As a natural upstream entrance to the CRM market, MA has the potential to be expected.

Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “Hatching Hand” (ID: ibushouzhi), the author is more chapter. Original title “CRM yesterday, MA Today”

New breakthrough in the enterprise service market: yesterday CRM, today MA

After experiencing the vicious competition in CRM and corporate collaborative office market, the domestic enterprise market is seeking new breakthroughs. Marketing Automation (hereinafter referred to as MA) with strong localization attributes enters the capital market line of sight. As a natural upstream entrance to the CRM market, MA has the potential to be expected. However, the complicated domestic market environment makes the future of MA uncertain.

This catcher (ID: ibushouzhi) interviewed a number of MA market practitioners and investors and explored the challenges and opportunities in the current MA market. I believe that reading will have you. Inspired.

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In the context of this year’s rejuvenation of the track, the catcher observed that some investors are actively researching the MA project, and the business card platform can search thousands of project items with the keyword “marketing automation”. Most of the projects are actually vertical sales service platforms and DMP data management platforms. They are not truly MA. Many investors also reflect that there are not many good targets in the current MA direction.

The foreign MA market also provides a guiding light for domestic practitioners. In 2013, Salesforce took out 2.5 billion US dollars to acquire ExactTarget, which has pushed the entire MA market to its peak, and HubSpot’s market value of 8.7 billion US dollars is becoming a business service. A new story in the market.

A new breakthrough in the enterprise service market: yesterday CRM, today MA

Major acquisitions in the marketing automation industry (2010-2014)

This kind of capital performance allows investors to recognize the close relationship between MA and CRM. In the domestic CRM market is still in a state of rest, through MA to create aCRM SaaS becomes a logically feasible path. “CRM has been expanding its boundaries, and MA is becoming part of CRM to help companies do the entire lead collection and management.” Zhang Shaoyu, Managing Director of Jiuhe Ventures, introduced market trend.

At the same time, Zheng Jingwei, the founding partner of Jingya Capital, which focuses on early-stage corporate service investment, believes that the domestic MA market has begun to take off, and the giants are laying out their own forces and territory behind them. “Looking at Alibaba Cloud and Salesforce some time ago, the products offered are sales cloud, service cloud, business cloud, and there is no marketing cloud.”

Although Salesforce’s marketing cloud products have been developed for overseas markets and are not suitable for the domestic business environment, Alibaba Cloud has not introduced and is a reasonable move, but as a new product that Salesforce has pushed in recent years, this strategic level cooperation is only The word is not mentioned, it is impossible to guess whether Ali is laying out his own MA business.

However, compared with investors who are actively investigating, entrepreneurs in related fields are not too warm on the attitude of MA. Most entrepreneurs are reluctant to regard their projects as MA, and they are more willing to position themselves as SFA (Sales Automation), CRM, BI (Business Intelligence), this state is similar to last year’s RPA (Robot Process Automation).

This shows that the domestic MA market is still in the initial stage of development. The acceptance of new concepts by customers is not high. The related companies are still driven by customer needs, so they are more willing to play labels that customers can understand. Sales service.

For example, in the context of Tencent’s push for the middle platform, these companies are more willing to compare their own products to data in the middle, but the data in the form of products is the DMP (data management platform) that integrates BI business intelligence, the essence It’s just a part of the MA. It is a good sign that the industry has not gone too far to chase the concept, indicating that the industry is moving in the direction of customer success.

1, MA concept is dynamically adjusted, service has been initially settled

From a literal point of view, MA is Marketing Automation, relying on automated software technology to help companies replace labor that reduces labor and improves the efficiency of the marketing department. From the perspective of business model, MA is the same as SFA, which is a key module of CRM software. It adopts the market-based subscription system.

MA is a SaaS business generated by the integration of marketing and sales business. It consists of three parts: marketing dataization, automated Campaign engine and BI engine.Rong>, using web crawler, email marketing, SMS marketing, telemarketing, geek marketing, H5 touch, coupon coupons and other tools to find sales leads from online and offline advertising campaigns, to SCRM efficient management WeChat, Weibo , vibrato, fast hands, etc. in the whole platform to track the data of the customer needs in the middle, and then to the sales to track the completion of follow-up services.

The target market MA can be clearly divided into two categories, one for B TO B and the second for B TO C. “B TO Big C is a company with high-priced products such as medical beauty, education, and finance. Their product purchase decision cycle is longer than other TO C consumer products, and customer leads are required. Incubation follow-up, second touch to improve conversion and repurchase.” Zheng Jingwei said that such business is closer to the SCRM form.

More detailed classification, The MA in the narrow sense is more in line with the marketing needs of BTOB and B TO big C low-frequency high-consumption enterprises, such as interest MarTech (Marketing Technology) like Baichuan; some BTOB companies do not have a complicated marketing department at all. Exploring such SFA services or selling CRM services like this can directly cover their marketing needs; B TO small C companies may be more Frequent use of ADtech (advertising technology) services such as Microsystems has relatively few opportunities to use MA.

