B2B Marketing Automation How-To Guide

How-To Guide
© 2014 Demand Metric Research Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
B2B Marketing Automation
By David Raab, Research Director
February 2014
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Business-to-business (B2B) marketing automation systems are among
the hottest sectors of the technology industry. Vendor revenues have
grown at 50% per year since 2009 and will probably top $1 billion in
2014. Leading vendors including Eloqua, Marketo, and Pardot have
been acquired or gone public at tremendous valuations. Major software
companies including IBM, Oracle, Salesforce.com, Adobe, and Teradata
have purchased B2B or business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing
automation products. Venture capitalists have invested several hundred
million dollars in start-ups and existing firms.

How-To Guide
Yet, despite this growth, fewer than 20% of B2B marketers have
purchased an integrated marketing automation system (although many
more use email, Web analytics, and other component technologies).1
Even more alarming, many past buyers do not use their systems fully
and a significant portion report little benefit from their investment.2
The lesson of these statistics is not that marketing automation doesn’t
work. The same studies show that the majority of users are satisfied and
productive. Rather, the point is that marketing automation works only
when marketers deploy their systems effectively. This Best Practices
Guide will help to ensure that you are among the successful
majority of B2B marketing automation buyers, not the unhappy
remnant.
WHAT IS B2B MARKETING AUTOMATION?
The label “marketing automation” might apply to any type of computer
system used by marketers: email, ad buying, search engine optimization,
Web site personalization, Web analytics, budgeting, planning, predictive
modeling, segmentation, Webinars, mobile messaging, lead
management, social media, and much else. But over the past few years
the term has increasingly taken on a narrower meaning of products that
offer B2B marketers an integrated combination of email, Web behavior
tracking, landing pages, multi-step nurture campaigns, lead scoring,
integration with sales automation software, and related analytics. In
fact, a major selling point for marketing automation has been its ability
to replace multiple single-purpose systems (often called “point
solutions”).
The price of marketing automation is not always less than the combined
fees of the point solutions it replaces. But the savings in training and
time spent moving data between the systems are substantial. These
savings are especially important to small businesses where the same
person would operate several of the point solutions herself. Using the
same system for different marketing tasks matters less at larger
organizations, where different people manage email, advertising, Web
pages, and analytics. But those organizations gain greater benefits from
the shared customer database, easier coordination across channels,
better planning and budgeting, and tighter control over user access to
specific functions and data.
1 http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/2013/02/why-is-marketing-automation-growing-so.html
2 http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/2013/10/marketing-automation-user-satisfaction.html

How-To Guide
The scope of many marketing automation systems has recently
expanded to incorporate social media publishing and, somewhat less
common, social monitoring and social promotions. Some systems have
also added “inbound marketing” functions designed to attract Web
traffic, including blogging, Webinars, search engine optimization, and
paid Web advertising. However, most marketers still use separate
systems for the “inbound” functions. Instead of trying to replace those
systems, most marketing automation vendors have made it easier for
those systems to integrate with the primary marketing automation
database.
As already noted, most systems now described as “marketing
automation” are designed for business marketers. This wasn’t always
the case. The phrase “marketing automation” was originally applied to
B2C systems such as Unica and Aprimo. Like the B2B systems, those
earlier B2C marketing automation products offered an integrated
solution that supported several channels with a shared customer
database and shared analytics. The specific channels and features
differed because different marketing methods were important when
those systems were originally developed during the 1990’s.
The more important distinction, which still remains, is that the B2C
systems attach to an external marketing database with nearly any
design. B2B systems maintain their own customer database, with core
structures that mirror sales automation databases so the two can easily
exchange data. Early B2B marketing automation systems were
extremely limited in the deviations they allowed from this core data
structure. Some of today’s systems are considerably more flexible but
this is still an area that requires close examination by prospective
buyers.
Another important difference between B2B and B2C marketing
automation is that the nearly all B2B systems are designed as “cloud”
(Software as a Service, or SaaS) systems, meaning the client only
purchases a subscription to software which is actually run by the vendor.
It also typically implies a “multi-tenant” architecture, meaning many
clients run on the same instance of the software and security procedures
ensure each client’s information remains separate and private. Most
B2C marketing automation products were originally designed as “on-
premise” software, which was purchased outright by the client, installed
on the client’s servers, and managed by the client’s staff. Many large
B2C deployments are still handled this way. Today’s B2C systems

