Gartner defines B2B marketing automation platforms (B2B MAPs) as software applications that support demand generation processes at scale. B2B MAPs help marketers capture and qualify leads and accounts, orchestrate marketing-driven engagement across the full customer journey, and use analytics to optimize and measure performance. B2B MAPs enable marketers to automate a wide range of activities intended to drive new customer acquisition, retention and growth. To support the pursuit of new commercial opportunities (from current or prospective customers), marketers use B2B MAPs to generate, prioritize, and manage leads and buying teams across the revenue life cycle. This includes the distribution of marketing-generated and qualified leads to sales teams for further pursuit.
Gartner defines content marketing platforms (CMPs) as software solutions that support the practice of content marketing. These solutions facilitate creating and curating text, video, images, graphics, audio, e-books, white papers and interactive content assets that are distributed through paid, owned and earned channels. These assets are used to tell stories that help brands engage with and nurture customers, prospects and other audiences. The goal of content marketing is to drive awareness, demand, purchases and loyalty through deeper engagement with customers. CMPs enable the fundamentals of content marketing — specifically, ideation insight, editorial planning, creative workflow and performance analytics to drive a unified strategy and production at scale. CMPs collect and analyze data to inform content creation and reuse, streamline operations and iterate on content to improve marketing effectiveness. These platforms can also generate branded iterations of content for different audiences and enable internal teams, contributors and agencies involved in content creation to coordinate efforts. As a result, CMPs help connect content marketing efforts to business objectives across channels, ensuring organizational alignment and broad scope for managing content. CMPs also drive iterative content improvements, including capabilities to evaluate and test operating models and governance to drive collaboration across siloed teams. This supports faster time to market at scale. Many CMPs complement their software with optional services, such as content strategy development, creative marketplaces, and training to drive adoption and utilization.
Gartner defines customer data platforms (CDPs) as software applications that support marketing and customer experience use cases by unifying a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels. CDPs optimize the timing and targeting of messages, offers and customer engagement activities, and enable the analysis of individual-level customer behavior over time. The purpose of a CDP is to centralize data collection and unify customer data from disparate sources into profiles. CDPs enable marketers to create and manage segments and push those segments to priority channels without requiring coding or use of advanced querying techniques. While CDPs originated to serve marketing use cases, interest from data management roles, IT and other customer-facing roles (e.g. sales, service and support) is on the rise. Digital marketing leaders have long used a variety of systems to design, orchestrate and measure multichannel campaigns. While many of those systems also manage customer-level data and audiences for targeting, they do so in a way that makes both data governance and orchestration across channels (and across competitive vendor solutions) a challenge. CDPs aim to address that challenge by collecting and unifying disparate customer data in a centralized location accessible to marketers. The CDP is not a substitute for an enterprise’s master data management, but it can ensure that customer profile data, transactional events and analytic attributes are available to marketing when needed for real-time interactions.
Digital asset management software includes capabilities for ingestion, storage, retrieval, collaboration and life cycle management of rich-media assets, including text, graphics, images, videos and audio.
A digital experience platform (DXP) is an integrated set of technologies designed for the composition, management, delivery and optimization of personalized digital experiences across multiple channels in the customer journey. A DXP binds capabilities from multiple applications to allow the creation, orchestration and presentation of seamless experiences. It also forms part of a digital business ecosystem via API-based integrations with adjacent technologies. DXPs are applicable to business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-employee (B2E) use cases.
Gartner defines multichannel marketing hubs (MMHs) as software applications that orchestrate personalized communications to individuals in common marketing channels. MMHs optimize the timing, format and content of interactions through the analysis of customer data, audience segments and offers. MMHs are foundational for multichannel marketing, customer journey orchestration and next best action programs.
Gartner defines personalization engines as technology that enables marketing professionals to identify, set up, conduct and measure the optimum experience for an individual based on knowledge about them, their intent and context. Personalization engines apply context about individual users and their circumstances to select, tailor and deliver messaging such as content, offers and other interactions through various digital channels in support of three use cases: Marketing: Delivering the right message to the right audience and in the right context (i.e., tone, timing and channel) to maximize marketing and advertising performance. It involves behavioral inference, segmentation, testing, targeting and optimization of marketing campaign content, messaging and engagements across marketing and communication channels. Digital commerce: Tailoring content, offers, recommendations and experiences across digital sales channels. It includes personalized site search and navigation and customized content across homepages, category landing pages and product detail pages, with the goal of increasing conversion and delivering online revenue growth. Service and support: Using customer insight, journey context and user feedback (i.e., surveys and stated intent) to customize online and offline experiences across business functions to reduce customer effort or increase customer satisfaction and advocacy.
The market for PIM software includes vendors that: - Provide product, commerce and marketing teams with the ability to create and maintain an approved shareable version of rich product content. - Support complex use cases, including product data syndication (PDS), PXM, product analytics, product feedback loops and the contextualization of product data for brands, markets and channels
The market for social software in the workplace includes software products that support people working together in teams, communities or networks. These products can be tailored to support a variety of collaborative activities. Buyers are looking for virtual environments that can engage participants to create, organize and share information, and encourage them to find, connect and interact with each other. Business use of these products ranges from project coordination within small teams or homogeneous groups, to information exchange between employees across an entire organization.
Gartner defines WCM as the process of creating, managing and delivering content to one or more digital channels. This is achieved through the use of specific content management features based on a core repository. WCM tools are used to manage content to be delivered to websites and other digital channels. These tools are used by both IT and marketing/business. They may be procured as commercial products or open-source tools and are typically cloud-based. The functionality of WCM solutions goes beyond the publication of webpages. It also includes: - Content-creation functions, such as assembling content components, pages, websites, microsites and landing pages. - A content repository that organizes different content types and their metadata. - Library services, such as check-in and check-out, versioning and rollback. - Security and roles, and permissions management. - Management features such as layout and templates, menus and navigation, and workflows. - Content and application deployment functions. - Personalization capabilities. - The ability to integrate, via APIs, with adjacent technologies such as digital commerce platforms, CRM, and marketing automation platforms. - Hybrid and headless capabilities for API-driven multiexperience content delivery beyond websites and to other channels — such as mobile apps, progressive web apps (PWAs), single-page applications (SPAs), digital and voice assistants and smart devices.