In the world of marketing, there are three key metrics by which we measure success.
- Mindshare: How aware of you your prospects and influencer base are
- Heartshare: What their personal preference is
- Marketshare: How many customers you’re winning
While the third, marketshare, might sound the most important, it simply won’t happen without winning mindshare and heartshare first.
So which of the big hitters are winning the heartshare, mindshare and marketshare when it comes to marketing automation?
While names like Pardot, Marketo and Eloqua tend to dominate the conversation, it’s difficult to give an accurate estimate of the size of the MA market. While it’s the fastest growing part of the CRM space, it is still nascent in comparison to other marketing methodologies, and so the big analyst houses like Gartner and Forrester don’t yet quantify it. Mintigo offer the best guess we currently have.
Being independent here at CleverTouch, we get a lot of qualified traffic from vendor sites – but who is really in the ascendancy? The ratio of referrals we receive might be a crude indicator of future market traction, but at 75:75:1 for Pardot, Marketo and Eloqua respectively, it’s interesting all the same.
It would seem that Pardot and Marketo are the vendors packing the biggest punch, while Oracle’s Eloqua is being lost in a collection of more exciting and easier to sell brands like BlueKai and Maximiser. Pardot and Marketo are quite probably more partner-centric; while Eloqua was once the most customer and partner-centric marketing automation vendor, they’re priorities that appear to have slipped since becoming part of Oracle, even setting up a competing services business.
Industry evidence supports what we’ve seen too: Asset Management, currently the fastest growing segment for marketing automation has been carved up between just two vendors, with Pardot at the lower end and Marketo at the higher.To learn more about the changes in marketing automation over the last few years, and where it’s going next, join us at our next London event, ‘Marketing Automation in the Enterprise, Lessons Learned’.