Take the Lead on Lead Generation

We have to put our Canadian software star Eloqua, to the top of the list for enterprise level demand generation and marketing automation. Founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, by three Queen’s University graduates, Steven Woods, Mark Organ, and Abe Wagner, the company continued to grow successfully over the last decade. On December 12th, 2012, just a little over ten years since its inception, an acquisition deal was papered with the technology industry giant Oracle for $871 million. Eloqua focuses on the enterprise market, and while they have Canadian roots, their customer base is still largely comprised of worldwide, enterprise level, multinational corporations with relatively few instances of the software operating within Canada for Canadian companies. 

Services 
If you are familiar with Salesforce, Eloqua is a similar, very mature, robust, and feature rich platform, focused on creating demand generation in the B2B space. The platform allows for deep integration with Salesforce, and your sales, marketing, and marketing technology teams can working together on the platform to drive strategic business, marketing and sales objectives. Designed for B2B sales with longer sales cycles which require nurturing, emails and digital engagement can be coordinated and automated for different touch points in the buying decision process. This allows companies to engage prospects automatically at certain points in the buying cycle, and provide timely information to prospects at key points within their buying and decision making process. The general starting point for companies interested in this software, is a minimum of 50,000 records (records are potential prospect data points, and prospect information, which has been collected by the company in the last three years). At least 50,000 prospect data records need to present, for it to even be considered a useful software tool for a company. 

Pricing
Prior to the Oracle acquisition, an Eloqua instance began at starting point for the Software As A Service platform for approximately $4000 - $10,000 / month. Even at a lower entry cost of the platform, once minimal marketing technology support service support is provided, $20,000 - $30,000 per month is really the entry level pricing needed to make this marketing machine run. Oracle has since integrated Eloqua into its service offerings and related platforms and therefore, pricing models, features and software as a service plans have changed.

The force behind the platform is known as the ‘Marketing Nation’, and consists of over 49 thousand marketers who share ideas, expertise and practices.

Marketo aims to ‘help marketers master the art and science of digital marketing’ by using their software platform, to help companies drive revenue and increase performance. The growth for businesses, is created by using the software to help monitor web traffic to capture leads online and engage with potential prospects. This allows companies to accelerate leads and help convert browsing prospects into paying customers. The system allows you to monitor traffic, create mass emails, and host webinars. There are simple feature settings and options, such as replicating or cloning an event, along with suite of online tools to help support sales and marketing initiatives.

The Engagement Marketing Platform is a marketing platform, and allows marketers to understand their audiences, while engaging and building bonds with them in real time online. The platform provides a unified experience for sales and marketing initiatives, while accelerating leads. This community allows for a variety of marketing suggestions and simple technical support solutions to be exchanged and shared.

Pricing
Varies from $ 895-$ 3,195 a month depending on services requested and the size of business. Once entry level service and support plans by a marketing technology team is put into place, companies will need to budget $ 5,000 - $10,000 / month at minimum, to drive effective engagement, accelerate leads and convert browsing prospects into new customers.

HubSpot was founded 2006 in Cambridge Massachusetts, by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shan who are both graduates from MIT. The company has over 11 thousand customers and 1900 partners across 70 different countries. The founders recognized businesses needed to adapt to people’s way of living and shopping-in relation to how they consume, source, and share information in society today. Cold calls, trade shows and pop ups are not as effective as they once were, and the way potential customers are attracted or engaged needed to be transformed.

HubSpot speaks to the “inbound” marketing experience and the platform is necessary to entice, engage and interact with potential customers. HubSpot aims to create more traffic to websites by using inbound marketing, and exposure optimization, to assist in content being found, as well as the content being appealing and accessible to all potential prospects through a variety of means. As an example of its engagement strategies, HubSpot recommends ending a video with a suggestion for another video, to continue the engagement and further the interaction with the prospect(s). With 15 - 20 writers of staff focused on their own marketing, HubSpot understands the importance of content.

Pricing
Pricing varies from $1000- $ 2,400 a month depending on the size of the business and services required. HubSpot scales pricing according the number of data and records a company collects and uses . With marketing technology services, the entry level budgets and pricing for any company creating a well structured inbound lead program will range from approximately $ 4,000 - $ 8,000 / month.

In 2013 Salesforce acquired Pardot, a marketing automation company that offered ‘software as a service’ (SAAS). Pardot is headquartered in Atlanta Georgia and was founded in 2007 by David Cummings and Adam Blitzer. The company was first acquired 2012 by ExactTarget, until Salesforce acquired both ExactTarget and Pardot the following year. At the time of acquisition, Pardot had 1,500 clients in B2B, offering marketing automation software to increase revenues while maximizing efficiency for companies. Pardot creates, deploys and manages online campaigns, as well as offering email deliverability services. Their modules build, manage and activate lead generation components (marketing campaign landing pages, forms, and email marketing programs). In November 2014, Salesforce also introduced ‘social engagement’ to their Customer Service Success Platform, empowering employees to make use of every social interaction from any single device. Features included; social listening engine, social customer service and social lead engagement , connecting with customers an entirely different way.

Services
 

Email Marketing
Email Marketing; customized content, scheduling for optimization, authentication for personalized experience, SPAM filter analysis, also track emails with plugins
 

Marketing Automation 
Lead Generation; landing page builder, progressive profiling, and search campaigns
 

Sales Force Automation 
Lead Management; email automation, lead nurturing and drip marketing, lead capture forms, as well as lead nurturing and lead scoring
 

Sales Intelligence; real time sales alerts, prospect tracking and analytics, data.com connector, and CRM integration
 

Social Media Management
Social Marketing; social profile lookups, cross-platform posting, social tracking and post scheduling
Reporting
 

ROI Reporting; closed-loop reporting, lifecycle reporting (combines marketing and sales reports to give overall view of sales funnel), Google analytics connector (to bridge gaps between micro and macro), and paid search reporting
 

CRM Services assist with the connecting of customers, partners and employees online with; 
Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, Collaboration Cloud, and Custom Cloud, case and task management, automatically routes and escalates important events, customer success platform, social and mobile cloud.
 

Sales Force Automation services include;
Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, ROI Reporting, Sales Intelligence, Social Marketing

Pricing
 

SalesForce is a ‘heavier’, mature platform which will require training for internal staff and support by a marketing technology team. Monthly plans are reasonable with pricing ranging from $1000/month for a standard account, $2000/month for a pro account which includes all the standard account features plus, and the customized marketing automation bundle of $3000 includes all Pro account features plus. All packages include up to 10 000 contacts and are billed annually.

While not a full suite marketing and lead generation platform, Vidyard needs to be given the title of the leading niche player in the market. Our home town heros and tech neighbours Vidyard was founded 2010, launched in 2011 and is located in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, by Michael Litt, Devon Galoway and Edward Wu, who had originally started Vidyard as a fourth year design project at University of Waterloo. 

Vidyard launched the video monitoring and analytics platform for Eloqua first, and shortly thereafter, also deployed the platform as an integral part of the Marketo platform. Vidyard has captured market share by creating software to help you monitor and manage your video content. The company’s aim is to host, analyze and measure video performance in order to generate leads and drive action towards sales. The platform allows for businesses to track their clients viewing history (who watched what, for how long, and shared where), click through behaviour, review geographic locations, as well as what browser and device the prospect was using. Tracking clients viewing history allows for sales and marketing teams to identify interests, follow up with potential prospects and turn viewers into customers.

Pricing
Pricing starts at $79/month per video. With marketing technology support combined with video production, company costs and budgets will increase proportionately. Without video production costs, your monthly entry level fees and budget will be $ 2,000 - $ 5,000 / month.