The marketing function has been evolving at a breakneck pace in recent years, especially in the B2B space. What worked just a few years ago may no longer pass muster as a mix of AI disruption, increased demands from boardrooms and investors, and changing buyer behaviors scramble the conventional wisdom for marketers everywhere.
Fortunately, marketers can start catching up to these moving goalposts with strategic shifts in their martech investments. According to top analysts, fewer than 20% of marketers are satisfied with their marketing automation platform.
What’s amiss, and which providers are offering the functionality customers want? Let’s jump in.
Why Most Marketers are Unhappy with Their Marketing Automation
Every year, the independent technology consulting firm Research in Action conducts an extensive survey of over ten-thousand business leaders to take the pulse on the various tools in their tech stack, including marketing automation. Those findings are illuminating, and not necessarily comforting for marketers. Take this stat for instance: only 14.1% of marketers say their marketing automation platform meets their organization’s growing list of needs.* Why are so many marketers’ expectations unmet by their automation?
Peter O’Neill, Research in Action’s research director, links this disconnect to overlap in the martech space. “Historically, companies have been deploying separate Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP), Marketing Lead Management (MLM) or, specifically in B2B, even extra Account-Based Marketing (ABM) solutions to support their lifecycle revenue management and marketing campaigns,” according to O’Neill, “often resulting in significant functional overlap, redundancy, and user confusion.”
Today’s marketers crave a more complete solution. The answer might well be to pursue what O’Neill calls “Revenue Marketing Automation,” a concept on the rise to describe platforms that fully orchestrate customer relationships and accounts across the buying journey. In a recent report, Research in Action ranked Act-On among the solutions that meet these more sophisticated needs.
What’s Missing from Marketing Automation Installations?
According to O’Neill and team’s research, the following features are most frequently cited by marketing professionals as lacking in their current platforms:
- Omnichannel personalization
- Campaign workflow management
- Campaign personalization
- Campaign collaboration
- Predictive content
- Revenue analytics
- Campaign analytics/optimization
- Campaign creation and design
Those shortcomings have many marketing automation customers in consideration mode. In the same survey, 44.9% of marketers reported that, while their current platform is meeting their needs for now, they’ll be seeking replacement in the next two years. But that number only paints a partial picture of the crisis many marketers face with outdated MAPs. A further 27.8% plan to replace their automation platform, but are not yet actively evaluating alternatives. Finally, 11.5% are in the process of replacing their platforms at this very moment.
Marketing buyers concerned with the diminishing returns of their current platform owe it to themselves to consider platforms like Act-On, which analysts consider a more comprehensive platform. Full revenue marketing automation platforms like Act-On provide “a central hub, allowing for stronger efficiency, better integrations, and enhanced data consolidation,” O’Neill’s report explains. The result? “Marketing efficiency is increased due to having fewer tools and finding revenue-generating opportunities is made easier.”
Act-On Beats Out Leading Competitors in Revenue Marketing Category
Research In Action’s Vendor Selection Matrix ranks the top vendors in the insurgent Revenue Marketing Automation category. Notably, marketing automation platforms are included in the selections as well as various platforms traditionally associated with other disciplines, including those focused on account-based marketing (ABM) or customer relationship management (CRM).
In the 2024 rankings, Act-On beats out marketing automation stalwarts including Eloqua, Marketo, and Hubspot. What’s more, Act-On also came out ahead of solutions as varied as TechTarget and Intensify. Among all these solutions, Act-On received the highest customer satisfaction score of any vendor in Research in Action’s Survey, as well as a high score for breadth and depth of solutions.
Act-On supports buyer role segmentation, insights into customer engagement habits, opportunity management, buyer journey engagement, and lead acceleration, all motions that Research In Action describes as crucial to marketing maturity and the revenue marketing approach. Large, mature marketing organizations should consider Act-On for their marketing automation.
For more on revenue marketing automation and Act-On’s performance, read the report:
*This and all other data cited in this blog are from Research in Action’s “Vendor Selection Matrix: Revenue Marketing Automation Solutions,” March 2024. Used with permission.