The News
On May 10, 2022, Zoho released Zoho Marketing Plus, its suite of marketing solutions.
You can read the complete press release here.
The suite combines multiple Zoho applications including Campaigns, Social, Webinar, Analytics, Marketing Automation, Workdrive, PageSense, Survey, and Backstage. It shall provide digital marketers with a unified platform of integrated capabilities that help them achieve their objectives more easily through a combination of simplification, integration and embedded collaboration capabilities.
Zoho Marketing Plus brings together marketing activities throughout the whole campaign life cycle from ideation through creation, execution to measurement. This allows to manage campaigns and provides the whole marketing organization with a single shared view of information.
“Consumers and digital marketing continue to evolve at warp-speed, and marketers are struggling to keep up. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to properly manage multiple campaigns, channels, customer profiles, data, and ROI,” said Mani Vembu, Chief Operating Officer at Zoho. “The complexity of data and personalization at-scale only raises pressure on marketers and CMOs to deliver effective campaigns and revenue. By eliminating redundancies and confusion arising from multiple siloed solutions, Zoho Marketing Plus maximizes productivity and teamwork, allowing marketers to stay nimble and collaborative amid evolving customer needs. When marketers aren’t bogged down by operations, they can deliver creative campaigns that promote meaningful relationships between the brand and customers.“
With Zoho Marketing Plus, Zoho addresses mid-market companies with around 250 to 1,000 employees and a structured marketing organization with a progressively thinking leadership.
Early customers show themselves impressed with the breadth of the functionality as well as the support for the end-to-end support that is offered by the platform. Says Saru Saadeh, CEO of Iron Roots Inc. “Everything at Iron Roots starts with the data. But there’s a huge hole in the market, where channel solutions are siloed. Zoho marketing platform gives us a comprehensive view of our omnichannel marketing campaigns, allowing touchpoint cadence and the ability to visualize our entire strategy in one place. From this unified platform, we can install heat-maps, see the traffic to our landing and product pages, use PageSense to identify the average fold, engagement, and then extract incredibly valuable data from on-page experiences, which then fuels our subsequent marketing activities. In a nutshell, Zoho’s new marketing platform solves so many problems that are neglected by most marketing operations and marketing tools.“
The Bigger Picture
The marketing landscape is as cluttered as never before with nearly ten thousand solutions that address different aspects of marketers’ daily challenges. At the same time, there is a growing appetite for platforms or at least integrated solutions that do not only solve a particular challenge created by a marketer’s daily work but a wider range of issues. This also in combination with other parts of the enterprise.
For marketers it is of crucial importance to be able to work with a single, consistent set of (customer) master data to be able to meaningfully engage customers with relevant conversations – or at least content.
An additional challenge that not only marketing departments face, are processes that go across different, unconnected systems and, caused by this, an inability to efficiently plan, set up and follow through campaigns.
A third big challenge for marketing teams is attribution, in a more and more data/number driven world. What is the return of a particular campaign, or a segment of a campaign?
Lastly, IT departments are getting more and more overwhelmed with the need to integrate and maintain an ever-increasing set of applications and systems. Even in times of SaaS and cloud solutions, this causes a workload and expenses that then are missing for innovation. The IT department stays too busy just “keeping the lights on”. It is not uncommon that around 80 percent of an IT budget is used for maintenance. And this is a quite unhealthy quota.
My PoV and Analysis
With Zoho Marketing Plus, Zoho sets a visible mark in the highly contested market of marketing solutions. The Martechmap meanwhile counts nearly ten thousand solutions.
Zoho Marketing Plus sits firmly on the ground of supporting end-to-end processes over the functional depth that some specialists can offer for their niche. Still, the solution offers sufficient depth and breadth that it can deliver value fast. It therefore addresses a good number of the challenges mentioned above.
Zoho addresses mid-market companies with around 250 to 1,000 employees and a structured marketing organization with a progressively thinking leadership. This is also fitting the company’s sweet spot but does not mean that smaller or larger organizations are out of scope.
Zoho Marketing Plus is a young solution that targets at distinguishing itself in two ways. Firstly, it supports the complete marketing process, starting with the budgeting. Secondly, it makes it as simple as possible for the different stakeholders and roles to accomplish their objectives. Being based upon and integrating existing Zoho products that mainly complement each other, Zoho Marketing Plus offers quite strong collaboration, campaign management and marketing automation functionality, including good analytics capabilities. This is partly at the expense of the UI not being fully harmonized. Still, the offered user interface is slick and easy to handle.
With all the integrations offered and an attractive price point, Zoho Marketing Plus is a solution to look at if the own company looks for an end-to-end digital marketing solution that not only integrates well into Zoho, but also other products.
If you are interested in more, you can download and read my complete report about Zoho Marketing Plus from this page.