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Marketing technology is horribly fragmented and selecting a vendor can be paralysing for buyers. Thus the big software companies, alongside a number of smaller competitors, have seized the opportunity to sell their customers more complete marketing suites. In theory, this takes some of the hassle out of building a bespoke, marketing stack. For companies of a certain size and ambition, simplifying and unifying marketing software is alluring, ideally meaning less time spent integrating and more time spent marketing. Customers are buying packages stuffed with possibilities – paying meaty sums, annually billed, in the process – but their employees aren’t necessarily exploring the full breadth of what is included. If you were feeling cynical, you might commend this trend as an impressive example of mass upselling. Price is a major issue here: if you simply want to send email, monitor web traffic and/or manage social channels, there are cheaper or indeed free alternatives (TFM has established regularly updated hubs on the most popular freemium tech, including Google Analytics, Hootsuite and MailChimp). Buying a marketing cloud from one of the software titans, with their reputations for dependability, stability and trustworthiness, offers a warm blanket for the IT department, after all: “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”. Implementing any new technology is a serious investment, so whilst the services of small, sexy startups can be appealing, you want to be sure that your core systems are robust and your vendors are in it for the long haul. Further, at a time when cybersecurity is a case of ‘when, not if’, entrusting customer data to a single, well-protected cloud is attractive. What is a “marketing cloud”? Definitions vary, but a marketing cloud that passes muster should be built around a core of content management, marketing automation and solid analytics. Each of the big four have competencies in each of these core systems, with an additional collection of different data management, social and advertising tools around them. The Hub notes that predictive analytics and customer journey mapping are the next must-have features for marketing clouds.
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