Highly Competitive - software industry insights

Content Marketing Strategies for Midsized Companies

  

Content marketing isn't anything new but it has proven to be an effective marketing strategy for companies of all sizes. For 2014 the Content Marketing Institute reports that overall amounts spent on content marketing is segmented by B2B companies allocating 30% of their marketing budgets, while B2C companies earmark 24% of their marketing budgets. In 2012, midsized organizations spent 22% of their marketing budgets on content marketing.

 

Midsized organizations are using content marketing to support multiple objectives:

• Brand awareness – thought leadership and trusted source of quality information
• Customer retention and loyalty – nurturing ongoing relationships
• Lead management activities (lead gen, nurturing, presales buyer journey touchpoints)
• New customer acquisition
• Improving website traffic and eCommerce activity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

        Image source: Post+Beam

 

 

 We see a lot of articles about how organizations go wrong when it comes to content marketing.And most of what's called out is not surprising: failure to write properly on topics that customers prefer or to even find out what customers want to read; poor writing quality and non-engaging material; promoting marketing brochure-ware instead of useful, thought-provoking material. Organizations can fail to understand how to match the right content to the right channel, or lack the knowledge as to which channels different customer segments prefer for various kinds of content. These organizations may not even have clear customer segmentation for their products.

The existence of these missteps usually indicates the lack of a cohesive long-term strategy for content marketing. And it's just as likely that there is no overarching marketing strategy that ties into corporate goals and objectives. This may mean that not only does content marketing lack executive backing, but the overall marketing function is suffering the same fate.

 

Well-Crafted Strategies

So before an organization can create a well-crafted content marketing strategy, upper management must make the commitment to be customer-focused and marketing savvy. The value of content marketing to reach the customer-as-buyer must be given credence, support and enablement. Content marketing is not a short term campaign or project; it's a strategic commitment that impacts the entire enterprise.

Content marketing (if done well) keeps the company focused on understanding and meeting the needs of customers – something companies should be doing anyway. Align the business with the customer, align content with the customer. Content marketing is a natural progression from recognizing that the customer-as-buyer drives more of how, when or even if sales happen. The work to be done to understand how to deliver the right content to customers and prospects is the same work that organizations should be doing to deliver the products and services that customers and prospects want and need.

Strategic decisions need to be made regarding the technology tools to assist content marketing initiatives. For well-targeted content, marketing teams need sophisticated analytics for customer segmentation and behavioral insight to create the right content for the right customer segment, delivered where the customer wants to find it. Digital marketing technologies interoperate with content marketing initiatives, including marketing automation and omnichannel experience management platforms.

 

A comprehensive content marketing strategy provides a wellspring for all company content so that organizations connect with customers consistently and clearly. The content marketing strategy pulls together individual marketing programs and initiatives resulting in a more seamless transition for the customer from channel to channel. Connecting the tactics of marketing to a content strategy makes it more possible to construct metrics that track the effectiveness of quality content, that then can be mapped to functions such as lead gen, sales funnel and overall marketing ROI.

 

 

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit  IBM's Midsize Insider. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

 

Shaping the Future of Customer-Responsive Marketing Automation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marketing automation has shown that it can be a smart tool (when done right) for shepherding and converting leads, and automating marketing processes. The near future role for marketing automation has begun evolving as MA technologies have become more sophisticated to deliver customer-responsive interactions on any channel. If this evolution continues, the name 'marketing automation' will become inadequate to describe what can be accomplished with these technologies when combined with customer-focused processes, practices and strategies.

Within the marketing realm, marketing automation capabilities are becoming an important component of integrated marketing and communications, for seamless interaction management on any channel and support for omnichannel customer experiences. Marketing automation is also converging with cross-enterprise customer-adaptive processes and 'sense and respond' models, both of which have been in practice for quite some time for various enterprise functions, with customer needs as a strong focus.

Marketing automation has growing relationships with 'anything customer', such as customer service and customer master data. Content marketing strategies and initiatives are essential partners for effective MA. To deliver better buying experiences, marketing automation integrated with other customer-focused systems can reveal a great deal about customer behavior, motivation, and needs. Organizations can interact more authentically with customers anywhere using such intelligence.

 

Speeding Past 'Sense and Respond' to "Predict and Act"

Retail and eCommerce take advantage of customer-adaptive processes to personalize and propel buying journeys. And supply chain management and retail have successfully utilized 'sense and respond', aka agile/lean or just-in-time management, to optimize supply chain functions while speedily fulfilling end customer requirements. For these models, important common denominators aren't just responding to customers more quickly and accurately, but also delivering more value to customers - on customer terms.

The increase in real-time multichannel communications and interaction touchpoints has brought 'sense and respond' processes to marketing. Mobile is a particular focal point for sense and respond, particularly with the increasing use of 'in the moment' marketing and buying opportunities. Touchpoints become more effective with sense and respond and customer-adaptive processes behind them. The customer intelligence attained through integrating data and analytics from marketing automation, customer service and other customer-focused functions will power smarter touchpoints that include faster, more customer-accurate responses. The implications for competitive advantage are clear.

The strategic combining of marketing automation with cross-functional integrations results in continuous highly personalized communications delivered to customers. Adaptive processes based on context continuously respond more accurately to every customer action on any channel. Marketing and other customer functions are now in the world of real-time, location-aware customer experiences, moving past the basic mechanics of interaction.

Predictive analytics behind both customer-adaptive processes and 'sense and respond' are moving organizations from analysis of past and in-process interactions to anticipation of near future activities in order to better understand and fulfill customer desires. The continuing transformation of marketing automation is rapidly changing to "predict and act".

But all of this takes strategic commitment, the right experts, much preparation and testing, improved processes, and a lot of hard work. Done right, there is much to be gained for nurturing and growing ongoing customer relationships. To achieve more valuable use of marketing automation, you have to start with thoroughly understanding customers, buyer journeys, trigger events and key touchpoints. This means a great deal of research, analysis and segmentation at sophisticated levels – all of which will have to be constantly refreshed.

    

Technologies as Evolutionary Tools

When marketing automation is first introduced into an organization it's easy to get caught up in the tunnel vision of how to use new technologies and the tactical tasks that can be accomplished. It's easy to fail to see the big picture of how all the pieces fit together to achieve higher level objectives and corporate strategies. Many are still struggling to connect these technologies to overall marketing functions, and larger objectives – and to add all of the right people: designers, marketing technologists, analytics experts, data managers, content professionals, and strategists of all kinds.

As marketing automation technologies have progressed to better manage multichannel interactions and an omnichannel customer experience, they're addressing the complexities of understanding interactions during buying journeys, accurate customer segmentation and better personalized communications. A comprehensive view of the customer requires more than what the marketing automation platform covers. Extensive integrations are essential with other systems and processes, such as CRM, content management, content marketing, and social media tools. Marketing automation works best when it includes bi-directional integrations with other customer and product focused systems to deliver the most accurate intelligence in real-time - to any function.

Business process design, automation and event processing must be done at sophisticated levels to respond to circumstances and participants that can change at any time. All of this comes into play to both manage and maintain response-ready processes for today's more complicated customer experience lifecycles.

 

Overcoming Organizational Obstacles

Like much in the enterprise, cross-functional collaboration and integration of business processes are key elements for successful outcomes. The entire organization must be empowered to make a strategic commitment to the customer and to nurturing improved experiences. Upper level management must ensure that the entire organization can focus on the customer first, with top notch execution of practices and processes.

Organizations that continue to see marketing as an add-on function will not achieve improved customer experiences. Organizations that allow functional silos to persist are equally destined for failure. Because of these organizational flaws, most obstacles to successful marketing automation and customer-adaptive processes are not directly related to marketing automation itself:

• Inadequate budget for all aspects of marketing automation and multichannel interactions
• Reluctance to invest in quality content creation for all customer interactions (which also impacts the content marketing strategy)
• Lack of the right staffing and skillsets -- and no budget to invest in them
• Poor cross-team integration and collaboration
• Lagging systems integration across the organization
• Deficient data quality and analytics processes
• Badly designed business processes across the organization

 

The Future is Now

The idea of the customer-focused organization has been around for a while, but there's still a lot to be done to do it well – and to earn value in the eyes of customers. Continuously positive customer interactions obviously create immeasurable return for an organization. Such experiences result in more resilient customer loyalty – but to achieve them requires sophisticated actions and orchestration of practices and processes across the organization. Non-integrated silos for communications, marketing, customer service, and product development cannot ever achieve a holistic customer experience that matters to customers.

The strategic potential of marketing automation isn't about a single campaign or even the marketing function, and it isn't about the technology platform. It's about customer experiences throughout the lifecycle of a customer with a particular organization. Customers and markets can change very quickly; agile and sophisticated technologies, processes and creative practices are needed to grow and sustain positive customer relationships. Marketing automation can evolve into a customer-focused platform that offers new possibilities as an orchestration hub for a significant portion of customer interactions and for nurturing improved customer experiences with a vendor.