How-To Guide
usually offer some type of SaaS option, which may or may not have a
true multi-tenant architecture underneath.
B2B marketing automation systems were specifically designed to
provide marketers with features that were missing from sales
automation systems. Yet there is always a question of whether
marketing automation should be part of sales automation or sales
automation’s parent category of customer relationship management
(CRM) software. Some marketing automation features are now more
common in CRM, including landing pages, lead scoring, some analytics,
and some social marketing. But others remain mostly missing,
including advanced segmentation, multi-step nurture campaigns, and
Web behavior tracking. This is largely due to technical constraints that
make it difficult for CRM systems to support all marketing automation
functions. These constraints will probably be overcome in the long run,
but, for the immediate future, the categories will probably stay distinct.
The one exception is “all in one” systems for very small businesses, such
as Infusionsoft and Ontraport, which already combine CRM and
marketing automation features. They can do this because their
relatively small data volumes make it easier to support CRM and
marketing automation requirements on the same architecture.
CORE FUNCTIONS
B2B marketing automation systems all provide the following core
functions. However, they differ considerably in the details of their
implementations.
 Email. Users can compose and send mass emails to lists of
prospects and customers. This is a critical difference from CRM
systems, which let salespeople send emails to individuals but
often have very limited mass mailing capabilities. Nearly all
marketing automation systems support personalization (inserting
data values such as the recipient’s name) and some allow dynamic
content (inserting different messages based on variables such as
the recipient’s industry). Other differences involve the creation
and use of standard templates, formatting and previewing for
different devices (smartphone, tablet, desktop), spam scoring, and
support for large message volumes.
 Landing Pages. Users can build Web forms that post
information to the underlying marketing database. These forms
are typically hosted by the marketing automation system, freeing
the marketers from dependence on their company Web site.
Some systems can generate forms to add to the company Web

How-To Guide
site and/or provide code that lets external forms post to the
marketing database. Advanced features include pre-filling forms
with known data, automatically replacing answered questions
with new ones (“progressive profiling”), and asking different
questions based on previous answers or other customer data
(“branching”). Some systems let users build surveys and multi-
page microsites in addition to simple forms. All systems make it
easy to embed links to forms in system-generated emails.
 Behavior Tracking. The system keeps a record of email and
Web behaviors such as email opens, link clicks, and page views.
Individuals are tracked by dropping browser cookies that identify
repeat visitors; when a visitor explicitly identifies herself by
filling out a form or logging in, the identity is connected to the
cookie. Tracking is sometimes limited to emails and landing
pages created by the marketing automation system but can
usually be extended to other Web pages by embedding a vendor-
provided bit of Javascript. Different technologies are needed to
track behaviors on mobile devices; some vendors do this better
than others. Systems also differ in how much behavior detail they
store, which data is accessible to external systems, and how it can
be used for segmentation, event triggers, analyses, and other
purposes.
 Lead Scoring. Users can define formulas that attach a category
label or numeric score to each lead. The formulas draw on
behaviors and profile data stored in the marketing database.
Many systems create two scores, one reflecting the lead’s
similarity to the company’s target customers and the other
reflecting the lead’s apparent level of interest. Systems vary
considerably in the types of data available for scoring, the
sophistication of the scoring formulas, how often scores are
recalculated, whether scores are influenced all leads from the
same company, and whether one lead can have multiple scores.
Lead scores may be exposed to sales people through the CRM
integration; some marketing automation vendors offer special
modules to let sales people to view and understand this
information.
 Nurture Campaigns. Names in the database can be sent a
sequence of messages. These are typically aimed at people who
are not yet ready for direct sales contact, but the campaigns
might also have other purposes such as encouraging renewal or
use of new system features. Some systems send everyone the

