"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. 

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.