Marketing automation has the potential to become an important catalyst for the multi-dimensional intelligence that is critical for digital marketing processes and many other corporate functions . To achieve this, not only is a change in the marketing mindset essential, but the overall corporate mindset where marketing objectives become an integral part of corporate strategies.

 

Image Sources   business2community.com      clarkstonconsulting.com

 

 

About the author: Julie is an independent consultant and industry analyst for B2B software solutions, providing services to vendors to improve strategies for customers and target markets, products and solutions, and future direction. Julie has expertise in several solution spaces including: data integration and data quality; analytics and BI; business process, workflow and collaboration; digital marketing, WCM and social media; and the pivotal importance of user and customer experiences. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

 

Customer-focused Marketing Automation: ‘Automation’ is the Easy Part

                    Cross-posted on CMSWire

 

Marketing automation (MA) is a hot topic right now – it's also in the early stages of potentially becoming an integral component of engendering positive customer interactions. Quite a bit has been written about what comprises current marketing automation capabilities. Most use cases center on email drip marketing and lead management / nurturing – done well, they can make a big difference for many companies. Enterprises are beginning to understand how to use MA for more on-target 'shepherding' of prospects during the buying cycle. And for enterprises with sophisticated buyer needs, marketing automation tools can provide a good means for building sustainable processes for continuous high quality leads and revenue growth.

There are stumbling blocks for marketing automation:

• Multi-channel customer experiences are fragmented and don't always map well into MA
• Marketing automation is doomed if it retracts into a robotic email-blasting machine
• A customer focus aligned with marketing automation requires several interconnected strategies for customer, marketing, content, lead gen - plus sales and marketing collaboration

A further complication is this advice from Forrester: frequently the customer has completed 75% of the buyer journey before engaging with sales. Of course, not all buyer journeys are the same -- often marketing automation is the most useful for complex journeys. But there's still a lot to do to be successful with marketing automation.

 

The Customer Perspective Always Matters

From the company perspective, enabling excellent (or even good) customer experiences can seem complicated, even ephemeral. Some marketing programs are trying to make the "customer experience" quite intricate, perhaps overly convoluted. Software solutions are being developed around marketing processes for "customer experience management", where too much emphasis may be on the "management" part, and too little on what constitute positive or desirable experiences from the customer perspective.

The customer perspective should also drive the use of marketing automation. There's a lot of activity for the development and adoption of MA technologies – there's also a lot of room for improvement regarding processes, practices and objectives. All of this should swirl around what the customer needs and wants from the enterprise's products and services. And that will take deep intelligence, constant measurement and improvement, and continuous analysis to achieve tangible results that benefit the customer and the enterprise.

 

A Forrester report from 2011 conveys some of what it takes for success with marketing automation:

 

 

        

 

'Customer' and the Buyer Journey

To achieve more valuable use of marketing automation, you have to start with thoroughly understanding customers, buyer journeys, trigger events and key touchpoints. This means a lot of research, analysis and segmentation at sophisticated levels – all of which will have to be constantly refreshed. Behavioral and predictive analytics can provide useful insights, but these types of analytical modeling are not simple tasks. Collaboration with domain experts must be included to validate research, analysis and recommended steps to take.

Buyer journey mapping is a significant undertaking for engendering better customer buying experiences and for adding intelligence to marketing automation plans. Customer segmentation may yield multiple buyer journeys and maps, and possibly different customer experiences – this will serve to take marketing automation further away from an undesirable one-size-fits-all. Buyer journey mapping helps better decision-making for aligning the interconnected strategies and processes needed to constantly refresh relevance for customers, particularly when marketing automation is in play.

    
 

Source: Forrester

 

 

Buyer journeys are not always linear progressions. Instead steps or phases in the journey can circle back on themselves. Different phases may be revisited until the buyer is ready to move to subsequent phases. Circle-back cycles can occur multiple times. All of which adds complexity to constructing effective marketing automation processes.

 

 

Forrester's customer experience touchpoints flow captures the iterative nature of many buyer journeys:

 
                                          Forrester: Emergence of Customer Experience Management Solutions

 

 

 

Customer Intelligence: Data, Integration, Analytics

For almost all aspects of Marketing, data really matters for achieving sustained effectiveness. Data is needed from many different internal systems and also must be collected from external venues such as social sites. Data sources and business processes must be integrated to manage the constant need for up-to-date information on customers. Useful customer segmentation can only be achieved through such integration efforts.

Constant interaction between marketing automation and CRM systems is another must-have. Beyond these two systems, the understanding of customer needs and desires also requires data from customer experience systems, social media owned by the enterprise, and campaign management. For marketing automation to support engaging and personalized customer interactions, detailed analysis of communications over time can reveal what buyers are likely interested in now and for the near future.

Marketing automation processes don't have to end with converted leads. Significant opportunities remain for targeted customer communications to nurture a more developed long term customer relationship, to open the door for new interactions, and eventually grow new purchases and customer brand advocacy. Effective personalized interactions that evolve with the customer relationship can derive from the use of analytics. Customers can change very quickly – marketing automation has to keep up.

The data and intelligence attained in support of MA objectives must be shared with many other systems to enrich the continuous improvement of enterprise-wide customer focus and service. Not only are integrated systems and processes needed to accomplish this, but healthy cross-team collaboration, as well as the right strategies from top to bottom.

 

Marketing Automation + Customer Intelligence = Lots of Quality Content

A key aspect of marketing automation is matching the right content or message to the right customer at the right phase of the buying journey. In some ways, this is easier said than done, keeping in mind what it takes to really understand the customer. A great deal of very creative content will need to be developed along with savvy rules and decision processes. This is Personalization on Steroids.

Web content / experience management platforms and practices have a complementary relationship with marketing automation, and a critical need for interoperability to benefit each of them. Marketing automation is first focused on prospects who are purposefully interacting with enterprise web assets. WEM and content marketing are often attuned to engaging prospects who are less familiar with the brand and what it has to offer. Integration of MA and WEM for comprehensive interactions with prospects and customers has great potential:

HubSpot conducted a study last year on website redesign. What we found was that marketers redesign their websites with a surprising frequency. 68% of marketers underwent a website redesign in the last 12 months….Most marketers who redesigned their website did so for branding reasons or because "the previous website was old," and the company "just needed to modernize." When you think about it, none of these reasons are particularly focused on the customer.

After hearing from marketers, the survey also asked website visitors what they thought. The results were significant. 76% of respondents said the most important factor in the design of a website is that it "makes it easy for me to find what I want." So why are so many homepages driven by company-needs rather than those of prospective-customers?

The short answer is data. Emails sent through marketing automation are triggered by lead intelligence data. But most marketing automation systems are set up separately from a website's content tools so the same data can't trigger website content in a similar way.

 

For marketing automation content to provide superior customer engagement it must follow the same 'rules' that exist for effective content marketing: it's no longer about the vendor and product features, it's about content that helps prospects and customers solve their problems and improve the performance of their enterprises. Content marketing strategies map content to buyer journeys – since the same applies to marketing automation, integration opportunities should be explored.

 

  

Silos or Ecosystem?

The more strategic aspects of marketing automation are in their infancy and are going to take time and a lot of hard work to deliver useful results. Customer-responsive email marketing and better management of lead generation are important steps in the right direction. But marketing automation has to go beyond email programs and lead nurturing to bring more value to improved customer interactions not only for buyer journey phases, but for ongoing relationships with customers.

Marketing automation can take on greater significance particularly when integrated with WEM and content marketing processes for intelligent content delivery that reflects real understanding of each customer segment. Anytime we are talking about content, we're talking Customer – so the needs and desires of customers must be at the strategic heart of integrated processes for MA, WEM and the other components of an integrated digital marketing ecosystem.

Marketing automation has the potential to evolve into a key piece for building dynamic intelligence that feeds many digital marketing processes. But marketing automation will not meet that potential if it focuses only on responses to the actions taken by buyers in one-off interactions.

 

 

Related Links

The New Data-Savvy Adaptive Marketing

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands and sees the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

The Irrelevance of Porter’s Five Forces for the B2B Software Industry

 

For the software industry the use of strategic market and competitive intelligence has not been particularly well executed by many vendors. MI and CI for software vendors differs greatly from the more established practices for CPG, Pharma or manufacturing – often what works well for these other industries has little relevance for software vendors. The main difference: the intensely fast pace of constant change for most of the software industry. "Time" is measured in nanoseconds. As such the software industry requires a greater focus on MI and CI, but often actual practice does not include the most beneficial aspects.

Market Intelligence is essential for creating strong product strategy and for fine-tuning that strategy as industries, markets, customers, the product space, and competitors evolve over time – again usually very small windows of time. Core decisions for businesses must be based on reasonable understanding of significant and likely future events – what the potential impact could be, good and bad. Market intelligence is the dynamic means for uncovering the right future-pointing intelligence as early as possible, averting "nasty surprises" and discovering new opportunities.

Strategic market Intelligence differs from business research (and traditional business intelligence) through context -- a certain mindset held while the research and analysis phases are done. The market intelligence professional always has in mind the organization, its business and product space, the industry, customers and target markets, and the drivers behind the need for intelligence. It's an ongoing sense of the impact of what could be uncovered -- the ramifications of what seemingly unconnected items of intelligence could mean for the company. It ensures that business decisions and product direction are customer-focused, market-driven, and reality-based.