How-To Guide
same set of messages at fixed intervals (“drip campaign”). Others
keep the same intervals but vary the messages based on user
attributes. Some can deliver entirely different experiences based
on response to previous messages (“branching”). Systems vary in
how users enter a campaign, how the campaign flows are defined,
how treatments can vary within a flow, what data is available to
guide treatments, what actions can be triggered by a campaign,
what messaging channels are supported, and what information is
available for reporting. Nurture campaigns are a very powerful
part of marketing automation, but complex campaigns can be
difficult to design and execute. Campaign features probably differ
more between systems than any other marketing automation
function. Users need to look carefully to find a system that
matches their requirements and skills.
 CRM Integration. At a minimum, the marketing automation
system must be able to pass new leads to CRM. In practice,
nearly all marketing automation systems can both send and
receive CRM data and have synchronization features to ensure
that changes made in one system are later copied into the other.
Systems vary in the types of data that are shared, the control
users have over which changes are accepted, how processes such
as campaign assignments are coordinated, how new leads are
added to the CRM system, and whether marketing automation
can send alerts or assign tasks to sales people. Typically only
some marketing automation data is copied to the CRM database.
Other information, such as detailed behavior histories, is
displayed on CRM screens but read from marketing automation
files. Most CRM integration works through vendor-published
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) which are open to all
systems. Access to special features or to CRM systems without a
published API may still require custom programming.
 Analytics. Marketing automation systems provide basic
statistics on email performance (messages sent, opened, clicked,
bounced, etc.), landing pages (views, unique visitors, form fills,
etc.), and campaign events (leads added, leads removed, active
leads, leads per stage, etc.). Some provide more detailed
information, better visualizations, drill-down into segments, and
custom reports. Automated predictive modeling is occasionally
available, but usually relies on external software. Some systems
create return on investment reports based on revenue data from
CRM or other systems. One key challenge with such reports is

How-To Guide
that CRM systems often don’t attach the revenue to the contacts
or accounts that exist in marketing automation.
SPECIALTY FUNCTIONS
As the core marketing automation features have become established,
vendors have expanded in several directions. These include social
marketing, marketing administration, and Web traffic generation. Each
category has its own functions.
Social marketing features include:
 Social Monitoring. This is listening for public mentions of a
client’s product or other keywords on social media such Twitter,
Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogs. Advanced monitoring might use
artificial intelligence to classify the mentions and direct them to
appropriate individuals for response. Some systems also identify
influencers or import influence measurements from external
sources such as Klout, PeerIndex, and Kred.
 Social Publishing and Sharing. It is now fairly common for
B2B marketing automation to let users add sharing buttons to
system-generated content such as email and Web pages. These
buttons let recipients repost the content to their own social
networks. Many systems also can now publish content directly
to major social networks through the client’s own accounts.
These systems also providing tracking reports to show
readership and traffic generation.
 Social Promotions. Some systems support specialized
promotions through Facebook and other networks, or run
general promotions such as contests and games. Some can also
produce landing pages, surveys, and similar contents that are
tailored to specific social networks.
Marketing administration features include:
 Budgeting and Planning. Basic features are attaching expected
costs and revenue to campaigns and comparing these with actual
results. More advanced features include assigning campaigns to
hierarchies related to product, regions, strategies, or customer
segments; estimating costs based on volumes; and associating
costs with revenues for return on investment reporting.

