Guest Post: Altimeter’s new Analyst on Digital Marketing Suites, Andrew Jones

Jeremiah: Please welcome Andrew Jones, as a guest poster on the Web Strategy blog.  I worked with Andrew for many years at Altimeter, if you’ve read my research reports, you’ll often find him on the byline as a researcher involved in my work on social business, social media management systems, and more.  Andrew has showed fantastic research chops, derives insights, and is growing his capability to forecast future markets.   While I’ve moved on from Altimeter a month ago, I remain a friend of the firm (and on the board of advisors) and wanted to help showcase the new talent that’s rising, esp during these transition periods.  Please show Andrew the same warm welcome that others have shown me, as he now covers the digital marketing space and more.   In the following post, Andrew spells out the future of the growing digital marketing suite, which we see the large enterprise software players building. Andrew, the floor is yours…

Building the Digital Marketing Suite 
by Andrew Jones (bio, twitter, the full post is here on the Altimeter blog)

Salesforce, Oracle, and Adobe are all building “suites” for cross-channel customer engagement through a series of acquisitions and integration with their existing offerings (see Figure 1). Among the components, each has bought marketing automation players as well as various social media tools. Having a complete social offering is a big part of this, but it’s also about integrating social with other customer engagement channels for the best data, targeting, and contextualization. The result: a technology suite that goes beyond just social, designed to entice CMOs with one-stop shopping convenience.

It should go without saying that this chart is not an exact comparison and that line item “components” vary in complexity; the degree of integration also varies significantly.

What does the future look like with Digital Marketing Suites?

Beyond the obvious benefits of integration, like fewer tools and logins, and platform security that come from an integrated suite, there are four impending changes that marketers should watch closely:

1. Internal and external social networking on a single platform

In SMMS, collaboration features are mostly limited to basic workflow (tag, flag, annotate, route). Yet as social permeates an organization, the need for internal communication through Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs) becomes necessary to plan and react to external engagement. Companies with installed ESNs are also eager to tap and evolve internal employee engagement and direct it toward external conversations for purposes like providing customer support and employee advocacy.

Most SMMS address one or two departments’ needs well, yet we found that companies today are likely to have up to 13 departments involved in social. Because each department has different use cases and metrics, these suites are looking to address the needs of many departments rather than just the one or few primarily addressed today. Marketing is central, but other stakeholders are increasingly being involved.

The growing need for a common view of customers’ social profiles and social behavior data is also driving a move to suites. Several SMMS vendors have focused on customer identification and targeting from the outset–but few integrate well with marketing automation and enterprise CRM systems in order to know and target customers based not only on social data, but all relevant customer data. This has been a long-term promise and the customer journey keeps getting more complex, but Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle have all been especially focused on this of late.

The average enterprise deal size for SMMS has steadily increased over the past few years, rising from $76k last year to deal sizes of what we typically see today in the $100-150k range. This reflects a growing ability to spend on social software where there is perceived value. These larger Digital Marketing Suites will naturally be more expensive, and because these suites are larger in scale and require greater care to be “plugged in” correctly, marketers will need IT to be more involved than it has been in decisions like SMMS, which marketing departments have often been able to buy and “install” completely independently.