You don’t see Belgian marketing companies going to the US every day. Looking at the participation of Belgian marketing automation vendor Selligent at major events across the Atlantic (I’m Belgian for the record), it’s clear Selligent is going for fast growth in its’ niche in the US.
The company also announced that it is ranked in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Campaign Management” at the occasion of its’ participation at Integrated Marketing Week.
Disclaimer: until over six months ago I worked a few years as a small external digital ‘help’ for the company, advocating customer-centric and integrated marketing as usual, and knew it was preparing a move to the US but since then I’m not involved anymore so this is entirely neutral.
Amid the turmoil of a consolidating marketing automation landscape, Selligent claims a place in a specific niche of mid-tier B2C marketing automation players or should I say multichannel campaign management players.
CRM + marketing automation = gold? The roots of Selligent (and the move of Salesforce.com)
Selligent is indeed all about multichannel campaign management as a niche player. When reading what CEO André Lejeune says today, it seems the US is another – step – in a global expansion.
Recently, Selligent added some new features, among others in the area of MRM (Marketing Resource Management). For my US friends: Selligent originally started as a CRM vendor. However, CEO André Lejeune, was among the first to see the increasing role of CRM in marketing, in the end what Salesforce.com’s move was all about and as you can read in this interview. This led to the acquisition of one of the first marketing automation solutions “over here”, back then called Messagent. Today, Selligent, the new name for the marketing automation suite, works with several CRM vendors.
Since the acquisition, the focus gradually started shifting towards integrated marketing with the famous single customer view in the middle. Selligent has a partnership model and in its’ home market works with quite some agencies and MSPs. With a massive presence at virtually all marketing events in the US, it’s clear that the marketing automation company invests heavily to move fast in a rapid changing market and wants to sign partners.
IBM, SAS, Teradata and Oracle lead the multichannel campaign management pack – MRM is “hot”
Back to Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Campaign Management”. The leaders are IBM, SAS, Teradata (Aprimo) and Oracle. Teradata scores well (in B2C), among others thanks to the MRM functionality it also offers. In fact, the company (formerly Aprimo) is positioned as a leader in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for MRM” for the eleventh consecutive year. The MRM market is hot and, while Selligent goes US, Gartner notes increased competition in Europe.
In the “Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Campaign Management”, SAP is ranked as a challenger and Marketo, Oracle (Eloqua), Infor, Pitney Bowes Software, ClickSquared, SDL and Selligent as niche players, all with their own niche (with the B2B market as the fastest changing now).
The visionaries are Adobe, Responsys, ExactTarget (owner of Pardot), Neolane and SiteCore. As you know, there is probably still some consolidation to come with at least one company looking around for a partners. Interesting times indeed.
In the meantime, it’s clear that email marketing ‘de facto’ remains essential in multichannel campaign management space. Not surprising of course. Remembering David Raab’s message regarding web content management, it’s interesting to note that Gartner says this is increasingly becoming important in the multichannel campaign management domain. Content marketing next?
The major challenges and frustrations of marketers when it boils down to multichannel marketing? Increasing complexity, measurement challenges and ROI issues.
However, on top of expanding, consolidating, investing and fighting over a booming market, vendors keep investing in R&D as well. Selligent, for instance, has a strong ROI and measurement component and other players focus on analysis and ROI too.
You can read David Raab’s review of Selligent here. David also wrote a whitepaper for the company in the meantime.
Belgian marketing technology goes global: Engagor
There are quite some interesting companies in Belgium at the moment, including start-ups in the social space. And some of them share Selligent’s global ambitions.
Powerful and multi-language social media software Engagor is another Belgian company pushing hard in international markets (allow me some chauvinism for once).
Since March, Engagor, also has an internal Social CRM and in April it struck a deal with data provide Trendiction to braden the range of data sources.
Funny that several years ago I introduced some US companies that just started, such as SpredFast in 2010, to the local market over here and now I’m doing the opposite. Go Belgium (in case you wonder where it is: think Brussels).
Update: Engagor has been acquired by US-based Clarabridge a few years (2015) after this post was originally published on our Social Email Marketing blog (we’re integrating all of our blogs).