How-To Guide
 Revenue Forecasts. Some systems assign leads to funnel stages
and forecast the timing and amount of revenue they will produce,
based on historical data. This is similar to the sales pipeline
forecasts in CRM systems except that the leads are at an earlier
stage in their lifecycle. The stages may be a simple sequential
funnel or more elaborate flows that move customers in specified
patterns among alternate states.
 Project Management and Workflow. These features let
marketers define the tasks required to create a promotion, assign
those tasks to individuals, and track progress. Some B2C
marketing automation products offer very sophisticated project
scheduling features but these are rare among B2B systems. More
B2B systems have basic workflow to manage content
development, such as tracking approvals and revisions.
Traffic generation features include:
 Blogging and Content Marketing. Some systems provide built-
in blogging and Web site management tools. This makes it
easier to add subscribers’ names to the marketing database, to add
blog and Web readership to behavior profiles, and to publish
personalized promotions on blogs and Web pages. Similar
advantages apply to managing other types of content, such as
downloadable white papers, within the marketing automation
system.
 Search Engine Optimization. These features let marketers
specify the search terms or types of readers they wish to target,
and then assess the likely performance of Web pages, emails, and
other potential marketing content against those goals. At its
simplest, this involves scanning the content for keywords and
other attributes that help with search engine rankings. More
advanced systems can recommend additional search terms to
target or suggest content to add.
 Advertising Management. An increasing number of systems
integrate directly with search engine advertising tools like
Google AdWords to set up and manage paid search campaigns
from within their marketing automation interface. This makes it
easier to identify the campaigns associated with each response
and provides easier integration with planning, budgeting, and
return on investment analysis.

How-To Guide
KEY CONSIDERATIONS
The functions described so far are supported by underlying technologies
that have a major impact on user experience. Issues to consider include:
 Content Management. Emails, landing pages, and other
marketing content are usually created within the system using
some sort of visual designer. Beneath this layer, systems differ in
how easily content can be shared across promotions, how it is
stored and accessed, and the controls provided over versions and
changes. Multi-national organizations will also be concerned
about support for multiple languages.
 Database Management. Early B2B marketing automation
databases often held little more than a single profile record and
behavior history for each individual, with only a handful of user-
defined fields. Even today, many systems rely on email address
as a unique identifier for each individual. Some systems are now
much more advanced, allowing additional user-defined tables,
multi-layer data structures, and user identity matching on
multiple keys. There are often still limits on the total amount of
data that can be stored or on the amount that can be extracted to
other systems. Marketers with large data volumes or extensive
analytical needs should examine database features closely before
selecting a system.
 User Rights Management. Smaller marketing departments are
often comfortable letting all users access all system functions and
data, but larger departments typically need to control who does
what. These limits might reflect divisions along product lines,
geographic regions, or functional specialties. Larger
organizations are also more likely to require a supervisor or
compliance officer to approve a program someone else has created
before it is released. Systems vary substantially in the how finely
they can control user authorities and in how easily users can
manage complex authorization hierarchies.
 Open API and Apps. Most marketing automation systems were
originally designed as self-contained systems with little
integration to other software except for CRM. Today, major
vendors have published APIs that let external systems access
marketing automation data and functions. Many also let the
marketing automation system itself access other products’ APIs.
Typical uses include integration with Webinar systems to send

How-To Guide
invitations, register participants, and track attendance;
integration with search engine advertising campaigns; and
integration with external data sources to clean data and enhance
customer profiles. Some vendors have created their own
application market places that make it easy to find and
incorporate third party systems with a few mouse clicks.
VENDOR LANDSCAPE
Marketing automation is a composite of several “point solutions” within
the larger category of marketing software. To put it a broader context,
marketing systems are part of the CRM environment (broadly defined as
including marketing, sales and service systems), which in turn is nested
within customer interaction management (incorporating CRM and Web
site management), which sits alongside “back office” systems accounting,
human resources, and manufacturing). Integrated suites exist at every
level of this structure: complete enterprise management systems like
SAP; complete customer interaction systems like IBM; complete CRM
systems like Salesforce.com. Since these suites all contain some form of
marketing automation, they are all part of the competitive landscape.
But companies that purchase such suites are rarely focusing on
marketing automation as their main priority, so the most relevant
competition for B2B marketing automation vendors is still other B2B
marketing automation vendors.

