I had the pleasure of chatting with Amita Paul, CEO of ObjectiveMarketer. She started the company in August of 2009 and has focused on delivering a solid tool for Enterprise users. While the company has focused on the tool first, and not marketing and sales, they have been able to work with customers like Answers.com and Intel.
This focus on the tool has paid off. In the month that I have played with the product I have seen major updates ranging from the roll-out of a much more intuitive user interface to new reports (and formats) and Twitter and Facebook automation tools such as a simple rules engine for managing twitter auto-follows.
What about pricing?
Pricing is always something companies struggle and I would expect their pricing to evolve over time. However, small organizations would be wise to try the 15 day free trial and then look at the Basic package. This offering will give these organizations the functionality they need and a little more.
What are some of the core capabilities?
First and foremost, ObjectiveMarketer simplifies your social media driven marketing campaigns. You are able to specify the messages, the channels for these messages to be sent through (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), the schedules for the delivering of these messages. While it lacks integration with your mail campaigns (which is a hole I am hoping they will close in the future) it does a nice job of managing the social media portion of of your campaigns.
As your messages are delivered you can track click-throughs, retweets (for Twitter) and gauge the effectiveness of your message. You can use this information, combined with standard A/B testing methodologies to refine your message, learning how to get the biggest return on your social communication investment.
It is worth noting is that you can queue messages up as part of an internal review process, only having them released after the reviewer approves the content. Basic notifications occur, informing reviewers that there is content they must check out. While this is a basic system it is also a good starting point.
You can also create custom landing pages, like these created by people like Brian Yanish at Marketinghits. These pages are a header for your content (think Hootsuite) where you can code links to your blog, Twitter, Facebook, and you are truly only limited by your own imagination. I minimized my use of this during the demo period but will be exploring this further as I continue to explore this tool.
ObjectiveMarketer also supports polls, which I will be using in an upcoming post, stay tuned for more information on this front.
Okay, reporting?
On-screen reports are solid and the drill-down functionality is useful. The majority of reports can be downloaded as CSV files so that you can import them into Excel to slice and dice the information to your hearts content. I want to see more analytics and business intelligence capabilities to give me clear answers about how well my campaigns are performing. More is needed.
What do others think?
Brian Yanish of Marketinghit notes “After putting ObjectiveMarketer to the test for over 6 month I found it to be the best tools for social media marketing. I have many of my clients also using the software now to reach new audiences within the different social networks.”
Debra Ellis of Wilson Ellis Consulting also notes: “I’ve been using ObjectiveMarketer for several month. Like Brian, I find it to be one of the best social media tools. My favorite feature is the landing page. I’m using it to promote special items for my company and my clients.”
Liz Cohen of Answers.com told me “..Answers.com has been using ObjectiveMarketer for about six months now and we are very pleased with the kinds of stats we get. One of my favorite things is the way it is so easy to create an entire Twitter campaign based on scheduling and reposting.”
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