you’re up and running and takes a very technical team including development resources to implement
  • Marketo is centered around email automation - while their email automation is sophisticated, it doesn’t support full-funnel, multi-channel marketing making reporting difficult or inaccurate
  • It takes a sophisticated marketer to use Marketo:
    • Different interfaces for landing pages, emails and blog
    • Custom coding is required to make landing pages and emails responsive
    • It's an extra cost just to access phone support

Pardot

  • Very costly - their most basic subscription is $1,000/month and this doesn’t include any phone support
  • They don’t offer a free trial so the only way you’re seeing the software prior to purchase is through a Pardot sales rep
  • Steep discounts in the first year when paired with purchase of Salesforce and then large price jump in Year 2

Eloqua

  • Really meant for large enterprise teams
  • Manual integrations required for channels such as blogging and social media
  • Multiple tools requires making it difficult to measure effectiveness of marketing campaigns
  • Focused on email automation and doesn’t include tools for generating leads - as a result, many users end up purchasing lists of contacts
  • Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud offers many tools, but they’ve all been acquired by the giant and are not all fully integrated

Act-On

  • Limited functionality suited for beginners - marketers quickly “grow out of it”
  • Multiple tools required making it hard to measure effectiveness
  • Doesn’t provide closed loop analytics
  • No social monitoring tools
  • Poor email deliverability rate
  • Shows # of visits and leads but doesn’t compare which channels they came from
  • Requires a manual export of data from CRM and importing it into Act-On to attempt revenue reporting

Infusionsoft

  • No top-of-the-funnel tools or inbound capabilities (blogging, SEO, social media publishing/analytics, sources reporting, responsive landing pages etc.)
  • Infusionsoft is built to serve very small businesses and lacks scalability
  • Software is known to be “buggy and unreliable”
  • Weak customer support -  customers report that support reps often can’t offer a solution and support emails going unanswered

So there you have it- whether these aspects are important or relative to your marketing initiatives, you should at least an idea of what you should be on the lookout for during a demo of any of the above platforms. Ask hard questions on the above bullet points when evaluating these platforms prior to signing a contract and make the sales representative demo the exact functionality that will argue the above points.

Stay tuned for posts 2-6 in this series as we dive into more specific features like usability, customer service, implementation and everything in between. Most importantly, we’ll tell you how they compare to the #1 ranked marketing automation platform, HubSpot.
  p1ws   Posted in: Marketing Automation
Comments(0)