it follows the Salesforce playbook and makes acquisitions in machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies to “try to extract more value out of the data” it’ll have access to through Marketo. (HubSpot has also been investing in machine learning technologies.)
Jason Holmes, Marketo’s former chief operating officer, agrees that the company’s data was likely a significant factor in Adobe’s decision to acquire it. He knows both companies well—he was a vice president at Omniture, a business software firm Adobe bought in 2009 for $1.8 billion.
“Adding Marketo into the Adobe product lineup is as much about data as it is about functionality, similar to the Omniture acquisition,” Holmes, now the president of sales and marketing tech firm Showpad, wrote in an e-mailed statement. “Adobe seriously invests in the technologies it acquires and has a massive global distribution engine in place to grow quickly.”
Miller, the Marketo co-founder and Engagio CEO, thinks the coming generation of marketing technology companies will have platforms underpinned by machine learning and big data analytics. They will build technologies and processes that generate closer collaboration between marketing and sales teams, and will deploy a dual-pronged marketing strategy. That strategy will involve both lead-based marketing—he compares it to casting a broad net to catch as many fish as possible—and targeted account-based marketing, through which companies proactively target big companies, which he compares to fishing with a spear. (Miller’s current company develops tools for account-based marketing and collaboration between sales and marketing teams.)
Like Miller, Drift CEO and co-founder David Cancel (pictured on the right) thinks it’s the end of an era in marketing tech—specifically the “marketing automation = e-mail” era. Drift is a Boston-based marketing and sales automation startup whose products include website chatbots, as well as tools that help marketers manage their e-mails to prospective clients.
“In the past, marketing automation was built heavily around e-mail, but now that customers have all of the power and the way people buy has changed, marketing automation has to change, too,” Cancel argues in an e-mailed statement. “E-mail is still a key channel for sure, but the future of marketing automation isn’t about e-mail—it’s about conversations and meeting potential customers wherever those conversations are happening online,” whether that means social media, chat windows, or video and voice communications.
The bottom line, Miller says, is marketing tech has changed a lot since Marketo’s early days. And it is likely to change even more in the months and years ahead.
[Top image “Handshake” by Flickr user Aidan Jones, used under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.]