Where software companies go wrong with MI and CI efforts is limiting activities to directly supporting sales in tactical ways, focusing only on pointless programs for "killing the competition", and endless feature/function battles that are meaningless in today's commoditized markets for software solutions. Another wrong turn has been the adherence to Porter's Five Forces as a model for product strategy and for market and competitive intelligence, undoubtedly influenced by MBA school curricula in the eighties and nineties, much of which has now proven useless to many enterprises.

 

 

                                                PORTER'S FIVE FORCES 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Porter's Five Forces: The Magic Model that Doesn't Work

I recently read Steve Denning's article on the demise of Michael Porter's Monitor Group consulting firm. Porter invented a model for corporate "strategy" based on 'Five Forces' that has been treated almost as a reverential artifact for many years. Denning's article brought me back to my own thinking years ago on why Porter doesn't work for software companies. I never have really used Porter for strategic market intelligence for the software industry – instead I developed a matrix that holds more relevance to the needs of software companies.

I refer to Porter's model as an "artifact" because it is no longer relevant to today's markets, if it ever really was. It's linked to a business context set in the Eighties, when corporate strategy focused on inside-out objectives such as beating competitors and sustaining profitability with no connection to value delivered to customers – chest-thumping instead of serving customers. There was a great deal more market predictability and regularity. Today's markets obviously have become volatile and not so predictable; businesses are now challenged to create new business models multiple times during the life of the enterprise to survive and thrive.

 

Five Forces Model Fails the Software Industry

Because Porter's Five Forces model is based on non-changing market conditions, it is limited or even harmful for dealing with dynamic, ever-changing industries and markets. Well, the software industry never sits still, and this has intensified in recent years. And the customers of software vendors are also facing uncertain and fluctuating markets, which adds further complexity when seeking insight for future trends regarding customer needs and wants.

Professionally, Porter was not experienced in any industry, in any hands on sense, when he created the Five Forces model, so he didn't have practical experience to fully explore or prove out his model. If you don't understand the software industry, how people interact with software and rely on software to improve their own enterprises, then any indirect models will likely have little relevance.

Under Porter, competitive intelligence is not about going to market competitively to meet customer needs and desires - it's about "beating" everyone including the customer. The customer is not a partner but a conquered spoil of war. Not exactly the best path to engendering customer experience excellence – perhaps Porter's model is one of the reasons that many enterprises have done such a bad job of focusing on the customer. MI and CI better serve a software company when its purpose is to understand the competitive landscape well enough to seek out paths that diverge from the "herd" so that the company carves out underserved markets and better understands customer needs. Porter's aggressive modeling around "competition" has misguided organizations into becoming obsessed with destroying the competition.

Other areas where Porter's model comes up short:

• The value of partner ecosystems including supply chain
• Predicting future trends
• Identifying new customer segments
• Understanding that software solution spaces are commoditized
• When it's time to sunset solutions and markets

These are all essential to growth and evolution for sustaining success.

 

Defining and Sizing Markets – Another Porter Failure

For software offerings, market sizing used to be a fairly straightforward task, when technology problems and solutions were seemingly distinct and silo'd from other technology areas. Market sizing is important but many software vendors don't consider all of the parameters that actually define the markets and the customers that are the best fit for software offerings.

An example of market sizing that has become more complex – and that certainly would be poorly served by using Porter's model – is the software market for what used to be called Web Content Management and is now frequently called Web Experience Management. The use of websites and web presence by organizations to promote and sell their products has evolved to sophisticated levels where multi-channel customer experiences have greater importance and often involve Internet venues that are not controlled by the organization.

WEM is actually a composite of a solution ecosystem – understanding this leads to a better calculation of the overall market size. Although some market forecasts from analyst firms are stretching to include more of this ecosystem, often multiple market forecasts must be considered and added into the final market potential for WEM solutions. The overall solution ecosystem becomes compellingly relevant when taking the customer's point-of-view for the desired end-to-end solution.

Porter's model is ill-equipped to handle such converging markets or ecosystems. Often Porter's model is used in business school in simplistic calculations of market size where the 'profit potential' is the real goal, unfortunately without considering the many variables that go into real market potential. And of course such simplistic calculations also lead to the allocation of 'market share' – once again focusing on competitors rather than customers.

The complex variables for real market potential primarily center on the customer: meeting customer needs and desires, improving customer experiences with the organization, understanding who the customer is through useful segmentations mapped to solution scenarios, addressing usability and problem-solving effectiveness for the software offering, from the customer perspective. But these are harder variables to try to quantify and often are left out of the 'equation'.

Another aspect of WEM markets is the fact that there are two sets of customers to be considered: the customer who buys the WEM software, and the target customer for the web properties that will be built with the WEM software. Since WEM solutions impact two levels of buyers, the technology exists as a means to an end – it is the "end" that really matters and must be foremost in the minds of vendors and solution buyers. Porter's model has little to account for the complexities of 'customer' in this scenario.

 

So Why Am I Concerned about Porter

As many have pointed out, Porter's Five Forces seemingly didn't save Michael Porter's own high-dollar consultancy, so how can it have relevance to the needs of other organizations. Even Porter's consultancy wasn't part of the simple market construct that is the best fit for gaining benefit from the Five Forces model.

Steve Denning asks in his article:  

Had Monitor tried to implement Porter’s strategy and executed it poorly? Or had Monitor implemented Porter’s strategy well but the strategy didn’t work? If not, why not?

Denning further explains what was greatly lacking from Porter's model:   

There was just one snag. What was the intellectual basis of this now vast enterprise of locating sustainable competitive advantage? As Stewart notes, it was “lacking any foundation in fact or logic.” Except where generated by government regulation, sustainable competitive advantage simply doesn’t exist.

What’s gone wrong here was Porter’s initial thought. The purpose of strategy—or business or business education—is not about coping with competition–i.e. a contest in which a winner is selected from among rivals. The purpose of business is to add value for customers and ultimately society. There is a straight line from this conceptual error at the outset of Porter’s writing to the debacle of Monitor’s bankruptcy. Monitor failed to add value to customers.

 

For strategic purposes alone, a lot of time has been wasted on trying to align an organization's management with Porter's model when it just plain wasn't useful for most software companies. Many industries have spent way too much time and resources on building complicated and non-scaling frameworks that never really help the organization with strategic decision-making and don't provide real-time responsiveness to market changes. And if the model is applied only to particular segments of a complex corporation, important aspects will be missed by working without the context of interrelations across product groups and segments, as well as across organizational functions.

 

                                                                                                        Source: Julie Hunt Consulting

 

 

Customer-Focused Strategic Market & Competitive Intelligence

Many software companies continue to think of market and competitive intelligence as tactical methods to attack competitors, to convince a customer not to buy from a competitor, instead of: developing their own strategic solution offerings, building strategic relationships with customers, and understanding how to help customers really solve their problems and support their business initiatives with reliable solutions.

Focusing on Customers should be the starting point for MI and CI initiatives for software vendors. It is essential for software vendors to attract customers, and eventually sales, through true ROI and through differentiation other than feature/function minutiae. Market Intelligence programs, in collaboration with product marketing, are important sources of comprehensive research, analysis and recommendations for providing the elements of a software solution that can set it apart, from the customer perspective.

Strategic MI makes a significant difference for the competitiveness of software companies:  

• New opportunities – identify new trends that will matter to target markets and customers; how to get there before the competition (whenever possible)
• Enhanced customer interaction – understand customer POV, goals, needs, strategic direction
• Stronger target market selection & positioning – research, validate go-to-market and positioning; locate under-served markets for target customers and solution space; guide how to articulate positioning well for customers, analysts, industry
• Strategic view of competitive landscape – figure out true differentiation, figure out where competitors are not operating; understand the issues that matter to customers and the solutions they seek from competitors
• Early warning of industry and/or competitor changes – take advantage of opportunities and leverage/deal with threats and risk

 

Related links:

Software companies still fail to tap into top benefits from market and competitive intelligence programs

Market Intelligence – Making Better Business Decisions at the Core of the Company

Shallow Thinking Ensures Bad Business Decisions

Provocation-based Market Intelligence in a Market-Driven world

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

 

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

     Originally published in CMSWire July 2, 2012

 

The customer journey consists of multiple touchpoints, which are the interactions with any and all enterprise functions, employees, and marketing / digital channels. They all matter – they are the milestones of the customer journey. Touchpoints are also components of multi-channel marketing, which has the challenge of nurturing and sustaining a unified customer experience across all channels, and for the customer journey.

The buying process or customer decision journey – where customers go through various stages to reach a decision about purchase – is a significant piece of the B2B customer journey. Content marketing can bring value to all aspects of the customer journey – all customer engagement opportunities. But particular attention to the buying process is an essential aspect of successful content marketing strategies.

