Zoho Consolidates Marketing Functions

The CRM vendor community seems to be trying to welcome us back to normalcy by priming the selling pump with new marketing tools. It makes sense. Marketing is the beginning of the pipeline that brings in revenue, so why not?

One vendor with plenty to say is Zoho.  The company just announced Zoho Marketing Plus — a suite of tools and integrations for the whole marketing team in companies with 25-to-1,000-member marketing organizations.

That’s like saying everybody — and at only $25 per seat/month, it won’t break the bank. The strategy is to integrate a lot of third-party apps and replace one-off tools which will enable some to reduce their single use marketing subscriptions and save money.

Independent research I’ve been conducting shows that the users themselves are drowning in too many single-use apps, so the Zoho approach might have legs for that alone.

Marketing is a tough task with no end and taking it on with advanced capabilities is a heavy lift. It’s a tough job because it requires constant data management, and it is endless because the more you do the more data there is to manage. There’s customer data and there’s marketing generated data — or more precisely content. There’s also management to contemplate.

Shared View of Data

Zoho Marketing Plus goes after both classes of data. However, it is more focused on what’s internal to the business because that’s what needs management most.

Conceptually, it’s a platform for the entire marketing organization that supports collaboration across marketing activities from first idea, through creation, execution, and management — ending with measurement.

It gives all of marketing’s stakeholders a shared view of marketing information to form a basis for collaboration, and it integrates with other CRM tools like Microsoft, HubSpot and Salesforce, as well as Zoho CRM.

The platform cuts down on redundancies and exposes marketers to deeper understanding of customers and marketing processes. At the same time it reduces the management overhead of collaborating through multiple tools.

Integrations help Zoho Marketing Plus to shine by giving it a central role in many businesses’ marketing deployments.

For instance, CRM integration gives users feedback on revenue generation from marketing spend. Data integration with Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, YouTube, and Survey Monkey helps marketers to target their prospects. To support finance it integrates with QuickBooks, Xero, and Stripe; WooCommerce and Shopify take care of commerce and Eventbrite brings in marketing events.

The result is a single view of the business so that teams can collaborate across campaigns regardless of the chosen channels while automated AI-powered data analysis helps marketers to understand the results of their efforts.

Zoho Marketing Plus Dashboard (Credit: Zoho)

A long time ago we believed that subscription apps had leveled the playing field between large and small companies and to a degree it did. Subscriptions enabled any company that could pony up the monthly per-seat price to use the same tools as the big guys. That was true as far as it went but overlooked the effort implied.

We’ve now reached a point where there is so much good, cheap product that larger companies again have a relative advantage simply because they can afford to hire the souls needed to man all the battle stations.

Democratizing Information

Zoho Marketing Plus is an attempt to bring things back into focus so that smaller companies can do the same things in marketing that larger companies do with more labor. You might call this the second democratization of information.

My research shows that the pandemic exposed many shortcomings in marketing and sales that had accumulated over the years. Too many single use apps that don’t communicate well is one big issue.

A bigger problem with those single use apps is that they are largely systems of record, which means it’s up to the user to make sense of the data. But the proliferation of so many systems of record makes this nearly impossible for the average user. That’s why Zoho’s announcement resonates.

With good integration between the parts of marketing and feedback from the real world that can be further analyzed, users have a good chance of refilling their pipelines and getting back to revenue generation in a world reconfigured for working from anywhere.