How-To Guide
Those vendors fall into three rough groups, based largely on the size
and sophistication of their target clients. Some vendors serve more than
one client group, but each is probably best suited to a single segment.
 Micro-Business Vendors. These serve the very small
businesses, typically under 20 employees and often with fewer
than five. Companies this small rarely have a professional
marketer on staff, so the owner or one other person runs the
system. Because one person handles all the marketing and often
all the sales, buyers want a single system that offers as many
functions as possible. This simplifies training and avoids the need
for technical skills to move data from one system to another.
Vendors serving this market stress extreme ease of use,
comprehensive scope, limited complexity, and low price. This is
the realm of “all in one” systems that combine CRM with
marketing automation. Major vendors include Infusionsoft,
Ontraport, and Venntive. This segment is also served by several
systems that add nurture campaign capabilities directly to a CRM
database; while not true marketing automation, they meet the
same purpose for many companies. Examples include
CoreMotives and ClickDimensions, which both integrate with
Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and ZohoCRM. This segment is also
served by several companies that specialize in small service
businesses, such as dentists and plumbers, providing help with
appointments and local advertising. This group includes
companies like ReachLocal and DemandForce. Pricing for a full
marketing automation solution in this segment usually starts
around $200 to $400 per month, although lower cost options are
often available for companies who want only limited features.
 Small to Mid-Size Business Vendors. This is the heart of the
marketing automation industry, where the most vendors compete
for the most revenue (although the micro-business vendors have
more individual clients). Clients in this group range from $5
million to $500 million revenue, with exceptions in either
direction. These firms have at least one full-time marketer and a
separate sales staff. They run more complicated marketing
programs and use most core marketing automation features,
content marketing, and social publishing, and promotions.
However, these marketers are less interested in integrated CRM,
advertising, and Web site management, since those are often
handled by someone else. Major vendors in this segment include
Act-On Software, HubSpot, and Salesforce/Pardot for smaller
clients and Marketo, Oracle/Eloqua, and Silverpop serving larger

How-To Guide
firms. This segment also includes systems that are sold primarily
to marketing agencies who use them to support their own clients.
This group includes Optify, Net-Results, and LeadLife. The
sector also includes many other, small vendors with strong
products. These often have specialized features or expertise that
make them worth considering if they happen to fit the buyer’s
needs. Pricing in this segment starts from $1,000 to $2,500 per
month.
 Enterprise Vendors. These serve businesses over $500 million
revenue. Those firms have large marketing departments, often
reaching several hundred users in multiple locations. They need
high scalability, precise user rights management, advanced
budgeting and planning, revenue forecasting, project
management, and extensive content management including
multiple language support. Oracle/Eloqua is the leading
specialist in this group, with competition from Marketo and
Silverpop among conventional B2B marketing automation
vendors and, for the largest accounts, from B2C marketing
automation systems including IBM/Unica, Teradata,
Adobe/Neolane, SAS, RedPoint, and SAP. Prices among this
group start around $5,000 per month and often reach much
higher.
BEST PRACTICES
Cloud technology and monthly subscriptions make it very simple to
deploy a marketing automation system. But successful implementation
is still hard. Here are some key practices to get full value from your
investment:
 Pick the Right Vendor. Marketing automation systems all have
the same list of core functions, but there are still significant
differences in the products and the vendors behind them. Every
function can be implemented at different levels of sophistication
and ease of use; marketers must carefully assess their own
requirements to find the right balance power and complexity. In
addition to features, vendors differ in their size, support services,
partner networks, pricing, and industry expertise. Finding a
vendor you’re comfortable with – and checking with references to
be sure your impression is correct – is essential to a successful
relationship.
 Define Scenarios. It’s easy to say that buyers should define their
requirements, but many first time marketing automation users