  

Content and the Customer Journey

The buying process for B2B software can be complex and involve multiple steps for the customer, both for arriving at a decision and for making the purchase itself. The "customer" frequently consists of multiple roles: techies (IT), line-of-business decision-makers, financial and budget managers, executives, and sometimes the actual users of the technology. (One of the flaws on the buyer side of the equation is too often the "end" user of the software solution is left out of the decision-making process.) Content marketing has a fantastic opportunity to help potential buyer roles with the decision steps and foster positive experiences as part of the customer journey.

  

"What do Suspects want? What you Know, not what you Sell"

 

                                 Source: Eloqua

 

 Eloqua's Joe Chernov has produced a lot of solid work advising B2B companies on how best to implement content marketing. Chernov and Elle Woulfe recently released a slide deck on Mapping Content to the Buyer's Journey:

 Key takeaways:

• Content has minimal value in absolute, but tremendous value when mapped to the right stage in the funnel
• When it comes to distribution, think of suspect-stage content as "many to many," prospect-stage as "one to many," lead-stage as "one to few," and opportunity-stage as "one to one"
• When it comes to prospects, content that assuages professional fears tends to be most effective
• Mismatching content to stage can backfire … mitigate by asking yourself, "Is this piece of content, delivered at this time, advancing the buyer's journey?"

  

Customer Segmentation for the Journey

Work done for target customer segmentation and for mapping the customer journey is very useful for organizing types of content, and how and when content is made available to various customer roles and needs. Some content will be tagged to certain steps in the buying process: key customer roles for each step, what topics matter to them, what kind of content, where do they prefer to consume it. Some content will help existing customers use technology solutions for greater benefit and find out more that the vendor can do to help with business success. Some content is meant to pique interest for anyone unfamiliar with the vendor.

  

                             Source: Inflexion Point

  

The key milestones in the B2B buying decision process happen when:

• Something changes, and your prospect recognises they have a potential need
• They conclude that solutions are available, and that there is an economic case for change
• They define their requirements and decision criteria
• They identify and shortlist technically and financially feasible options
• They identify a single preferred solution
• That solution successfully navigates the investment approval process

 

Many resources are available for understanding how to match content to steps or phases in the customer journey, including Spark Inbound Marketing's B2B Buying Cycle and Eloqua's Content Grid:

 

  Eloqua's Content Grid v2 (excerpt)  

 

  

Content for the Customer-as-Buyer

è Content Value is Strictly from the Customer Point-of-View

Just as the customer alone owns the customer experience, the perceived value of content solely rests with the customer. Learning customer desires for content is where a lot of time should be spent. Just like software solutions must be right-fit for customers needs, the same goes for content. Just as vendors should be segmenting target markets and target customer roles for being able to connect their solutions to customer needs, the same segmentation should be used for content.

è Insights, Critical Thinking and Expert Knowledge-sharing

Software vendors need to provide content about current problems and future directions for topics that matter to customers. With so much content available on the internet, writing about yesterday's issues is not engaging to most customers, unless yesterday's issues address problems still plaguing customers. Then the content should look at what might be done to solve those problems. Customers realize that technology is in constant flux, in good and bad ways. Helping customers to see into future trends that could benefit their businesses, and the potential gotchas of new technology, is likely to provide valuable content from the customer POV.

è Diversity of Content

Content can be expressed in many forms, multiplied by many channels – which means companies really must understand for each target customer role what are the preferred content types and preferred channel for each content type. Mobile platforms present good but difficult channels that must be understood and handled well. Opportunities are increasing for more interactive components related to content. Creative, sophisticated approaches to most content should be considered – simplicity and clarity are other constructs to consider. Developing several related pieces of content for a particular topic can enrich how content marketing aligns with the customer journey. People come back for the next installments, and the vendor can develop more in-depth coverage via different media and different channels.

   

 Source: InboundWriter

   

è Quality over Quantity – and reliable continuity of quality content is vital

Customers and prospects don't want to waste their time on junk content or thinly disguised brochure-ware. Imperatives for effective content marketing artifacts are quality, creativity, hot topics, deep insights – essentially respecting the target audience by producing excellent work. Constant and reliable content creation is important, but what this means will vary by content type and channel.

 

There are a lot of reasons why content marketing doesn't work for some companies…But the biggest culprit (and it's not even close) is a lack of consistency, and, in some cases, a content stoppage. Research from IBM in 2010 stated that about 80 percent of corporate blogs never post more than five entries (hat tip to Rebecca Lieb). That is a truly unbelievable stat…

 

è People, Money, Time

Content marketing is sustained only by realistic allocations of resources: people, money and time in particular. B2B software companies should be tapping internal subject matter experts (SMEs), as well as external ones, to deliver the kind of content that customers want. Internal tech experts are also needed as reviewers and editors to ensure that content is accurate. Strategic-thinking enterprises cannot expect their employees to participate in content marketing on their own time or to work it into already busy work schedules, as a "sideline". Upper management has to make sure that content marketing participation for an employee is a recognized part of regular compensated responsibilities.

The responsibilities of creating relevant content must come from company staff:

Content marketing is brand marketing, cubed, and as such requires the full attention and supervision of your team. Prospects and customers now expect to engage with you— and by engage with you we mean get to know your brand—through your content. Creating content assets to support content marketing is a centralized strategy that relies on a consistent brand voice and vision to work. It's a bad habit left over from legacy thinking to allow your marketing organization to create content as one-off campaign or program assets without thinking of the broader implications.

 

Strategies to Deliver What Customers Need

The work to be done to understand how to deliver the right content to customers and prospects is the same work that B2B software vendors should be doing to deliver the products and services that customers and prospects want and need. The work being done to identify optimal target markets and customer roles for products should be extended to segmentation for content marketing purposes. In all of these cases the ultimate "product" for the customer should be high quality, reliable, useful, easy to put to work.

There are a lot of great ideas for the tactics of content marketing, but it's not likely that sustained success will result without multiple strategy levels in a given enterprise. Even if Marketing and other teams develop a good content marketing strategy, it cannot be effective if Marketing does not have a strategic position in the overall enterprise, backed by upper management. And before we can make the journey to a well-crafted content marketing strategy, upper management must make the commitment to be an inter-operative enterprise that is customer-focused, market-driven, and process and data savvy. Enterprises must ensure the creation of integrated systems and processes for internal and external customer interactions. Content marketing is not a short term campaign or project; it is a strategic commitment that impacts most of the enterprise – for the entire customer lifecycle.

 

  

Related Links

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors  

Content Marketing Strategy for B2B Software Vendors: Starring the 'New' White Paper

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the "customer as buyer"

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 25+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side, to customer-centric work in solutions strategy, competitive selling and go-to-market strategies. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

 

Time Travel Required: Finding WEM in the 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management

 

A few days ago while reading through various articles about the future of websites and web presence, I came across a post by Thomas Baekdal that started off with a look back to the beginnings of web design:

 Back in 1998 designing for the internet was all about 3 things:

Design for the desktop, where the vast majority was using 800x600, with their browser maximized.

Design a website, a place where people could come to you. With emphasize on getting traffic and have them stick around as long as possible.

Optimize for the many search engines, because that was the primary way people would get to you.

But if we fast-forward to today, none of these really matters anymore. You still need them, but they are no longer the best things to do.

  

The reference to 1998 immediately brought to mind the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management: while the MQ does cover concepts newer than Baekdal’s 1998 list, the basic approach for this MQ is very 1998: it’s déjà vu all over again…

Then I recalled this passage in Jon Marks' post on the 2010 MQ:

Most of these little yellow dots haven’t drifted very far in a year – the report is pretty similar despite the M&A activity that has kept us bloggers busy. So pretty much a repeat of last year.

If I were a police officer, I would be repeating:  Move along, nothing to see here. No offense to most of the vendors in the benchmark, but this MQ does nothing to excite us about the future of websites / WEM / web presence nor does it do much to stimulate buyer interests for finding the right-fit solutions for business needs.  

  

Redux: Moving Beyond WCM - Web Experience Management Software Solutions and Markets

 So I decided to take a look at an article I wrote almost a year ago about understanding WEM (web experience management) markets and solutions: the article includes a reference to the 2009 Gartner MQ for WCM. I wanted to see how many of my reactions to the 2009 MQ would now be different >> answer: none. Which sadly means that not much has changed with this new 2010 Gartner benchmark for providing value to vendors and buyers: 

When it comes to how to select the best-fit Web Content Management (WCM) software, a great deal of confusion continues to haunt vendors and customers alike.  Industry analysts have done little to make this any easier by perpetuating these mistakes:

• Frequently lumping together disparate offerings that target clearly separate customer segments and customer needs
• Failing to segment WCM offerings into solution categories, such as:  Web Experience Management (WEM) for Enterprise, basic web publishing for internal business processes/intranet, mid-market solutions for e-commerce, and so on
• Persisting with the pointless notion that WCM is a functional subset of Enterprise Content Management (ECM), especially in light of the speciousness of the ECM platform; such a notion is even more off-target when considering WEM solutions
• While understanding that WEM solutions are directly tied to interactive/digital marketing initiatives, analyst reports and benchmarks fail to use this understanding as an essential tenet of such reports

  

Looking for WEM?

