You Ask, I Answer: Marketing Automation Solutions for SMBs?

In today's episode, Dan asks, what are your suggestions for an inexpensive marketing automation platform that integrates with Salesforce and either scales well or can easily be migrated to a more powerful platform down the road? This is a good question. There are, no surprise, hundreds, if not thousands of marketing automation platforms. If you refer to Scott Brinker's uh infamous uh Martech Lumiscape or the Martech landscape, there's 8,000 solutions on there and at least a couple hundred marketing automation. So there's no shortage of choices out there.

The question is, what do you have for resources? And resources with marketing automation comes in two forms. One, technical knowledge, two, money. Most people are pretty familiar with money, right? So my guideline on that is it should be you should spend on marketing automation approximately 25% of your data and analytics budget.

Remembering that um from the most recent CMO survey, most marketing departments are spending somewhere between seven and eleven percent of their overall marketing budget on data and analytics. They should be spending a lot more, but can't fix that, right? So let's be generous and call it say data and analytics should be 15% of your marketing budget, right? That's that is optimistic. So that you have money left over to help you with other things you don't have, specifically knowledge.

When Katie and I started Trust Insights uh two years ago now, almost. Wow, that went fast. Um, we chose a platform called MODIC. Modic is an open source marketing automation platform. They have a cloud hosted version that looks and and and works very similarly to uh you know what what all the other major cloud marketing automation providers have, but the pricing on that is comparable.

We chose the self-hosted version because in the early days of the company we were literally funding everything out of our own pockets. We were literally paying for stuff out of our personal funds to get the company going. That's startup life. So we chose Modic because it was the least expensive solution for which we still had the technical knowledge in order to deploy it. Self-hosted Mautic means you have to start uh a server somewhere, virtual server, you know, someplace on a VPS or whatever.

Um you have to install uh the software yourself, you have to configure the server yourself, and you have to firewall it and do all the things that you're supposed to do in order to make sure that the server's working correctly. That is a pretty heavy lift for a lot of companies. But the trade-off is that our total costs for marketing automation are somewhere around eight dollars a month, right? In the beginning days of the company, that is manageable, that is affordable when you have no customers at all. That that is that is great news.

Um now, that system does integrate with Salesforce. No better or worse, I would say, than any other uh platforms, but it is super easy to migrate because you have the server, right? So as long as you have some idea of what you're doing when it comes with to uh to databases, you can literally work directly in the database. You don't need to go through the software, the interface and all that stuff. You you are as close to bare metal as possible, and that is a wonderful thing when you're talking about migration.

Because when you look at every other platform out there, like HubSpot, Pardon, Marketo, Eloquire, you name it, they don't let you get direct access to the server ever. A, it's a security risk. Uh, and B, there is some incentive to make it more difficult to migrate to move on. When you run your own systems and servers, you have the total control over the environment for good or ill. Now that the the ill side means you have to maintain that environment yourself, and you'd better have some technical knowledge, or your server will end up getting hacked sooner rather than later.

And that's not a good thing. So, my recommendation if you are literally like rummaging through the couch cushions uh looking for spare change to run your business, your marketing department, things like that. Um, my recommendation would be Mautic, right? It is the best overall choice for super affordable uh startup environments to run marketing automation. Now, depending on uh scales and issue with Modic in the sense that when you provision a virtual server, you get certain limits like disk space and things like that, and you would better be working with a hosting company that allows you to scale up your instance.

Um, I've had to do this on my own personal uh Modic server. Um, I have my my email list is now like close to f a little more than actually it's yeah, it's more than 40,000 subscribers. Guess what? That generates a tremendous amount of data, which means it takes more disk space to store more records. The database has to be optimized more often.

And the bills will start to increase as scale goes up. That's okay. You could but you need to have you working with a hosting company that allows you to scale up your server, otherwise you're you're gonna get be in a really bad situation. In terms of if you don't have the technical skill, um, and you do have the money. My second choice really, I mean, it w it would be it has to be HubSpot.

HubSpot's software is expensive for a small business. 800 bucks a month for the pro version, but it is seamless. It is uh well engineered, it works, um, it offers all the usual compliance stuff, everything you want it you need and want for compliance. So if you've got the cash, go with HubSpot. Um there are other providers, you know, Clavio and Active Campaign and Drip and all these other providers.

I have not used them, I can't speak to them, uh, whether they're they're good or bad. Um most of the review sites put those uh companies in reasonably good standing with each other. It's actually funny, Mautic is in in pretty poor standing because again, it's extremely technical to make it work well. We you we're making the trade off. We have the knowledge, we don't have we didn't have the cash at the time.

Um if you don't have the knowledge or the cash, you had better figure out which one to go after first. I would strongly suggest you get the knowledge because the knowledge lets you build the infrastructure you need to then generate the cash. If you are a an entrepreneur and you don't have the knowledge, either learn it before you launch your company, or partner with somebody who does have the knowledge who can fill that gap because it's it's extremely important that you have that. That may change. And if you're a marketing automation vendor and you want me to review your software, we're happy to chat about that.

We'll at least test it out and see uh see what's under the hood, as long as you're okay with feedback that you might not like. So, further comments in the comments box below. Uh please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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