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Odem Global offers an all-in-one marketing platform for businesses of all sizes. Email, CRM, social media management, data collection and more -- this was certainly designed to be a one-stop shop.
Marketing technology company Odem Global just announced the release of a new platform that integrates cross-channel online and offline marketing with paid, earned and owned media. The all-in-one marketing dashboard, suitable for use by small businesses and enterprises alike, consolidates marketing activity and is designed to save time and increase efficiency.
In an exclusive interview with Small Business Trends, Odem Global Founder and CEO, Frank O’Brien, explained that small businesses want one place to do everything, which is what his platform offers.
“Small businesses don’t want to deal with separate platforms for email, pay-per-click ads, social media and direct mail,” O’Brien said. “That’s the promise of Odem Global’s new platform. It’s one place to manage all marketing activities, both online and offline. It contains marketing resources formerly reserved for larger companies and makes them accessible to small business.”
To O’Brien’s credit, the platform is comprehensive in scope, enabling “subscribers” (Odem Global’s term for users) to plan, execute and analyze marketing activity through channels that include email, social media, pay-per-click, direct mail and others.
The all-in-one marketing dashboard comes with proprietary email, CRM and back-office technologies built in but also allows subscribers to integrate with tools they may already use, such as MailChimp, Salesforce or Basecamp.
Actually, there appear to be very few tools with which the platform can’t integrate. O’Brien touted its ability to interface with such things as point of sale systems, digital billboards, direct mail and even an online personalized gifting system called Loop and Tie.
How the Odem Global All-in-one Marketing Dashboard Works
Once you purchase a subscription and log in the first time, the platform conducts an initial “interview,” which is how the company describes the account profile setup.
“The platform takes new subscribers through an interview process where it asks questions such as what is the business name and primary business category, do you have a website, what is your physical address, is your company local, regional or national and so forth,” O’Brien said. “You then link up different channels, such as social networks, direct mail, email clients and CRM. You can also connect to other channels — gifting and direct mail, for example.”
The platform then starts pulling in data from the linked channels, for campaign targeting and analytics purposes. It also assigns the account a standard industry classification code, which offers its own set of benefits, according to O’Brien.
“By pulling in unique classification codes, which are used to manage a lot of different databases, we can really improve on the intelligence point,” O’Brien said. “It gives us the ability to connect the dots between who your competitors are, where that biggest audience targeting opportunity is and those types of things.”
The all-in-one marketing dashboard systematically walks subscribers through strategic planning, asset management, campaign execution and analytics reporting. It also pre-populates subscriber accounts with data based on the information shared during the interview.
Additionally, it pulls recent content from the linked channels into the dashboard — content that subscribers can use to gather customer intelligence data and monitor competitors.
Odem Global Platform Components
As you can imagine, a platform that purports to do everything must have a great many moving parts. Here is a rundown of some of the major components and their respective functions:
Builder (Campaign View)
The builder module allows subscribers to plan, execute, manage and analyze different marketing campaigns.
Email Builder (Edit View)
This graphic shows the edit view for the email builder component. Here, subscribers can customize their logo, image, headers, body copy and call-to-action using any one of three templates (more templates will be available soon, said O’Brien). The component follows email marketing best practices and works directly in conjunction with whatever email distribution platform subscribers currently use.
Task Manager
Subscribers who employ a task management platform such as Asana, Basecamp or Trello, can link to and feed them directly into Odem. However, the platform has task management capabilities of its own, which let users categorize, prioritize and delegate tasks to different teams and team members.
The tasks themselves can follow a multi-level approval process, to ensure they are managed efficiently and team members assigned to the task can comment and give feedback on a task-to-task basis.
Qualitative Reports
The platform’s qualitative reports collect data from all the information sources that subscribers provided during the initial interview process. In addition to information and insights on organic, search, referral and direct traffic, it also pulls insights from social accounts, including popular posts, engagement, reach and impact. The purpose of the reports is to show, in a snapshot view, which aspects of marketing campaigns are working, and which aren’t.
CRM
Odem’s CRM module allows subscribers to feed in lists from multiple sources. For example, users who have .CSV files can upload and organize them as they see fit. Subscribers who have existing CRM accounts on platforms such as Salesforce or Campaign Monitor can feed those lists directly into Odem when they link them to their account.
On the single person CRM view, Odem gives users a snapshot of the individual’s information as shown in the record. Subscribers can use this to track behaviors such as, for example, logins to an app, the redemption of coupon codes or clicking a call-to-action link in an email.
Information is listed historically so users can have a clear idea of who interacts with the brand the most, and can turn them into brand advocates.
Calendar (Month View)
The calendar is the central hub for all activity on Odem. Users can link whatever calendars and task apps they would like, and they show up on the calendar directly.
Whenever users schedule a social media post, task or anything else with a deadline date and time, it appears on the calendar. If a user needs to reschedule an online activity on the fly, she can just drag and drop the entry to the desired date and time.
Subscribers can plan offline activities such as direct mail, meetings and events through the calendar as well. It also reflects paid media and the run-time of paid campaigns from Adwords, radio, outdoor and TV.
Multilingual Chat (seen as Calendar View)
Team members and partners can chat all in one place with a multilingual chat system, for international teams. Additionally, anyone who needs to reach a member of Odem’s support team at any time, for any reason, can do so using the chat function.
Asset Upload/Library
Odem’s asset upload library consists of a simple drag-and-drop interface that allows users to easily schedule content to post on a specific time and date. Users can also upload documents, for internal distribution and revision. The library is highly customizable and searchable so that users can find existing assets quickly.
Odem Global Platform Pricing
Odem offers three core monthly subscription packages: Startup (A La Carte), Small Business (Managed), and Enterprise (Growth).
Startup: At the Startup level ($99 per month), subscribers can access the platform at a subscription rate much lower than many single solution platforms on the market. Additional services are available on-demand or on an a la carte “pay as you need” basis.
Small Business: At $495 per month, the Small Business subscription is built around a core set of monthly deliverables from Odem Global that can include content creation, graphic design, promotional strategies or media placements. Think of this level as hiring an agency to do the work on your behalf.
Enterprise: Enterprise subscriptions, which cost a whopping $4,395 per month, allow subscribers to unlock access to custom data integrations, Odem team support and platform customization. There is also an enterprise-plus option available for larger brands and agencies looking for on-site hosting of data and white labeling.
Image: Odem Global
