The Value of an Integrated Marketing Platform

Over the past 15 or so years the marketing tech “stack” has exploded in number of solutions, categories of solutions and complexity. Since almost all new marketing solutions are SaaS based, subscribing to the ever growing number of solutions is very easy, which is good and bad. It’s good because it has empowered users to find the best solution to their particular business problem. On the “bad” side though, adding all the niche solutions to the mix has created application, data and communication silos that prevent the organization from easily getting a complete view of the customer, prospect and the performance of marketing projects and initiatives. In other words, solving some problems has create new and bigger problems, leading to an extremely disjointed and fragmented view of the entire marketing function, its impact and the critical customer data that is needed by the entire company. All this fragmentation directly impacts the ability of marketing to collaborate inside its organization and across the business.

With that backdrop, I was really interested when I learned about Zoho’s newest release of its marketing automation solution, called Zoho Marketing Plus. Announced today, the solution provides a unified marketing platform to facilitate team collaboration and more effective marketing execution while delivering consistent customer experiences. The new release pulls many marketing features and functions together in a single platform with an integrated data model with the rest of the Zoho product portfolio. In particular the new release helps companies:

• Provide a single destination for the marketing team to manage marketing activities

• Encourage and facilitate collaboration across the marketing team

• Manage all marketing collateral in one system

• Execute end-to-end marketing campaigns with full control and visibility

• Manage and execute efforts across multiple channels including email, SMS, surveys, events, webinars and social media

• Manage customer data in a single platform

• Automate marketing operations

• Accurate real-time data analysis

Some Zoho customers are already using the beta version of Zoho Marketing Plus. Saru Saadeh, the CEO of Iron Roots Inc., USA had this to say about the experience:

"Everything at Iron Roots starts with the data. But there's a huge hole in the market, where channel solutions are siloed. Zoho marketing platform gives us a comprehensive view of our omnichannel marketing campaigns, allowing touchpoint cadence and the ability to visualize our entire strategy in one place. From this unified platform, we can install heat-maps, see the traffic to our landing and product pages, use PageSense to identify the average fold, measure engagement, and then extract incredibly valuable data from on-page experiences, which then fuels our subsequent marketing activities. In a nutshell, Zoho's new marketing platform solves so many problems that are neglected by most marketing operations and marketing tools."

And Mackenzie Baron a Marketing Coordinator at Data-Tech, US said:

"For the past 11 months, I've been using Zoho's Marketing Platform to coordinate daily activities, which include scheduling social media posts, creating surveys, running campaigns, and checking reports, to name a few. Needless to say, there's a lot going on simultaneously. With access to such an array of tools, working together and sharing data seamlessly under one roof, I'm able to do more with more, but in much less time and at significantly better value than the other products around.”

Zoho Marketing Plus Dashboard

Moving from a complex mix of marketing tools to a single platform solution can provide a great deal of benefit to the whole marketing team. In addition the value of a unified customer data model has a big impact across the whole company. This doesn’t mean that there might be some unique use cases that require a specialized solution, but in the aggregate unifying the team with a robust marketing platform can solve many problems and streamline operations. More information on Zoho Marketing Plus.