Tomorrow I’m honored to speak at Drupalcamp Atlanta about the Pardot story. Drupal, best known as an open source content management system, is now used as a full blown platform for building dynamic websites. Before I co-founded Pardot, I founded Hannon Hill, a content management company and spent many years in the industry. So, then, where does the Pardot story and marketing automation fit in with content management?
Here are a few thoughts on the intersection of content management and marketing automation:
- More and more sites, especially sites that are brochureware, incorporate marketing functions like anonymous visitor tracking, contact us forms, trackable site search, and more
- As sites collect additional data on visitors through custom or turn key modules (e.g. social sign-on systems), more information is available to do targeted lead nurturing
- For a non-transactional site, it’s difficult to prove return on investment, but by adding marketing automation, it’s easy to show value
In the near future, the majority of sites will have some form of marketing automation and it’ll be commonplace for content management systems and marketing automation systems to have a much tighter integration.
What else? What are some other thoughts on the intersection of content management and marketing automation?
David Cummings on Startups 
David, I couldn’t agree more. I run a Marketing Automation services business for small companies and we are seeing WordPress plugins and native support in the SMB MA tools (Infusionsoft, Office Autopilot, etc.) grow significantly.
I agree. Marketing Automation is an extremely big player for small companies and has helped my families company surge off the ground!