MarketingPilot: what it means for the new marketer and your business
Another quick from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference – WPC 2013 sessions. This is an overview and a few screenshots of a MarketingPilot session presented by:
- Jamie Fiorda, Director, Worldwide Product Marketing
- Jeff Marcoux. Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Dynamics CRM
The entire video link is below, if you want to watch. It’s about an hour so I am giving you the Cliff’s notes version.
As a recap, if you are not aware, Microsoft purchased a marketing automation and marketing resource management application called MarketingPilot in October 2012. MarketingPilot delivers powerful, integrated marketing management solutions that can help you better understand your customers, get exceptional insight and control over budgets and resources, and create automated, measurable multi-channel campaigns that deliver real results to the top line.
Microsoft has been busy revamping the user interface and user experience. It will match the user experience we will see in the new Dynamics CRM 2013 release (formerly called Orion). Screenshot below.
In addition, they are focused on adding deeper functionality both within MarketingPilot as well as the integration with Dynamics CRM.
The positioning of MarketingPilot will focus on two areas. The needs of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and the needs of the functional marketing team.
The CMO?s top concerns – reducing costs, decreasing time to market, managing budgets better, and measuring performance of their marketing investments.
The functional marketing team?s needs are more tactical and focus on assigning and completing tasks related to campaigns, materials, resources, events and digital campaigns. Tracking and reporting on these activities are also very important.
The stated advantage for Microsoft and MarketingPilot is the connected database and history of contacts, accounts, opportunities and customer care. It?s delivering on the promise of a single repository for marketing, sales and customer service.
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Prior to the demo the B2B marketing, maturity model was presented. I liked this slide and can easily where we are at, as well as many of our clients and prospects. It?s a pretty good summary of where organization fits in their marketing maturity (or strategic use of marketing). Where do you see your organization?
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So, on to the demo and what we were shown. Consistent with Dynamics CRM, the starting point for most users is a dashboard view. Like CRM, it is configurable by role and by user.
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Navigating will also be the same between CRM and MarketingPilot In addition the concept of a List View and Detail View are also used, similar between the two, but not exactly the same UI. Here is a Campaign List View.
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And selecting one of the records, we see the Campaign Detail View.
Approvals and routing are usually a big deal when it comes to marketing. Often there are lots of people that have input for the look and feel, the positioning, the types of material; etc. Notice the Route for Approval button highlighted below.
Job or Task tracking
In the demo, a search for a particular white paper was performed. Which takes us to another useful capability, content management, content markup, development (landing pages, web pages, etc.), and even content tracking (how often has the material been opened, downloaded, clicked, etc.).
Moving, a nice add is global search. Notice it at the top of the screen?I really hope we see this in CRM as well!
Content Management
Content Markup
Content Tracking
?Another important area to most marketing teams are the ability to conduct email campaigns. There has been light details on these capabilities to date. The demo was brief and did not provide much more details, however, they did indeed demonstrate there are HTML email managing and tracking capabilities.
HTML Email Performance Tracking
HTML email and template editing.
In today?s business world, social media campaigns are a very important requirement for marketing teams. As we saw with the email capabilities, we will see social media campaign management and tracking.
Twitter posting made from MarketingPilot.
That covers the highlights from the demo and recording. The session ended with some details on what?s coming in the office release, which has been delayed. The original information we were getting from Microsoft is MarketingPilot would be included in the Orion release. The information below now confirms it will not be in Orion, and rather, will be in a Q1 2014 release, currently code named ?Mira?. One of the nice adds will be visual nurture and workflow capabilities.
And for our international clients and friends, below are the 17 markets and 10 languages that will be included with the Mira launch.
A couple of questions that still remain open are current availability with Dynamics CRM integration and pricing. On current availability, we heard from Microsoft that MarketingPilot 15 was released, and it stated the integration is available; ?MarketingPilot 15 and the MarketingPilot Connector for Microsoft Dynamics CRM is expected to be available in the month of March, and will be offered to customers in the United States and to existing MarketingPilot Online customers worldwide.?
Well, there are a few caveats and back-pedaling on that, namely (from the configuration guide):
- MarketingPilot and the Connector are initially provided to a limited audience of customers and partners (referenced as Customer in this document).
- The customer must have subscribed to Microsoft Azure which can be requested as a free trial or paid subscription. (MH: I really hope they make this step completely automated like so many of the partner add-ons do ? sorry, but setting this stuff up on your own is for techies only).
- In this subscription the customer will need to create a Service Bus of an available namespace of his choice and two queues (MH: See what I mean…)
For all intents and purposes, this is really not available yet. In fact, a question in the Q&A was asked and Jamie Fiorda responded that he doesn’t recommend anyone going and selling this just yet.
Regarding pricing, the statement is a flat ?no pricing is available at this time?.
All in all some exciting things to look forward to. It?s still a bit pre-mature to go out and start using MarketingPilot but it looks like good progress. Unfortunately, a little slower than our initial expectation, but progressing none the less.
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