At Salesforce.com’s recent Dreamforce event, Mike Volpe, CMO of Hubspot, held a session entitled “Death by Marketing Automation” and launched his company’s #DeathbyMA program to encourage marketing automation users to upgrade to their inbound marketing solution.
The folks at Hubspot are great and super smart. They have written the book on Inbound Marketing (literally) and this is a creative way to get their message out there but there are few things in Mike’s presentation that aren’t quite right. Among them (my paraphrasing):
- Marketing automation is a tool of the 1990s
- Marketing automation doesn’t help attract more leads like blogging, search engines, and social media.
- Prospective customers interact in new ways like mobile and social media but marketing automation can’t capture this and help personalize the relationship
- Lead nurturing is spamming
Here’s Mike’s full presentation.
Marketing automation is as much a piece of the modern marketing plan as is having an on-line presence through blogs, social media, and other ways to share and distribute content. Using an email marketing SPAM cannon is not part of the plan and it seems most of the points here are about sending unwanted emails to stale or purchased lists.
Who does that?
While marketing automation products like LoopFuse do have an email marketing capability, it is just one of many. Lead nurturing is not spamming. Quite the contrary – it is done to avoid it by sending timely and valuable content to a prospective customer that fits their level of interest and engagement.
The results of using a marketing automation system are impressive and quantifiable. The folks at Hubspot know this otherwise they wouldn’t have just purchased marketing automation functionality with their acquisition of Performable.
“HubSpot founders said this acquisition will enable them to provide innovative marketing functionality to their 4,500 customers, including advanced landing page optimization, lead nurturing with event-triggered communication, and marketing analytics from across the Web, email, social media, and mobile channels.”
Well said! So definitely make inbound marketing part of your plan (blogging, social presence, etc.) but, to really drive sales pipeline performance, use LoopFuse for full-featured and proven marketing automation capabilities.
We would love you to try out LoopFuse here.
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Robert;
Great post – thanks for sharing.
As you said, the founders of HubSpot wrote the book on Inbound. HubSpot tools are designed to help attract the right traffic. And they’re quite good at that, but as you point out their purchase of Performable is to add marketing automation to their tool’s capabilities.
We agree so much with your assessment that one needs both an Inbound Marketing strategy and tools, and a Marketing Automation strategy and tools, that we call the combined system Inbound Marketing Automation (IMA).
The driving forces behind Inbound’s ability to “get found online” are Social Media, SEO and if needed PPC. Used properly, they do attract the right visitors: your keywords bring them, which makes them “right”. Marketing Automation gives you a way to handle the increased number of requests for information in a timely and reliable way, 24/7. And a way to score and qualify these visitors. And – with their permission, nudge them along their buying cycles.
Inbound Marketing Automation is provable – you can calculate ROI for marketing using it. It gets better and better as you use it because it’s based on science rather than guesswork; and it lowers costs. I’m biased, but I think our slogan says it all: More leads of higher quality at lower cost.