Small businesses are no strangers to the challenge of quality versus quantity, as it’s almost always difficult to maintain levels of excellence with scale. Zoho is familiar with that problem.
“There’s always a constant battle between doing more things and doing everything well,” says Prashanth VK, Zoho head of market strategy and CX thought leadership. “It’s like the classic tale of quality versus quantity. There’s certainly no universal right answer.”
With the May 10 launch of its new Marketing Plus platform, however, Zoho hopes to provide that and other needed marketing solutions for small businesses. The new Zoho Marketing Plus platform enables collaboration and combines marketing efforts across various aspects of a campaign.
“Consumers and digital marketing continue to evolve at warp-speed, and marketers are struggling to keep up. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to properly manage multiple campaigns, channels, customer profiles, data, and ROI,” Zoho Chief Operating Officer Mani Vembu says in a press release.
“The complexity of data and personalization at scale only raises pressure on marketers and CMOs to deliver effective campaigns and revenue,” Vembu adds. “By eliminating redundancies and confusion arising from multiple siloed solutions, Zoho Marketing Plus maximizes productivity and teamwork, allowing marketers to stay nimble and collaborative amid evolving customer needs. When marketers aren’t bogged down by operations, they can deliver creative campaigns that promote meaningful relationships between the brand and customers.”
What is Zoho Marketing Plus?
Zoho Marketing Plus is a unified platform that empowers marketing teams to build continuous and consistent customer experiences and deliver more personalized customer journeys.
Marketing platforms are tools that link marketers with their consumers while they build awareness, engagement and community. After all, marketing is about more than presenting a single message on a single channel. But integrated and unified marketing platforms often don’t cater to small businesses. With Zoho’s Marketing Plus platform, small businesses can drive engagement at every customer touchpoint while they confidently manage their unique marketing processes.
With Zoho Marketing Plus, companies of any size can:
- Keep teams aligned by granting the right access to the right marketer, enabling seamless collaboration.
- Optimize multichannel marketing efforts with support for email, SMS, webinars, events, surveys, social media and presentations.
- Manage campaigns more effectively by creating activities, assigning task ownership, tracking progress and collaborating in real-time.
- Store and share marketing collateral with centralized file management. Marketing collateral such as presentations, documents, pricing sheets, whitepapers and PDFs can be stored in one place.
- Measure marketing success with powerful insights. By combining data from across marketing operations, teams can see at a glance what channels, campaigns and messaging have the best impact.
- Automate marketing operations by building customer multi-channel marketing journeys that engage each lead and customer.
- Access everything in one place. Instead of switching between products, tabs, accounts and user experience, Marketing Plus users can access all their marketing efforts on a single screen.
Zoho Marketing Plus Offers Solutions
Zoho’s new Marketing Plus platform was designed to help small businesses make the most out of their marketing efforts by overcoming four primary challenges:
1. Small businesses struggle to do more well.
Quality or quantity? It’s a decision too many small businesses have to make. How do you scale your marketing efforts while retaining the same standards of excellence? The Zoho Marketing Plus platform makes it possible to find a middle ground by tracking every project from start to finish, managing every activity on every channel in a single location and collaborating to create and manage assets on the same platform.
2. Small marketing teams can struggle to personalize customer engagement.
Personalized engagement is a goal of most any marketing team, but it’s not one that’s easy to achieve. How do you deliver valuable content to customers systematically based on a strong understanding of what they need? Three components are necessary: valuable content, deep context and a system to deliver the content. The Zoho Marketing Plus platform offers the capability to segment the customer base according to a variety of criteria. Then marketers can analyze each segment independently and determine the best plan of action.
3. Small businesses typically have less access to data analysis and powerful insights.
Data is the clay that allows marketers to fulfill monumental experiences, yet most small business marketers don’t have access to the data that they need. If they do, they might need to manually scavenge for it or receive it once it’s too late to be useful. Zoho Marketing Plus employs tools like heat maps, score maps and session recordings to show marketers how users engage with their content. Combining quantitative data with qualitative information on user behavior will help marketers improve their content and create the right kind of engagement with their target audience.
4. Small businesses have more difficulty enabling outstanding customer experiences.
When a small business reaches a specific level of growth momentum, inferior customer experiences become more apparent. Unfortunately, most small organizations have a limited number of sales and service employees. Thanks to Zoho’s Marketing Plus platform, the ability to manage those customer-facing functions while monitoring them goes a long way toward improving the overall customer experience.
Zoho Customer Success Stories
Customers who previewed the software have taken notice.
“Our previous marketing solution required time-consuming and costly customization and engineering support just to provide experiences for our customers that didn’t scale or produce meaningful insights,” Sundeep MV, Chief Marketing Officer for Techademy, says in a press release. “We embraced Zoho Marketing Plus, integrated Zoho CRM, and now we have a full-stack, unified sales and marketing solution wherein every relevant stakeholder in the organization is armed with the data and tools to increase engagement and drive customer experience. Our evangelism, marketing, pre-sales, and sales teams collaborate within a single dashboard on the platform, which houses all of the content and data we use to derive actionable insights and grow the business.”
Austin-based Iron Roots’ CEO Saru Saadeh has been using components of Marketing Plus for some time. He enjoys accessing all the tools in one unified platform.
“What I really enjoy about Marketing Plus is that it kind of brings it all together,” Saadeh explains. “So, prior to the rollout of marketing plus we would still use a lot of the tools within the suite but also ones to complement. The main difference for us is that it has allowed us to bring the planning component into the rollout of different marketing strategies.”
Saadeh further described his company’s experience with Marketing Plus.
“What’s nice is that it gives you kind of an omnichannel view, allowing you to build what we specialize in, which is kind of cross channel touch points strategies that span multiple formats and styles,” he says. “And I think what’s not talked about enough is how powerful each of the Zoho applications are as standalone tools. Bringing everything into one face has been nice. It allows a nice feedback loop of planning, deploying, tracking, and allowing that data to fuel additional ideas and marketing tactics. And so I think it’s certainly filled with applications that are powerful standalones and really allowing us to harness the power of each one in a unified way with Marketing Plus.”
Saadeh even noted Zoho Marketing Plus’ affordable price, which he says helps even the playing field between small businesses and large companies. At $25 for the first user and just $10 for each additional user, the platform is one of the most affordable in the market.
I went ahead and signed up for this a month back and I can now maintain my entire business data inside Zoho.