How-To Guide
really don’t know what they need. One solution is to create
scenarios that describe the specific steps needed to complete
projects you plan to execute, like running a newsletter program
or nurture campaign. Once you’re done this, have potential
vendors demonstrate how they would execute the scenario using
their system. The goal is to see what’s required to do real work,
rather than just looking at a disconnected sample of whatever
features the vendor wants to highlight. Make sure your scenarios
include some of the more complicated marketing programs you
intend to develop, such as elaborate segmentations or event-based
branches in campaign flows. These are where product
weaknesses will be most visible.
 Improve Data Quality. Don’t be surprised if your initial load
uncovers poor data in the sales automation system: if anything,
you should be surprised if it doesn’t. Sales users can easily ignore
obsolete, incorrect, or duplicate records, but your marketing
automation system will treat every entry as equally valid unless
you tell it differently. Take a preliminary look at the sales data as
soon as possible and work with sales people to find ways to
eliminate or correct bad information. Then agree on standards
and audit processes so you’re sure that only good information is
shared between the systems in the future.
 Align with Sales. Data quality is just one area where marketing
automation requires new levels of cooperation. Other key
interactions with sales include defining target customers,
building formulas for lead scoring, setting rules for when leads
are passed to sales, creating the lead transfer process, and
agreeing much effort sales will invest in marketing-generated
leads. You’ll need even more coordination and training if your
marketing automation system sends alerts to sales people, assigns
leads directly, or shows sales people the lead scores and
behavioral profiles that marketing automation has created.
 Invest in Training. No matter how easy the marketing
automation system looks in sales demonstrations, your staff will
still need training to use it effectively. This training extends
beyond system operations to how to design effective programs,
monitor performance, and improve results over time. Be sure the
vendor’s start-up process leaves you with more than a handful of
prebuilt programs your staff isn’t able to adjust. And be sure to
continue training after the initial deployment so you staff can
deepen their skills and learn new system functions over time.

How-To Guide
 Map the Buying Process. Customer understanding is the
foundation of marketing success. Map the stages in the buying
cycle, with particular attention to the portion before leads are
turned over to sales. Then match your marketing programs
against the stages to identify any gaps where you are failing to
guide leads to the next step. This will be your framework for
future program development and analysis. You’ll further refine
this framework over time by identifying different buyer personas
and constructing programs to meet their particular needs.
 Set a Long-Term Plan. You can’t do everything at once. Start
your marketing automation deployment with some basic
campaigns that use primary features such as emails and landing
pages. But to be sure you don’t get stuck at that level, set a long-
term plan to add more advanced features such as lead scoring and
social media integration. Track progress against the plan as part
of your standard performance reporting to ensure it doesn’t get
lost amid the inevitable short-term crises. You may not truly
need every feature included in your marketing automation
system, but remember that the most successful marketers
generally use the broadest range of capabilities.
 Measure Results. If there is one key to marketing automation
success, it is measuring results so you can prove system value and
track improvements. Measures start with outcomes such as lead
counts and response rates, but should extend to efficiency
metrics, such as cost per qualified lead, and ultimately to value
measures such as incremental revenue and return on investment.
Measurements must always be placed in context by comparing
performance against plan or past results. Reliable measurement
supports other critical disciplines such as rigorous testing and
fact-based decisions, which themselves contribute hugely to
success.
BOTTOM LINE
The benefits of B2B marketing automation are firmly established, but
they are not guaranteed. Marketers need to understand what these
systems can do, identify how their company will use them, and pick a
system that matches their needs. They then need to follow a disciplined
implementation strategy that ensures they have the training, resources,
programs, and sales alignment necessary to gain real value from their
investment. Careful execution will ensure they become part of the
successful majority of marketing automation users, not the

How-To Guide
unhappy minority whose deployments have failed to match
expectations.
ABOUT THE RESEARCH ANALYST
With an MBA from Harvard, David is an expert in both B2B
& B2C marketing strategy & technology. He has advised The
Gap, JC Penney, Lowe's, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Williams-
Sonoma, Scholastic, Unisys, Sprint and Verizon Wireless.
He also publishes the Raab Guide to Demand Generation
Systems and the Marketing Performance Measurement Tool-
Kit.

B2B Marketing Automation How-To Guide

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