The biggest feature of MA is the coverage of the whole process of marketing, which can significantly improve the efficiency of the marketing department and reduce the efficiency. However, some practitioners also believe that its core sales lead service has open source extension capabilities. After all, such service solutions Enterprises can’t add sales KPIs to new media and event departments, which is in line with business needs.

“Everyone knows that half of the advertising budget is wasted, but everyone doesn’t know which half. And the marketing cloud is to help you figure out which half of the advertising costs are wasted.” Zheng Jingwei believes that MA can be almost marketing Cloud strokes, etc., and simply explain the role of MA.

DMP (data management platform) and the current popular lead tools that have been developed for many years can be regarded as marketing clouds, which allows thousands of companies to release rigid labels and label them with MA.

At present, advertising technology service providers and sales software vendors such as CRM are infiltrating into the MA field. “In general, DMP belongs to MA, but this is definitely not appropriate.” Fan An, CEO of American Digital Technology, thinks that he has a different perspective and many advertisements. Technical service providers can be called MA companies. However, because such companies can not provide complete MA services, in the strict sense of the difference, so most companies on the market have not yet tied with MA.

He Run also showed Salesforce’s official website classification to IDZhouzhi (ID: ibushouzhi), in which marketing automation is classified under BTOB.

A new breakthrough in the enterprise service market: yesterday CRM, today MA

Overall, the market’s understanding of the definition of MA and the scope of business is relatively uniform. However, limiting the MA service to the BTOB customer base is something that the business operators do not want to see. A large number of enterprises are integrating the different customer groups of the MA service.

In foreign countries, MA is not a new concept. As early as 1992, the United States had already emerged as a MA company, Unica. Of course, MA was also concentrated in the field of telephone sales. Until around 2005, the outbreak of personal enterprise websites brought about by the rapid spread of the Internet and the acceptance of Internet advertising platforms were accepted by the market, and the basic conditions for the growth of MAs with e-mail as the core were given, and since then, they have entered a stage of rapid development.

Beginning to the rise of DMP in 2010, MA began to deepen integration in the field of Internet advertising and SFA. Finally, Salesforce, IBM, SAP, Microsoft and other enterprise service giants successively took out relevant targets, and MA began to fully integrate with CRM. /strong>.

Back home, the concept of MA is gradually enriched with the development of technology and market ecology, and the line between CRM and CRM is becoming increasingly blurred. At the same time, although there are a number of DMP companies in the country that have been labelled with MA, they have been in the past few years, but it is not strictly MA in the final sense.

Zhang Shaoyu told the catcher: “The current MA is derived from the one-stop SaaS model. If you really do it, you need to get through the data service instead of doing a collection of tools.”

There is a development route brought by the unique market environment of domestic enterprises.

Domestic CRM and even the entire SaaS market have just experienced a round of vicious competition of capital ripening. In order to gain a competitive advantage in front of customers, relevant practitioners have to pack more SaaS services, which is called one-stop in the industry. SaaS. With the emergence of data management and internal enterprise collaboration management requirements, the one-stop SaaS competition has evolved from a simple software tool set to a software underlying integration and data access stage. This is the current SThe trend of technology products that the aaS market is experiencing.

The simplest MA is to subdivide the marketing data and then import it into the enterprise’s CRM and ERP systems, and use the underlying data to efficiently process and open up to achieve efficiency improvement, while the more professional MA needs perfect automation. Campaign engine, BI engine.

Based on the current market situation, MA is the one-stop SaaS model in the form of technical product service, but most enterprises can only provide a simple tool set, domestic The MA and even the entire enterprise market are in a slow phase of product technology ecological accumulation, and the market needs time.

Second,Eco technology is in the early stage, China MA is facing difficulties

First of all, the domestic market environment is complex and cannot simply translate foreign experience. Zhang Shaoyu said that MA may not be able to run out of the benchmarking company. “The DSP (Demand-Side Platform demand side platform) was also very hot in the past two years, but the giants were too strong and eventually did not run out.”

The domestic MA form is not the same as that in foreign countries. European and American users are accustomed to using e-mail to communicate, so the foreign MA is based on an open e-mail system; while the domestic social life is placed on WeChat. On instant messaging products, so domestic MA companies want to do a good job, they have to work hard on closed WeChat. This has brought great challenges to the domestic MA market.

Secondly, the mutual shielding between domestic giants has brought trouble to MA practitioners. The shielding of third-party crawlers by BAT and the popularity of closed media platforms have greatly reduced the tracking ability of MA customers. >.

Comparing with the dominant traffic status of Google, Facebook, and Amazon in the international Internet market, new platforms such as Weibo, headlines, and fast-handed players have emerged in recent years in China. In the face of potential customers, these domestic MAs are difficult to meet the multi-platform coverage needs of customers.

In addition, the domestic Internet ecology and MA technology have not yet reached a mature stage. More to see that Internet giants such as BAT are cultivating their own related ecology, and the giants are also in the stage of trial and control. /strong>. Now with the forced promotion of capital power, users do not necessarily have real needs, and the cost of products is also high. The business path behind this account requires rational calculus.

Although the technical ecology required by MA still needs time to accumulate, the market also shows some trends that are conducive to the development of MA, but these trends are still on the surface and cannot really promote the development of the MA market.

From the end of last year