Zoho launches their new Zoho Marketing Plus platform.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Let’s move to the next topic, very different here. Zoho’s Marketing Plus.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, we come around to Zoho every now and again, Pat. I mean really interesting company, builds really on its own infrastructure. The Zoho One platform is basically a single platform to be able to run your entire business, ERP, CRM, marketing, collaboration, optimization, all your apps, they’ve got platform. Heck, the company even does R&D in the semiconductor space, although most people would not realize that, very unique and interesting.
But the middle of the market, Pat, is sort of one of these markets that tends to be sometimes forgotten. Definitely have some players in there, like NetSuite, that are focused on that. But overall, Pat, you kind of have these really small, low end CRM systems that are designed for mini-companies, small companies with a handful of employees, and then you’ve got mega enterprise CRM solutions. And so this mid-market has been really well addressed by Zoho. This is a company that’s built a really large business, they’re private, so they do disclose some data about their size, but you don’t have the exact sizing, but they’ve built this really great Zoho One operating system for business.
And one of the areas that companies tend to struggle is in their marketing stack, there are so many solutions. If you’ve ever seen some of those graphics that are shared about the MarTech stack and all the different solutions that are available for everything from search engine optimization to ad targeting, to social media, to, of course, your marketing, your attribution, your content funnels, you can just absolutely get lost.
So what is Zoho trying to do? Well, they’re trying to help companies deal with brand, product, demand and operations related to marketing. And so what does the Zoho platform really bring? Well, it’s a creation environment, it’s a collaboration environment, and it’s a single suite that allows companies to basically do their marketing within a single platform, and it’s supposed to be designed, and again, I’ve only seen a demo, but I liked it, to make it easier to organize access and use your data for marketing.
It does your analytics, so it does the quantitative, it does performance, it gives heat mapping, scroll mapping. It can give recordings of data and sales interactions, and then all this data can then be tied together to create social posts, email campaigns, ad campaign, surveys, and even events. It does AB testing, so it’s a really pretty complete stack of marketing that companies can use.
It also has some document management, like a repository for being able to create things. So think about, if you’re a small or mid-size company and you want to put your brand standard, you want to put your marketing collateral, this might be somewhere where you would use an enterprise content application, Pat, like a box, or Dropbox, or Google apps or Microsoft OneDrive. Well, if you’re in Zoho, there’s a place here to put that as well.
And then of course, from a collaboration standpoint, the Zoho platform ties together across functionally with sales. And so I think that’s really important because once you do the marketing, how do you then get it through the funnel, create attribution, give dashboards to sales people to say, what has all this marketing created? So I like it, Pat, from a standpoint of planning, content management, experience design, it’s created for this market that Zoho has defined, it has successfully gone after, and it takes a lot of the complexity out of handling marketing in this big stack in saying, “Hey, if you’re a company, we can handle the vast majority of your need. We create the ecosystem, the collaboration in your cross function environments, the tools for development, the attribution and analytics.” So, like it, like I said, early days, want to see more in action, but very interesting launch kind of a comprehensive CDP style. It’s not, quote unquote, a CDP, but it’s kind of that all customer data platform for the Zoho users.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, this is classic Zoho, right? Which is, hey, let’s create some killer applications that interoperate at certain levels, cross each other horizontally and vertically, by the way. And now, they’re taking campaigns, social, webinar, analytics, marketing automation, work drive, page sense, survey, backstage and pulling all these together for a much more cohesive type of program. And, Daniel, I actually did marketing for 20 years, and I wish I had a tool like this. They just didn’t exist.
But if you’re looking to have accountability inside the organization, if you want to increase your collaboration, I really think you should give this a shot. Zoho has been incredibly successful in small and medium businesses, that’s what they’re known for. But, I believe that there is an opportunity, a big opportunity, for the company to expand, and it is expanding, into larger companies.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
