Zoho has been introducing unified platforms for things like billing, and the addition of a unified platform for marketing follows up this theme, simplifying the marketing experience, connecting it more tightly  with Go-to-Market strategy and increasing its impact.

Today Zoho Corporation is announcing the launch of Zoho Marketing Plus, a new unified platform that brings together marketing activities across campaign ideation, creation, execution, management, and measurement. It is designed to give all stakeholders across the entire marketing organization a single, shared view of critical information for improved collaboration and results and better understanding of digital marketing strategies.

“We have offered a variety of marketing tools before that are quite deep in themselves, but are still sold as different tools,” said Prashanth Krishnaswami, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Zoho. “We have also offered unified billing and other unified platforms for a while, and we decided that we needed a unified marketing platform as well, to normalize the unification process we have across sales and service to marketing. The problems that marketers experience are unified, but we believe firmly that the solutions have not been unified in the same way, and that’s what this platform is designed to do.”

Krishnaswami said that the new unified marketing platform will provide a deeper understanding of customer preferences and behaviors.

“It is designed to simplify the experience, by simplifying marketing, connecting it more tightly with the Go-to-Market strategy and increasing its impact. It is aimed at midmarket organizations with 100 or less people in marketing.”
Krishnaswami explained the core functions that the platform is designed to provide.

“Different teams need to be aware what others are doing so they don’t overlap,” he said. “As a result, visibility makes a huge difference. That’s the first challenge.”

The second challenge is that everyone is marketing has to work with ecosystem partners and other stakeholders.

“This makes collaboration more difficult, because nearly everything that the marketing team does involves multiple stakeholders,” Krishnaswami noted.

“Keeping track of the evolving customer base and managing this is the third challenge,” he said. “Work in planning marketing initiatives has to be based on a strong understanding of the customer base in the market.”

The result, Krishnaswami said, is that the unified platform helps marketers understand their market better and plan their approach.

“They can now do the bulk of their work on a single platform,” he said. Brand Studio is the centralized repository where marketing campaigns are created and managed.

“Omnichannel is also baked into the platform, which lets marketing teams access and manage all channels,” Krishnaswami indicated. “There are dozens of prebuilt dashboards with heat maps and other tools, and they can all be integrated with any niche marketing tools they are already using. Other vendors offer similar things – but we have a shared view of products across the entire team. This also works with other CRMs and not just Zoho.”

Because the platform enables marketing automation in a single place, it is easier for marketers to intervene when necessary.

“They are able to jump in and change the marketing automation setup for higher impact on revenue and growth,” Krishnaswami said. “This cross-functional collaboration lets them can jump in if it is underperforming. For the end customer, this unifies everything in a single brand, provides a personalized engagement through the journey, as well as continuity across functions.”

Partners will find the new unified marketing platform valuable as well, Krishnaswami emphasized.

“They will gain a big advantage in that customer lifetime and retention go drastically up with unified platform itself compared to separate products,” he said. “The unified marketing also fits together with our sales and service offering. It will make it easier for them to compete with Salesforce, HubSpot and Adobe.”

Zoho Marketing Plus is available immediately with a starting price of $31/month, billed annually.