When it comes to digital tools, marketers have an overabundance of several thousand choices.
To help navigate these possibilities, Boston-based CabinetM is today announcing its first product, a new platform of the same name.
The platform, still in beta, offers written profiles on about 3,500 tools in more than 450 categories, including “Advertising: Buying, Serving and Management” and “Content Marketing.” A search tool allows filtering by several parameters, such as install time or install complexity.
Co-founder and CEO Anita Brearton told me that, when she was running an e-commerce company called Fashion Plate, her marketing team realized “it wasn’t easy finding tools.” Marketers, she said, need a better way to find tools and technology, while tools vendors need better exposure to their potential buyers. Co-founder Sheryl Schultz is also a former marketer.
Sometime next year, she said, the site will allow a vendor to take over the software product’s profile at a cost ranging from $500 to $1,000 monthly, and there will be opportunities for ads. There are also plans to create a premium “workflow environment” where marketing teams can more collaboratively discover tools, after paying an unspecified fee appropriate for what she described as “a product discovery tool.”
Currently, registered users add tool profiles to “file drawers,” which are essentially folders, and they can share their drawers — so to speak — with other users. The drawers support the naming metaphor of a file cabinet:
In its current implementation, CabinetM is largely a filterable directory of profiles about tools that wants to evolve into vendor-supplied profiles. Here’s a sample profile, created by CabinetM:
Brearton said that CabinetM “will manage the content” and will try to make sure the description stays current as tools evolve. However, there’s no clear indication to users which tool descriptions are provided by the vendors and which by the site.
There is an option for user reviews, but no mechanism to screen them for authenticity. A vendor could readily set up a fake email account and then post raves for his product and pans for the competitors.
Data from site usage will be aggregated anonymously, with broad insights offered to marketers, such as which categories are most popular. Brearton said “there are no plans at the moment” for selling the data or otherwise making it directly available to marketers.
Marketers already have a number of options to help them find informed opinions, user feedback, and expert reviews about marketing tools. These include G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, VB Insight, and our own Digital Marketing Buyer’s Guides.
Brearton said that those marketing tool assessments sometimes rely on subjective user reviews and, in the case of G2 Crowd and TrustRadius, cover software products outside of marketing.
“We don’t have to get in the way of the marketer and vendor,” she said.
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