Web Experience Management has come together as a segment of WCM software solutions and reflects current directions for websites and web presence for certain companies and organizations:

It has been mainly customers who have helped to propel the WCM industry into providing the sorts of capabilities that are really needed for external-facing websites that are central to strategic business objectives.  So a significant segment of the overall WCM market has evolved into Web Experience Management (WEM), for which a much larger solution ecosystem has come together.  Most Web Experience Management platforms have little to do with basic content management or basic web publishing (à la WordPress and TypePad), and even less to do with the so-called ECM (enterprise content management) platform. 

A more complete WEM solution description includes:

• Understanding of solutions for B2B, B2C web/marketing initiatives
• Sophisticated digital / interactive marketing strategies
• External-facing web presence / multi-channel content delivery
• Website essential to corporate business strategy
• Ecosystem of ancillary tools to complete end-to-end solution for customer objectives
• Savvy use of social media, well-integrated into website and marketing plans
• Alignment with interactive/digital agencies

So a Web Experience Management solution is really a composite of several “markets”: 

• WCM solution suite, with usability both for business users and IT personnel (includes behind-the-scenes “content management”, workflow, design tools, and so on)
• Enterprise-quality portal / presentation management
• Recommendations-like technology for social search and personalization
• Web analytics / testing / content monetizing tools
• Rich media and video content management (monetizing components as appropriate)
• Social collaboration / social marketing capabilities
• Extensive integration / interoperability capabilities at several levels of the enterprise infrastructure

 

For buyers in search of WEM software solution vendors, it’s going to take some work to find them in the 2010 MQ. While the 2010 MQ dances around a number of the above capabilities, it never directly addresses WEM solutions, preferring to stick to more of a “classic” (1998?) description of WCM:

Gartner defines WCM as the process of controlling the content to be consumed over one or more online channels through the use of commercial, open-source or hosted management tools based on a core repository. We exclude products such as portals and e-commerce engines even though these technologies have overlapping functions in areas such as personalization, content management and content delivery.

 

(Originally the MQ for WCM 2010 was here - Gartner demanded the deletion of the diagram. JH - 6/12/2014) 

 

 

The Inside-Out Corporation

This particular MQ report for web content management seems to epitomize the work of a corporation more interested in its own goals, and one that is not operating from the customer POV, even though a lot of its revenue is customer-driven. And this particular MQ seems comprised of artificial parameters that only benefit a Gartner agenda. Drawing on my 1998 flashback, this benchmark also seems to be advocating “old school” decision-making processes for tech purchase decisions, focusing on IT rather than business/marketing decision-makers, and on recession scare tactics by primarily advocating big vendors to make the “safe” decision.

In a recession economy, for a company to effect growth, risks have to be taken, and business should be conducted in new ways with new technology paradigms. Companies must make tech purchases based on business goals and needs that contribute to success and competitive edge. Corporate websites and web presence are critical to the success of many businesses: to connect to potential customers wherever they are on the web; to engage buyers - whether B2C or B2B. How a company effectively uses the internet is constantly changing, so corporations need forward-looking solutions – unfortunately we aren’t finding guidance for such solutions in this Gartner MQ.

Evaluations of WEM / WCM solutions are somewhat unique in that they must consider two levels of customers: one is comprised of the buyers of the technology to build websites and manage web presence, and the other is comprised of the target customers that the original tech buyers want to attract/engage with their websites and web presence. Since WEM / WCM solutions impact two levels of buyers, we must look at the technology as a means to an end – it is the “end” that really matters and must be foremost in the minds of solution buyers. Unfortunately this Gartner MQ is not very focused on either the direct buyer of the technology or the customers that the WEM solution buyer hopes to attract.

  

Vendors Offerings Are Part of the Problem

WEM / WCM vendors also own responsibility for the failure of analyst benchmarks to provide clear guidance for buyers. Most vendors adhere to the vague domains of “WCM”, or worse, “CMS”, hedging their bets with offerings that are too horizontal to know if they truly align to the needs of buyers in search of specific WEM capabilities.  WEM is one of few truly segmented solutions in the larger mass of WCM. It’s time for vendors to shake off non-differentiated, broad offerings, to declare real solution segments and target markets (by working with specific industry scenarios and revenue segments). By doing so, vendor solutions will only get better at meeting the needs of specific markets and customers.

I’m frustrated by the continuation of terms like WCM / ECM / CMS – these vague terms just blur a “solution space” that is populated with scores of products from very basic to very complex. Lately there has been a superficial debate that WEM is yet another meaningless vendor buzzword. To the contrary, overly generalized terms like WCM and CMS are the buzzwords that have no real meaning anymore because they include everything and define nothing. WEM is an actual solution with clear purpose and defined capabilities. Whether or not a particular vendor provides an authentic WEM solution is another issue – but to assume none are providing WEM is ridiculous.

 

Back to the Future

Web presence and the various purposes of websites have changed dramatically and will continue to do so. In this MQ, Gartner seems to have overlooked the importance of distributed web presence and new approaches to marketing on the web. New solutions are evolving that are not necessarily based in “classic” WCM.

But what may be the most important factor for a lot of companies is a strong emphasis on the customer-focused web presence for the company. And this may mean that company web presence will show up on other websites, instead of on the corporate website. Additionally a WCM/WEM software platform may only be one of the components of a new management framework for all web presence (management of web content still matters but may not be tied to a specific website anymore).

Content is extremely important to a lot of web marketing plans and strategies, and content is the meat of most social sites, whether it is a conversation thread, a video, a blog post, and so on. So look for WEM solutions themselves to continue to evolve as the means of managing and delivering any kind of content for sites anywhere on the web, through any channel.

Web marketing and customer relationship strategies are changing (and improving) – companies need new solutions and practices to manage the new world. More companies have come to understand that first they must build the web marketing / presence strategy that will accomplish their goals. Then they have to figure out how to achieve the goals of the marketing strategy, which will involve preferred practices and processes, as well as technology.  With web presence evolution, marketing strategies should include orchestration of web presence via other sites, and how to integrate with conversations and content from those external sites.

 

To find significant forward-looking thinking regarding the future of web presence and websites, it may be best to look at the many talented writers and practitioners for website design and WEM solutions technology who understand the evolution taking place right now.  Many writers and practitioners for marketing technology, digital marketing and social media also contribute valuable insight for the future of web presence. Here are a few suggestions to get started:

Web Content, Website design:

A List Apart

Ian Truscott

Paul Boag

Stéphane Croisier

Aral Balkan

Aarron Walter

 

CMS Wire has been featuring many talented writers and recently added a WEM focus (in CMS Wire WEM is “web engagement management” but the capabilities and intent are the same)

 

Interactive Marketing – Social Media:

Jeremiah Owyang and Altimeter Group

Hubspot

Chris Brogan 

David Armano and Edelman Digital       

 

  

Related Articles:

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

B2B WEM / WCM Software Vendors Targeting Mid-Market customers: stay where you are!  

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services

Disclaimer: Julie Hunt occasionally contributes articles to CMS Wire.

  

B2B WEM/WCM Software Vendors Targeting Mid-Market customers: stay where you are!

 

Here’s a piece of advice that very few B2B software vendors of any sort ever follow: 

Vendors: If you have been targeting Mid-Market customers – then stay where you are!

Ignore the siren song of the high-end Enterprise.

 

This advice is especially meaningful for B2B vendors for Web Content Management (WCM) and Web Engagement Management (WEM).

 

From my experience, many of the WCM / WEM / CMS vendors seem to do very little market intelligence research and analysis to understand what exactly they are selling and to which customers/markets. Most WCM/WEM/CMS vendors seem to be milling around with no clear indication of how each vendor aligns to clearly defined solution, customer and market segments within a go-to-market matrix.  The main focus of most of these vendors is on feature sets, and not on delivering authentic solutions for specific industry scenarios and business problems.  When any sort of Mid-Market B2B software vendor persists with very horizontal solutions, it is in danger of “disappearing”.

 

The mid to upper tiers of the Mid-Market provide a fertile market for B2B vendors who are themselves SMB or Mid-Market companies. For the mid to upper tiers of the Mid-Market, annual revenue runs from $250M to just under $1B. Vendors will do better if they segregate this range into two segments ($250M-$499M and $500M-$999M respectively).  Within those two segments, vendors should then select and learn a lot about specific customers and various solution scenarios that matter to those customers.

 

I’m specifically calling out Mid-Market customers for WEM (rather than “classic SMB”), due to the higher cost of implementing digital marketing solutions based on WEM platforms, which are likely out of reach for classic SMB companies. Once a vendor is committed to targeting Mid-Market companies, the next phase is to very specifically target segments of customers for mid-market offerings. 

 

 

Drifting into the High-End Enterprise Usually Ends Badly for Smaller Vendors

I’ve seen too many SMB / Mid-Market software vendors lured by potential big money and big deals in the high-end enterprise; after taking the plunge, very few of these vendors do well or even survive. It is near-to-impossible for smaller software vendors to compete against large vendors when providing high-end solutions. When trying to compete with the “big boys”, sales engagements frequently deteriorate into pricing wars that can destroy the well-being and income of the smaller vendor. After crossing over, the smaller vendor spends all the time on “me too” development for what the high-end vendors are already doing. The smaller vendor becomes snarled up in feature bloat that leads to the bastardization of its original offering. And worse, the smaller vendor ends up alienating its original target markets of mid-market companies and loses their business.

