Allocadia is a marketing management platform for CMOs

10-second breakdown:

Allocadia is a powerful marketing management platform designed to give enterprise CMOs a comprehensive overview of all marketing processes, integrating with CRM and finance systems as well. Recommended for larger companies and agencies looking to improve sales processes and efficiency.

Allocadia is used in medium (51-1,000 employees) and enterprise companies (1,000+ employees).

The good:

Allocadia’s easy-to-use interface and intuitive design enables all departments to understand and utilize it.

As a performance marketing software it’s a complex tool that delivers in-depth data, enabling smart planning and measuring of all marketing operations, in the broader sense.

Integration with other marketing and sales platforms is also a big plus.

The bad:

Budget management is a bit tricky when having multiple users with editing responsibilities. It would be helpful to give editing permission for several budgets at once instead of going into every single budgets.

Sometimes there are some speed issues and data refresh lags.

How it works:

It’s designed to help CMOs understand the buyer’s journey, nurture leads and engage buyers and predict revenue performance. Return on Investment is the name of the game. The software connects all marketing operations with finance and sales, so that they work together to implement company strategy. For teams using this platform, decisions are data-driven, marketers are accountable for their own budgets and spreadsheets are “tool-non-grata”.

The platform’s main features focus on marketing automation, finance, CRM, advertising, social and content management. For CMOs, it offers marketing performance data, campaign metrics, ROI by business unit and product line, revenue analytics and success rate of planned KPIs. Marketing operation specialists can use the platform for market intelligence, demand creation, brand monitoring and sales enablement.

The service is integrated with a number of third-party marketing tools. Allocadia provides native connectors for Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua and HootSuite. These connectors use the cloud APIs available from these systems and pull in a variety of data elements surrounding campaign objects and their associated results and metrics. Imported campaigns can be associated with items in the Allocadia investment and results hierarchy.

Funnel metrics like campaign response and conversions are imported from these systems where you create and manage your marketing campaigns, enabling detailed cost-per analysis. When planning in Allocadia, use the outbound actions feature to create campaigns in your marketing automation system, directly from within the platform.

You can also connect your advertising platforms (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter), to get a more granular, more performance-driven view of ad spend vs. actuals by campaign, ad group and more. Within Allocadia, you gave more advanced analytics, such as ad spend in wider contexts: according to business unit or region, for example.

For such a complex tool, it’s very user-friendly. The tool has a spreadsheet-like interface for building bottoms-up plans and customizable fields and page layouts.

The finance dimension of this software enables everyone to have a clear overview of their company’s investments and returns. Marketers can plan their revenue, leads, clicks and social results, follow-up to measure their success and even generate forecasts based on existing data.

Budgeting and planning features are so advanced that you can even create alternative scenarios for your marketing plan with Allocadia’s scenario planner.

By inputting some key assumptions, funnel metrics and average deal sizes, you get a complete, convenient view of the estimated leads, opportunities, pipeline, revenue and ROI generated by each line item in your marketing plan.

Another key planning feature is the strategic alignment planner that helps you allocate investment and returns targets for example by objective, product or program line. This analysis gives you better visibility into your strategic targets as you build your bottoms-up plans. You can follow it throughout the year and adjust your numbers to meet the targets.

To keep your budget in line, you also have a revenue performance planner, that quantifies your marketing plan’s impact on company revenue. After inputting some key assumptions, funnel metrics and average deal sizes, you get a broad view of the projected leads, opportunities, pipeline, revenue and ROI generated by each line item in your marketing plan.

An enterprise marketing team will find this extremely useful, seeing as it helps them model the integrated sales and marketing funnel and it also enables them to adjust strategy through industry benchmarking.

Team management settings are high-level, enabling audit trails on all user activity, different access levels to data, workflows, granular permission and approval processes. You have organization and budget hierarchies with unlimited hierarchy levels, invited users and role preferences and global and regional team settings available.

The tool’s CRM system includes opportunity data such as won/lost opportunities, as well as pipeline generated.Marketers can report on this data using a variety of marketing attribution models, with the ultimate goal of linking investment dollars to results metrics for a complete picture of ROI.

In regards to enterprise data management, security is a major concern when choosing a software provider. Allocadia partners with Amazon web services to manage it’s physical data center and associated network and hardware infrastructure. Firewalls are in place with only the minimum required ports enabled and servers are hardened using industry best practices related to user accounts, credential management and remote administration. According to the tech team, data is backed up multiple times per day and archived for a minimum of 6 months.

If you’re a large enterprise looking to track and measure your marketing ROI this is an excellent tool for you. The platform is highly advanced in connecting marketing, sales and finance, so that you get an overview of how your funnels are evolving and what steps are generating revenue.

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