I wish I had an answer to that because I’m tired of answering that question.
The last several years have seen an explosion in the space of point marketing solutions. A space that will define your web presence and include among others solutions for web content management, sites and landing pages management, online communities, webcasts, podcasts, support forums, idea forums, blogs, wikis, polls and surveys, e-mail marketing management, website analytics, lead nurturing, customer relationship management, and search marketing management. There is a plethora of vendor solutions available in each one of these categories.
Oh, Great! So it is a marketer’s perfect world then?
If the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be.
Well, not exactly! What not exactly? Does this sound all too familar? You send out e-mails using vendor A to the list from your desktop Excelsheet that leads to registrations on vendor B for webcasts to be delivered by vendor C and to be archived by vendor D to be posted on the community platform of vendor E activity on which you would like to be progressively sent to your CRM system on vendor F. Somewhere in this mix is your own .com site, with or without a login, and analytics from vendor G. And, that all important copy change that you wanted to make on your site is request #42 for your webmaster/IT, who is working on scripts for your data to flow from vendor A to vendor C (or was it vendor F) so that you can have a more qualified lead for your Sales team. Working across these vendors and your own IT you pray that one more window of opportunity does not close on you ..
Now, you have’nt had enough and want to reach out to your audience with a new podcast or an eBook. What do you do? OK, you send out e-mails using vendor A to the list from your desktop Excelsheet that leads to registrations on vendor B for podcasts to be delivered by vendor C … wait a second!
It’s like deja-vu, all over again.
and, more. Audience Joe has as many profiles and metrics as there are vendors and campaigns. Lucky you, get to consolidate them the fun way on that spreadsheet again or the not so fun way by opening an IT project and wait until .. wait, ..
It gets late early out there.
So you wish there was that one single interface – your own pilot’s dashboard – from where you can control all the aspects of your marketing plane with the best-in-class components for the different functionality and importantly, fly the plane yourself too. Despair not. We are with you there ..
You can observe a lot by just watching.
And, so we did (by watching and participating). Embark on this mission to provide complete web presence management across multiple channels without the multiple vendor overhead, progressive and consolidated 360° optics into target audiences, and tighter integration with sales. Our first product release is cooking in the clouds (force.com platform) for a Jan’09 release. But wait ..
It ain’t over till it’s over.
We have larger and grander plans to make your life easier. We’ll simplify the process on how you can manage your brand’s presence not just on your corporate .com sites but also on the increasing list of social sites where they talk about you, with or without you. So wouldn’t it be great to let us support you in joining these conversations for ..
The future ain’t what it used to be.