 

The high-end enterprise is a very tough place for smaller software vendors: there is a much smaller field of potential customers, fierce competition for those customers, plus larger software vendors already have established extensive relationships in these enterprises. Large enterprise customers are also harder to please, bring on longer sales cycles that include more chances to fail. Even when a smaller vendor wins an initial deal with a large enterprise company, it is usually displaced by a larger vendor very quickly.

 

Conversely, when targeting the Mid-Market, very few high-end vendors go very deep into this overall segment (and rarely into SMB). For the most part, large enterprise software vendors still don’t really know how to win Mid-Market business or provide the right-fit solutions. And it’s not just about price but about understanding how Mid-Market buys software solutions . On the other hand, a Mid-Market vendor already has decent affinity for some of the concerns of its potential Mid-Market customers, simply by reflecting on what matters to the vendor’s own success.

 

 

Vendor-performed Segmentation Is Essential to Build WEM/WCM Solutions for Mid-Market

Mid-Market (and SMB) customers are overwhelmed by the large number of CMS offerings of all kinds and are not well prepared to figure out which ones are appropriate for WEM or even just WCM. WEM vendors targeting the Mid-Market have to do a much better job of marketing and engaging specific segments.

 

Vendors must take action to properly position themselves in segmentation to differentiate their solutions form the mass of WCM/WEM offerings. They must put focused thought and time into identifying and understanding specific customer segments in the Mid-Market. Then vendors must undertake further understanding of what the vendor solutions need to provide the best support for target customers. Vendors need to be clear on what the solutions are not, to avoid “market sprawl”. It will make a huge difference if vendors put good time into a conscious and rigorous go-to-market strategy that is continually fine-tuned. 

 

Take time to properly segment target customers and markets for solutions:

· Know the target customer size – usually based on revenue ranges

· Identify who should use your solution and why – what problem(s) does it address (be very specific) – stay far away from the massive horizontal pack of “CMS” offerings

· Research and select one or two industries you’d like to work with; then select a segment in the industry that is a good bet for WCM/WEM solutions

· Analyze and build out specific industry scenario solutions that really work – again focus on real target customers and real customer problems/needs

· Keep in touch with the customers who are using the scenario solutions: fine-tune, improve, evolve into other focused solutions

· Assess the success of the above to make decisions about new go-to-market strategies that will add growth to the company

· Truly support customers throughout the lifecycle of the customer experience

 

 

No Illusions – Price is #1 Criterion for Selling to Mid-Market

I’m just calling this out plain and simple:  for most Mid-Market customers, price is the first requirement to be met by prospective vendors. Most Mid-Market companies have very clear parameters for what they are willing to spend on software. But the Mid-Market also wants value for price. When I say price, I mean the total cost of the end-to-end solution that will be up and running and working properly – so price includes money, time and people.

 

Many Mid-Market companies have small IT groups, so the following capabilities are essential: ease of implementation, low maintenance, ease of use for non-techies, good to great performance, delivery on vendor promises. When selling to Mid-Market companies, publish honest prices on your corporate website. Revealing pricing is a part of marketing to and engaging the customer-as-buyer when dealing with the mid-market. Remember: Mid-market companies have no time or patience for long sales cycles and complicated pricing schemes.

 

 

Strategy for Providing and Selling WEM to Mid-Market Companies: keep it simple

Vendors must take the time to research, analyze and understand what comprises a WEM solution for target mid-market companies. They have to take a look at the overall WEM capabilities of their solutions, and then reconcile which capabilities matter to their Mid-Market target segments. CMSWire has had a recent series on WEM solutions that is a good starting point to help vendors with mapping a solution to the needs and requirements of desired customers.

 

Where WEM is heading for the Mid-Market:

· Product/solution capabilities that meet Mid-Market requirements

· Capabilities that support marketing strategies of most Mid-Market companies

· Inclusion of social media capabilities and/or integrations with social media and Social CRM apps

· Monitoring trends related to desires/needs of target markets and specific industry scenarios (identifying what Mid-Market segments need, not what big enterprise companies need)

· But continue to monitor Enterprise trends to watch for trickle-down effects – this is where vendor smarts and market intelligence must come into play

 

 

Innovate With Real Solutions for Real Markets

Smaller vendors for Mid-Market WEM solutions are frequently more agile (carrying less legacy and expensive baggage) when it comes to pursuing innovation that will benefit target customers. These vendors are better positioned to move quickly to embrace future trends that define where solution markets are heading.

 

Vendor success comes from continuous innovation that makes sense for its Mid-Market customers:

· Engage in continuous market intelligence processes to monitor target markets / customers, and what they want for future success – many sources for this information

· Innovate specifically for Mid-Market target customers – perform excellent research/analysis to understand which are the best markets/customers/solution scenarios

· Conduct continuous conversations with current customers, and with companies wanted as new customers – embrace Social CRM practices for better conversations, listening

· Keep an eye on what the marketing teams of Mid-Market companies’ will need from WEM solutions

· Monitor enterprise-level trends for WEM to determine if the trends are meaningful for Mid-Market companies; also follow WEM trends for consumer marketing for new ideas – but choose wisely for real market strengths

· Don’t follow in the footsteps of big WEM solutions just to land where they are now

o    Jump ahead to new trends that make sense for target Mid-Market segments

o    Pick innovation that is right for target customers and for the vendor: real differentiation will result

 

 

Jeremiah Owyang on Future of the Corporate Website

Recently at the Gilbane Conference 2010 in San Francisco, and on his blog, Jeremiah Owyang has set out some compelling predictions for the evolution of company websites and the potential new world of distributed web presence. He sees social sites driving far more customer connections and brand awareness than the traditional corporate website of past years.  This is the sort of innovative thinking that vendors for Mid-Market WEM/WCM solutions should be monitoring. 

 

 

A couple of Jeremiah’s slides from Gilbane Conference 2010 San Francisco:

 

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2010/05/19/slides-roadmap-for-integration-of-social-into-your-corporate-website/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related Posts:

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

 

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

 

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

 

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

 

Selling Software Solutions to SMB Markets – Who and How To Target

 

 

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished market intelligence analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights for the software industry. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side  to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services

 

 

Disclosure:  From time to time, I contribute articles to CMSWire.

 

 

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

Future of tools for managing web content and web presence anywhere

 

 

Recently a colleague was exploring options for improving the web marketing capabilities of the company that he works for. He started his efforts by looking at “traditional” Web Content Management (WCM) software, with an eye to Web Experience (Engagement) Management platforms. But since his company is itself a mid-market-sized company, he was very uncomfortable with the options – and not just because of cost and time to implement. As conversations with his company management evolved, my colleague realized that he was not satisfied with a WCM / WEM solution because it didn’t seem to be the right platform for their web marketing strategy and business goals.

 

These days, companies of all sizes have tired of the expense and complexity of many WCM / WEM solutions, and would dearly love agile alternatives. And, yes, there are lesser expensive options. But what may be the most important factor for a lot of companies, is a strong emphasis on the customer-focused web presence for the company. And this may mean that company web presence will show up on other websites, instead of on the corporate website -- which leads to the notion of whether or not the “corporate website” is becoming obsolete for many types of companies.

 

Web marketing and customer relationship strategies are changing (and improving) – companies need new solutions and practices to manage the new world. More companies have come to understand that first they must build the web marketing / presence strategy that will accomplish their goals. Then they have to figure out how to achieve the goals of the marketing strategy, which will involve preferred practices and processes, as well as technology.  With web presence evolution, marketing strategies should include orchestration of web presence via other sites, and how to integrate with conversations and content from those external sites.

 

 

B2C or B2B – Which Organization Needs A Corporate Website?

Whether or not a company should have a corporate website can depend on many factors. For both B2C and B2B companies, content still matters and has to be located somewhere. The B2B company has the greater need for a corporate website, but must now evolve the corporate website to a social / customer hub. B2C sales and marketing goals might be less about content per se and much more about customer conversations and brand awareness that take place anywhere on the web. Jeremiah Owyang points out that the corporate website is less and less the most likely place to connect with customers.

 

 

B2C – Time to Get Rid of the Monolithic Corporate Website?

Is the corporate website obsolete? Most corporate websites do not work well for customers. The sites are designed from the corporate POV, with too much useless content that is hard to find anyway. Frequently corporate websites become money pits, requiring too many resources over time compared to the benefits received.

 

Particularly for B2C businesses, new thinking is that the corporate website might be completely unnecessary for customer interactions and brand promotion.  Going where the customers are, i.e. social sites, seems to be an effective way to better connect. Monitoring web presence and participating in conversations on other sites help companies reach out to current and new customers in ways that matter to these customers and can bring effective results to companies.

