Nothing is more inspiring, challenging, and rewarding than having lunch with smart friends like Jake and Eric. Listening to Jake riff marketing and Eric discussing "tech stacks" was like watching Mozart compose music. I'm having lunch with both sides of a single digital marketing brain - Eric, the analytical coder, left brain, and Jake, the creative visualizer, right brain - I remember thinking. These days with marketing technology stacks and tech geeks like Eric knowing a lot about marketing, such characteristics are more subtle and less definitive than they once were.
Jake knows and has used every advanced marketing tool out there. Since digital marketing is another way of saying there are always more marketing tasks than your team can manage, marketing automation software to help streamline marketing tasks, automate the repetitive BS that drives marketers like me crazy and improve your marketing teams’ efficiency is target rich.
“Aspirational” is how Jake answered if his new company 10Cubed, would compete with Marketo and Pardot. I’ve used Marketo and Pardot and have the learning curve bruises to prove it. Marketing automation isn’t easy, intuitive, or kind. Having sat up nights when I was a M&M/Mars sales rep to learn Lotus 1-2-3 I'm familiar with the efficiency requires a steep learning curve or a painful period of inefficiency before a tool can relieve the pressure of managing a sales territory a lifetime ago or your lead generation digital marketing today. Things get messy, and there's a steep learning curve before "efficiency" enters the room.
I love Jake's idea - easier to use, less expensive marketing automation thanks to the wonders of artificial intelligence, the use of scaled systems such as Google and OpenAI's ChatGPT, and brilliant coders like Eric. Everyone at lunch proved the need - Eric is a coder who has learned marketing. Like Jake, I am consumer products goods (CPG) trained marketer who learned about technology, functionality, and "tech stacks" because they are required to finish any creative thought these days. The customer experience we want to create and the marketing campaigns we dream of integrate Jake's visual creativity right brain with Eric's methodical, analytical left brain.
Increased marketing efficiency feels like a fool's errand since efficiently making more lousy ideas is goofy and stupid. Marketing creativity gets lost in the CRM, signal, and noise customer data defining customer journeys and experiences we marketers love to think about and discuss.
That's why I love Jake's easier-to-use Marketo positioning or to pull a quote from his website, an "all-in-one digital marketing platform engineered for growth." Marketing automation is a $4.5B market. It should be a $20B or $30B market because only enterprise customers can afford marketing automation tools such as SalesForce's Pardot and Adobe's Marketo. Small to medium-sized businesses are bailing their leaking digital marketing boats as fast as possible, but a different kind of marketing automation needs to be on their radar.
Every Food Truck, church, lawyer, plumber, and small business is going digital, which is good and bad news. The digital-first movement, the growing realization by every company on the planet that their business depends on their website, is excellent news for software and web development companies such as WTE Solutions and bad news for most small to medium-sized businesses.
I built one of the first B2B2C websites in 1999 (FoundObjects.com is gone now, sadly, but I'll share in a tab), and it made money because when you are one in a thousand making money is easy. Siteefy puts the number of active websites today north of 200,000,000, and I've seen higher estimates. Let's stay aware of the marketing tasks math, but fully grasp that the need to stand out in a crowded, noisy world has never been more critical.
As more SMBs become digital-first businesses, a path everyone is traveling, and learning about customer relationship management (CRM), content management systems (CMS), social media, email marketing, and hundreds of other "marketing tasks" necessary to keep a roof over your head hidden inside the digital gold rush, you'll realize something - in a gold rush the best way to make money is to sell picks, shovels, and pans.
10Cubed wants to sell easy-to-use picks, shoves, and pans so SMBs don’t have to become marketing automation experts avoiding the long learning curves associated with marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot. Bravo - great idea and one Eric and I pledged our help to achieve.
"We document mission and values, what we call "onliness" or why people love you, and what's your value proposition, and then you have the other side of the brand brief, which is about audience and voice. You look at your ideal customer profile (ICP). We create empathy maps because customers buy with emotions and justify with logic and that leads to creating a message map," Jake explained.
Every plumber, food truck, church, and lawyer reading this post knows they must create digital marketing. Still, they may need help understanding Jake's quote. Jake provides a peek behind the digital marketing masterclass curtain. He is building intellectual property (IP) as fast as possible, but he consults with a customer and then uses 10Cubed to create a strategy and marketing plan for them at least that is the way his busines is going right now.
That's okay because "easier Marketo" is a lofty goal to introduce marketing automation to the masses. Selling digital marketing consulting services as you build the engine is a great way to fund and learn simultaneously. I adopted a similar strategy with my marketing automation Startup Foundry-supported startup, and selling consulting services can be a great way to bootstrap a startup. Kudos to Jake! Give 10Cubed.co a look and share your thoughts on marketing automation. martin (at) wte.net Martin Wescott Smith (on LinkedIn) 919.360.1224