Choosing a Marketing Automation Tool for Engineers

Like so many of you, we are deep in the world of content marketing.  In fact, some folks say that publishers are the original content marketers because we sell stories as much as advertising services.

So it’s no surprise that we are investigating marketing automation software.  We’re a small shop, so we ruled out the big guns like Marketo and Eloqua right away.  If the budget didn’t kill us, the implementation would.  And we can’t afford the brilliant content suggestion engines like Sailthru (yet).  Maybe next year.

For now we’ll be happy with just 3 things:

1. An easy way for Daria (our marketer) to create compelling landing pages without involving our technical team
2. A clear path for contacts to become leads, so that we neither ignore them nor pester them
3. A manageable email tool with more A/B testing and segmenting power than MailChimp

This led to a list of requirements that went on forever.  Seriously, like everyone else who buys software, we wanted integration with our social profiles, easier blogging tools, advanced analytics and easily automated profiling and scoring to name but a few.

Now we are at the near-final analysis.  Both Hubspot and Act-on can address our now scaled-back requirements.  Both offer:

• Intuitive toolset for creating landing pages
• Email creation tools with delivery and reporting
• Lead management including nurturing and scoring
• Social media campaign management

So our decision is more around our future comfort and budget. 

Hubspot is developing a set of tools for publishers.  That’s appealing to us for our future expansion.  But when it comes to budget and flexibility, Act-on comes out on top.  While both vendors charge based on the number of contacts in the database, Act-on is not only less expensive, they also have a quit-any-time monthly model. 

We’re still deciding.  Any suggestions or comments are very welcome.