 

Current thinking is that social sites are taking sales endeavors to a new place since customers can now participate in spreading the word to potential customers through forums, communities, ratings, reviews. On the flip side, corporations have the responsibility of finding and responding to concerns, complaints, feedback, and requests posted on social sites, hopefully to resolve problems, to engage and attract customers through answers, and to learn from customer POVs.

 

 

B2B Companies Still Benefit from Corporate Websites, With Social Improvements

One approach to introducing more web presence into corporate websites is to add improved social capabilities that interact well with customers and potential buyers. This approach appeals to companies that want a measure of control over customer “conversations” and also makes sense if the company is using social capabilities as part of a customer relationship and support strategy. Content still matters for B2B websites – B2B are customers still looking for a lot of different kinds of content that they want to easily find on the corporate website.  However, many potential B2B customers are also influenced by interactions and content on external social sites – the savvy B2B company had better understand the importance of such sites.  Integration with and monitoring of social sites are key.

 

Hubspot - inbound marketing and social media advisors::

Your website may very well be the most powerful tool in your marketing kit. Not only is it the place prospects and clients go to learn more about you and your services, but it has a huge impact on their ultimate purchase decision.

The Hubspot post goes on to discuss a survey conducted by RainToday.com that looked at buyers of professional services and the amount of influence that corporate websites exerted on the purchase decision:

According to the survey, 74% of buyers report the service provider's website holds at least "some influence" over their ultimate decision to buy services from the provider. This is 23 percentage points higher than in 2005 and represents a significant increase in the importance of websites.

 

B2B corporate websites need web management solutions not only for creating and maintaining more social and interactive experiences for customers visiting the site, but to monitor and participate in the conversations that take place on other sites. Other sorts of off-site social-related analytics need to take place, such as sentiment analysis. The results of monitoring and analytics must be used to fine-tune product and marketing strategies, and to help corporations better serve customers.

 

 

Jeremiah Owyang on the Future of Corporate Web Presence

Owyang throws out some compelling assertions: In the not-so-distant future, he states that there will be no “old school” corporate sites. There will only be sites assembled on the fly based on social data, a sort of dynamic personalization mashup of content and social engagement.

 

 Today, I’m pleased to see that the thinking –and technology, has emerged, where we’re finding a variety of companies that are integrating social technologies right into the corporate website, bringing the trusted discussions closer to the corporate site.

 

Although the highest state of nirvana (seamless integration) doesn’t yet exist, we should expect there to be very little difference between social technologies and corporate websites as content will assemble on the fly.  I predict URLs won’t matter, as content will be dynamically assembled around the buyer and their context in a variety of devices.  Sure, that’s far out thinking now, but that’s why we have several other stage gates that companies must first go through.

 

Owyang continues on the new social web presence:

1. Although it’s a new and experimental medium, brands should plan a roadmap.

2. The future of web experiences will be based around people – not products. 

3. Take inventory of all corporate web assets and identify where they are in the framework.

4. Next, identify the desired state, and then build a plan against it. Start small and slow, and be sure to have a strategy.

5. Don’t arbitrarily jump into the social marketing space without measurable KPIs. Be deliberate in your actions.

 

Owyang’s thinking is important especially for vendors of WCM / WEM software solutions since he may be pointing the way to future web presence solutions (a future that is not that distant). 

 

 

Should WCM / WEM Software be The Hub -- or one of the components?

Some vendors of “traditional” web content management solutions have been transitioning their offerings to WEM platforms where managing and enhancing the web experience or engagement of the customer is the central purpose. The current WEM platforms focus mainly on customer and social capabilities existing in the corporate website, and are in very early stages of supporting integrations with external social sites.

 

Those supporting the notion that WCM/WEM Platforms should manage web presence and continuation of corporate websites include:

Brice Dunwoodie of CMSWire is What is Web Engagement Management:

It's how you create and manage content, including primary web content, multi-device content, blogs, forums and wikis. Your WCM platform is also the hub of your social media integrations and increasingly the dashboard by which you view your brand's conversational world.

 

Further expansion on the WEM platform from Barb Mosher, CMSWire: The 5 Pillars of Web Engagement Management

1. Content Optimization: analytics, content and experience personalization, multi-variate testing, optimization and SEO.

2. Multi-channel Management:  delivering same message/experience to customers across devices and channels both online and offline – new mobile web

3. Conversational Engagement:  corporate website-based communities, UGC, commenting, trackbacks, micro-blogging, social media integration, analytics, social media monitoring and sentiment analysis.

4. Demand Generation:  customer engagement/experience through targeted marketing - increasing the number and quality of relationships, through need recognition, relevancy enhancements and engagement triggers.

5. Sales Automation: two-way CRM integration, social CRM; e-mail or other campaign integration with the content platform.

 

As described by CMSWire, WEM platforms would provide capabilities and monitoring of brand and customer conversations on corporate websites, as well as bi-directional communication extensions to external social sites.

 

On the other hand:

If the customer experience of a particular brand is taking place on external social sites, then there is now a distributed model for managing a brand’s web presence; the web experience/engagement for the customer is now remote from the corporate website.  So there is even more need for tools/solutions to monitor, listen, act, engage…for customer-focused purposes, as well as for corporate business goals (which should lean heavily towards the customer).

 

A WCM/WEM platform may not be the hub for the overall solution, but instead one of the components of a new management framework for all web presence (management of web content is still important but may not be tied to a specific website anymore).  But content is also integral to a lot of web marketing plans and strategies, and content is the meat of most social sites, whether it is a conversation thread, a video, a blog post, and so on. So look for WCM/WEM solutions themselves to continue to evolve as the means of managing and delivering any kind of content for sites anywhere on the web, through any channel.

  

 

Future Web Presence Management Solutions – What Could They Look Like?

A Web Presence Management Framework may be the best approach for monitoring and supporting a distributed web presence. With an emphasis on Management: the orchestration of all pertinent activities on social sites external to a corporate site. And the management of: marketing to / connecting with customers, monitoring and listening, responding, acting, analyzing, more acting. The Management Framework would be agile, timely, dynamic, flexible, open.

 

A starter list (high level) of potential capabilities and attributes for a Distributed Web Presence Management Framework:

· Sophisticated, agile management / orchestration capabilities

· Web presence “mashups”: dynamically creating personalized sites for each customer

· An evolved WCM/WEM component: delivery to external sites, advanced support of corporate site if still in play, handling of relevant content/conversations published on external sites

· Support / interoperability for content curation as well as content management

· Management of all types of “conversations”: Auditing - Listening - Capturing - Integrating

· Multiple kinds of analytics, including convergence with “traditional” data analytics

· Dashboards for different internal roles

· Agile, context-sensitive Search / recommendations-like technology to contextually filter content/search

· Integration is big (lots of API support)

· Orchestration and Integration with multiple kinds of “external solutions” that are in play for distributed web presence

· Usability for business as well as tech teams

· Workflow and automated processes for WCM, CRM, SCRM practices, other corporate systems

 

· Company roles will also evolve:  we’ll see new marketing technology roles, product marketing and product management roles for “caretakers” of company web presence on external social sites, among the possibilities

 

· Segmented customer advisory groups will also play much more interactive roles with management of distributed web presence

 

· Eventual alignment with semantic web, link management – for reach throughout the web. Here is a current view of opening up content to anywhere on the web:

Forget the fancy names of "semantic web" or "linked data." Associating structured data with your content assets lets you take advantage of Open Graph, Google RichSnippets, Yahoo Search Monkey, and a new generation of agents such as Siri. Disseminating your content with metadata through APIs enables developers to spread the seeds of your brand in a variety of mash-ups and apps. Sharing your data sets in collaborative venues such as Factual and Infochimps helps build relationships with the world of analytic power users, improve your data quality, and turn those dusty data silos into tools for advocating ideas and brands. (from Chief Marketing Technologist blog)

 

 

 

OK, WCM / WEM vendors of all sizes: should your current plans for your solution for corporate websites go forward unchanged, or should you start now to create a Management Framework for distributed web presence?

 

 

 

Related Posts:

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

 

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

 

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

 

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished market intelligence analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights for the software industry. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side  to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services

 

Disclosure: From time to time, I contribute articles to CMSWire.

 

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

When it comes to how to select the best-fit Web Content Management (WCM) software, a great deal of confusion continues to haunt vendors and customers alike.  Industry analysts have done little to make this any easier by perpetuating these mistakes:

·Frequently lumping together disparate offerings that target clearly separate customer segments and customer needs

·Failing to segment WCM offerings into solution categories, such as Web Experience Management (WEM) for Enterprise, basic web publishing for internal business processes/intranet, mid-market solutions for e-commerce, and so on

·Persisting with the pointless notion that WCM is a functional subset of Enterprise Content Management (ECM), especially in light of the speciousness of the ECM platform; such a notion is even more off-target when considering WEM solutions

·While understanding that WEM solutions are directly tied to interactive/digital marketing initiatives, analyst reports and benchmarks fail to use this understanding as an essential tenet of such reports

 

Analysts, writers, and bloggers have continued to produce a large body of work on various aspects of the “ECM platform”, as well as covering the questionable meaning of the term ECM and the many limitations of trying to shove a lot of capabilities into an “ECM container”.  There are a fair number of industry writers who agree that there is no such thing as a comprehensive single ECM platform. Within the debate of what belongs to ECM, WCM has been clumsily tacked on as a sub-component of ECM, with very little credible basis for doing so, especially in light of the evolution of WCM offerings in recent years.

