A number of our clients find themselves in the common situation of promoting marketing activities via disparate marketing tools:
- Marketing automation and analytics (HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, etc.)
- Email campaign software (Constant Contact, MailChimp, Vertical Response, etc.)
- Webinar management (GoToWebinar, Webex)
- Website analytics (Google Analytics), and on.
These are common tools that serve very specific purposes, and for the most part they work great at what they are intended to do. However, you may find that you are spending too much time getting data together in an organized way via these channels and translating/consolidating data to your CRM system for reporting and sales.
Often the result is constantly having to manage duplicate records and systems, working to combine and roll up activities between records that you hope are probably related to the same lead, and needing to sort out that information for your sales team, rather than focusing more time on your great marketing campaigns and lead generation activities. There really is a better way.
Want more actionable data and fewer dupes?
The first place to start for streamlined marketing automation is your primary CRM.
What plugins are available? Are there any 3rd party offerings that map exactly to the services you need? For example, SalesForce already has an AppExchange connection for Vertical Response. But what about MailChimp? Yep, there’s a MailChimp app for that as well. This is also the case for a Constant Contact account. So bear in mind that if you haven’t made these commitments yet, whether there is a plug and play option may (and probably should) affect your marketplace choices. Of course, HubSpot integrates quite well with SalesForce and some of the email apps already mentioned. If you’re using a webinar tool like GoToWebinar, you can sometimes have your work cut out for you, but you can easily enlist some professional programming assistance. GoToWebinar has an API available, which simply means that in order to leverage the GTW registration in a way that integrates with your SalesForce and marketing analytics/campaign management workflow, you might need a programming platform (.NET/PHP) and a programmer with the skills to assist. But there are always new, helpful apps that automate this multi-system integration where you don’t necessarily need heavy programming resources, like this new app in the HubSpot app marketplace that integrates GTW with HubSpot and Salesforce.
Me and the team here do lots of specialty integrations like the ones I’ve mentioned and can help you in this regard. So if you’ve got any questions, please just contact us.