Marketing tools go cloudy

It is being said, increasingly, that the key sales target for many cloud-delivered solutions is now the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) rather than the Chief Information Officer (CIO). More and more business services and applications these days revolve around building and maintaining good customer experiences of working with a company, so this shift does make sense.

It also leads to the appearance of new tools that make the core work of a marketing team that much easier. And cloud delivery is becoming a central part of what is offered, not least because it makes collaboration with other cloud-delivered business systems such as Demandbase, NetSuite and Salesforce so much easier.

One of the early contenders in this sector is San Francisco-based Bislr (pronounced Bis-ler), which claims to be the first to offer cloud-based marketing automation tools. Branded as an intelligent marketing operating system, the Bislr tools were originally launched back in February this year. They are aimed at allowing marketing staff to create multi-channel marketing campaigns in days instead of months.

Now the company has added new features and functionality, including Autopilot, which is a drag and drop app that lets anyone on the marketing team create campaigns with no technical skills required. Other enhancements include Landing Page, GoToWebinar, and Persona Targeting.

According to the company, more than half of large organisations in the USA have already deployed or will deploy marketing automation solutions this year. Despite that, it suggests there is widespread frustration in the experience, with users forced to work with solutions that are overly complicated, time-consuming, require dedicated administrators or expensive consultants and offer minimal personalisation.

“We want to do for marketing automation what Steve Jobs and Apple did for mobile – take an experience that sucks and remake it from the ground up,” said Michael Sharkey, CEO and co-founder of Bislr.

“Most of the tools out there are too difficult to use. As a result, many customers tell us that they are using these products to do little more than email. By leveraging an entirely new class of technologies that enable in-browser, drag and drop authoring – we make it easy for marketers to create campaigns that can truly drive an experience across multiple touch-points.”

The key enhancement to the Marketing Operating System is Autopilot. This is designed for in-browser drag and drop creation of multi-channel campaigns, including web, mobile, social and offline. The company claims it is the first to provide an easy way for non-technical marketing professionals to author complex lead-nurturing campaigns.

Campaign flows can be connected to any web application that utilises either web hooks or a REST API. For example, it is possible to set up a workflow that sends an email with more advanced user advice, after a prospect has used a freemium SaaS product the first three times. This can help drive deeper usage of the product and ultimately conversion to paying status.

Using the new Bislr Landing Page, it is possible to create branded landing pages, with high conversion value, without requiring support from IT or consultants. Drag and drop techniques make it easier to create landing pages ready for the new demands of mobile and social, whereas most tools require coding in JavaScript for something as simple as changing colours or the shape of a button.

Bislr Anywhere allows customers to apply Bislr and its marketing automation functionality within the context of any content management system. For users of the Chrome browser, dragging and dropping the Bislr landing page application into the browser will give immediate access to the customer intelligence and campaign authoring tools Bislr provides.

Bislr utilises “smart lists” within the product to automatically segment prospects by job title or vertical market. Now, additional smart lists can be set up to target them by persona. Dynamic content delivery is enabled as part of the landing page application, so that marketers can deliver different content to different personas in an automated manner.

Being cloud-based, the tools can be easily connected to other cloud services such as Demandbase, Eloqua, NetSuite and Salesforce to support customers with a pre-existing investment in these systems. This ties the creative side of marketing more closely to other marketing and sales oriented functions such as account-based personalisation, lead distribution and CRM.