 

 

Meanwhile it has been mainly customers who have helped to propel the WCM industry into providing the sorts of capabilities that are really needed for external-facing websites that are central to strategic business objectives.  So a significant segment of the overall WCM market has evolved into Web Experience Management (WEM), for which a much larger solution ecosystem has come together.  Most Web Experience Management platforms have little to do with basic content management or basic web publishing (à la WordPress and TypePad), and even less to do with the so-called ECM platform.  Understanding how to provide a platform for excellent web marketing initiatives has very little in common with understanding how to set up internal business processes for audit and governance requirements.  Metrics for successful web marketing initiatives have no meaning for ECM initiatives but are essential for determining best approaches to engaging and converting visitors into customers.

 

 

Social media / Web 2.0 have become important partners for WEM websites, for the purposes of drawing, engaging and re-calling customers. Inbound marketing is highly dependent on quality and interesting content that is provided through a variety of social media that lead back to a particular website.

 

 

A more complete WEM solution description includes:

·Understanding of solutions for B2B, B2C web/marketing initiatives

·Sophisticated digital / interactive marketing strategies

·External-facing web presence

·Website essential to corporate business strategy

·Ecosystem of ancillary tools to complete end-to-end solution for customer objectives

·Savvy use of social media, well-integrated into website and marketing plans

·Alignment with interactive/digital agencies

 

 

 

 

WEM Solution Ecosystem and Market Sizing

Another problem that has arisen is the seeming inability of major industry analysts to properly size the WCM, or WEM, market.  There is little evidence of analysts attempting to size the WEM ecosystem market potential in any tangible manner. To be able to compare and assess WEM vendors, it is essential to define the ecosystem with its corresponding market size composite.  Better market definition will result in better vendor benchmarks, instead of assessing a jumble of disparate vendors leading to disjointed “comparisons”.  More and more single vendors are offering most, if not all, of the components of the WEM ecosystem as the end-to-end solution.  Again, this solution segment has gone well beyond “web content management”.

 

 

So a Web Experience Management solution is really a composite of several “markets”: 

·WCM solution suite, with usability both for business users and IT personnel (includes behind-the-scenes “content management”, workflow, design tools, and so on)

·Enterprise-quality portal / presentation management

·Recommendations-like technology for social search and personalization

·Web analytics / testing / content monetizing tools

·Rich media and video content management (monetizing components as appropriate)

·Social collaboration / social marketing capabilities

·Extensive integration / interoperability capabilities at several levels of the enterprise infrastructure

 

 

When we consider WEM as a composite of the overall solution ecosystem, then we could arrive at a better understanding of the overall market size by tallying up the market forecasts for all or most of the components listed above to derive the comprehensive market potential. It’s not unreasonable to look at the overall ecosystem market size, since many WEM vendors supply most of the solution components, and have active partnerships with vendors that supply the remaining components.  The overall solution ecosystem becomes compellingly relevant when taking the customer’s point-of-view for the desired end-to-end solution.

 

 

Other approaches could be from the point of view of Interactive Marketing spend, or from looking at web site spend budgeted by companies with Global web presences: we could estimate the slice that the WEM ecosystem can command from these markets. For instance, Forrester data on web site spend for 2009 shows some very substantial budget forecasts for large companies with global web presences.

 

 

 

Interactive Marketing Spend

WCM seen as online marketing (WEM): by 2012, Forrester expects the US interactive market to grow to $59 billion with a recession, or $61 billion if there is no recession. 

Forrester, “US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2007 To 2012”

 

 

 

Website spend

Of the overall budget for website spend in 2009:

·U.S. Large companies – domestic-only website average spend $2.2M  

·Global companies average $3.5M for international sites

Forrester, “2009 Web Site Spending Trends”, Feb. 2009

 

 

 

Passing Glances at WEM market recognition by Industry Analysts

Two industry analysts expressed clearer views of the transformation of WCM to WEM for external-facing websites:  Kathleen Reidy of 451 Group, and Mick MacComascaigh of Gartner.  Oddly, neither analyst has followed through on these better definitions in subsequent reports or benchmarks, and generally continue to perpetuate the misleading usage of WCM as a subset of ECM.

 

 

Kathleen Reidy, January 2009: ECM deconstructs to TCM, IG and WCM?

 “I think the “ECM” moniker may be nearing the end of its usefulness now (if it was ever apt or useful in the first place). 

“WCM has already splintered off as it became clear that web content is really not just another type of content to be managed by a central repository.  Today WCM is more about online marketing….

 

 

 

 

Gartner’s Mick MacComascaigh, Marketscope for “Web Content Management 2008”:

The WCM market commands revenue of approximately $750 million (for 2007/2008).

But with analytics, social community and interactivity, personalization, media and digital asset management (DAM), and in some cases e-forms and localization, to be counted as part of the new "marketing machines," the worldwide WCM market is poised to grow substantially as customer engagement becomes an even greater priority.

 

 

 

 

Viewing WEM (WCM) as subset of ECM Market produces questionable benchmark reports

Gartner views WCM as a subset of the ECM market. In one of its most non-focused Magic Quadrants, the Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management 2009, the over-large team of analysts involved with creating this “benchmark” chose not to recognize that WCM is now mostly Web Experience Management as it relates to real world customer needs and use.  Instead the Gartner team chose to continue an agenda for maintaining ECM as the over-arching parent for WCM, relegating WCM to a minor role, while totally ignoring the WCM morph into WEM.

 

 

 

 

In terms of market size, Gartner persists in looking at a very limited definition of WCM to perform the calculation:

The WCM market commands revenue of approximately $750 million. With an estimated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15% between 2007 and 2012, it is growing faster than the overall ECM market. As a result, worldwide expenditure on WCM accounted for over a quarter of the ECM market in 2007 (it represented just over a fifth in 2004).

 

 

 

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for 2009 comes up with the dubious positioning of Oracle as the Leader of web content management – a company that does little in support of external-facing customer-oriented business websites, digital/interactive marketing, customer-facing social capabilities, and the conversion of visitors to customers.  If WEM had been used as the proper market segment, a more realistic and useful benchmark would have been produced (of which Oracle would not have been the Leader).

 

 

Comparing the Gartner WCM benchmark to the Forrester Wave of 2009, an even greater confusion arises:  Gartner’s Oracle Leader-designate is 6^th in line to the “throne” in the Forrester benchmark.  To make things even muddier, the top 3 leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant are big traditional ECM players, and are not leaders for WCM, and especially not for WEM.

 

 

 The Forrester Wave for WCM for External Websites 2009 gets top props for coming the closest to characterizing WCM as Web Experience Management for “online marketing”. Forrester’s better understanding of the WCM / WEM market undoubtedly derives from its practices for interactive/digital marketing and customer experience.  Forrester does not try to take a heavy-weight ECM vendor who is actually weak in WCM and fob off that vendor as a Leader in WCM/WEM. 

 

 

 

In general, IDC market reports (non-commissioned) stay very high level when considering web content management.  For instance, IDC produces an annual “content management” market report with sizing, vendor shares, and market forecasts, but it is a big container of “everything content management”. However, IDC is beginning to understand the importance of interactive marketing to corporate web presences, with added coverage of social media and digital marketing, although separate from coverage of content management and rich media management.

 

 

CMS Watch (Web CMS Report 2010) is at least segmenting WCM solutions relative to potential customer needs:

·Complex Enterprise Platforms

·Upper-Range Platforms

·Mid-Range Platforms

·Mid-Range Products

·Simpler Products

But even this segmentation can present ambiguities and overlaps, relative to the capabilities and requirements under consideration in the report.

  

The whole point is to take a real world approach to what is actually going on with WEM solutions to better help customers make purchase decisions and to better understand the total revenue potential for vendors with WEM offerings via an ecosystem perspective.  Most analysts have failed, to date, to do a better job for WEM definitions, market sizing, and more importantly, to produce meaningful benchmark reports with useful “apples to apples” comparisons, instead of the current comparisons of apples, oranges, walnuts, and elephants.  It is well past due for analysts to take WEM out of the “ECM platform” and recognize WEM as a separate and very different solution set that has little to do with the constructs of ECM.

 

 

 

Final Comment

Another questionable parameter of Gartner and Forrester in their respective benchmark reports is using a vendor’s overall market presence for all of the products that it sells (not just its market presence as related to the WCM segment) as a weighting factor.  This skews results against pure play vendors and inflates the actual success of larger corporate vendors regarding the specific market covered by the benchmark report.  None of the large vendors like Oracle or Microsoft sell tons of focused WCM/WEM solutions as suggested by the market presence shown by the Gartner and Forrester WCM benchmarks.  As such, the current offerings of Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Open Text (pre-acquisition of Vignette) are not the stuff of Leader-quality solutions for WCM / WEM.

 

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished market intelligence analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights for the software industry. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side  to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services