After sharing the story of 27 SaaS Products for the Marketing Department with an entrepreneur, I got to wondering if there’s going to emerge a new category of product: marketing orchestration platform. Today, marketing departments run as a federation of specialized functions managed by a central project management app like Trello or Asana. Only, the project management app is just for the projects, not for coordinating all the moving parts.
Here’s what a marketing orchestration platform might do:
- Connect via APIs to the major applications used by marketing
- Automatically show all campaigns/programs/processes running
- Collect all the relevant metrics and data for processing and visualization
- Apply machine learning to the data and make recommendations
- Facilitate coordination and timing of on-going programs
- Profit!
Then again, it might be too complicated and cumbersome and make all that happen elegantly. If someone can pull it off, it feels like a gap in the market. I’m curious to see if a standalone product emerges or if the marketing automation vendors get better at becoming a platform that other apps integrate with (the same way Salesforce.com has done) and marketing automation becomes the marketing orchestration hub.
What else? What are some more thoughts on a marketing orchestration platform?
David Cummings on Startups 
Interesting. HubSpot recently released a new feature that moves it close to this idea – https://www.hubspot.com/projects. And https://projects.growthhackers.com/ is probably the closest to it as far as standalone products go. Definitely a space to watch.
Hey, David. Peter Ingram here. You and I met at Atlanta Tech Village not long ago through our mutual friend and peer, Pete Davis of Greenprint.
I agree with you about the concept of a marketing orchestration platform. It’s a needed middleware product. I also agree that the solution would be complicated, since maintaining integration with each of them is an ongoing challenge. But if Mashery can do this with APIs, someone can do it in this space.
As it happens, we’re working on a virtually identical play for retail tech systems. I’d love to chat with you to get your input on the Socket concept, as well as to bat around ideas related to Marketing Orchestration Platforms.
Might you be willing to visit the first or second week of January?
Thanks, and I hope you and your family have a wonderful Holiday season.
Cheers.