A/B testing tools, compare the two versions (control and variant) of webpage or content to determine the better performing and appealing version. These tools aim to optimize engagement and conversion goals by deploying multiple versions of digital content in real time. Traffic is split at random so that each group sees either version of A/B. By dividing the traffic into two groups, marketers can measure the impact of a change on a predefined goal, such as click-through rates, conversion rates, or any other key performance indicator. Statistical analysis combined with segmentation data is used to improve actions taken by visitors/users across the customer life cycle. A/B testing tools are used by marketers and web developers to make data-driven decisions for product and marketing strategy.
Advertising technology (ad tech) platforms help digital marketing leaders plan, buy and manage digital advertising campaigns across channels, including, but not limited to, display, video, streaming TV and audio, mobile, social media and search. They provide functions for campaign planning, media buying, advertising analysis and optimization and automation. Ad tech platforms can be used by buy-side and sell-side agents.
The adaptive project management and reporting (APMR) market is defined by technologies that can support multiple delivery models to optimize project management practices and complex resource management needs across an organization. These tools promote continuous collaboration and unification of diverse and distributed teams. To support accelerating rates of change and continuous value delivery, these tools adapt to changing customer needs and governance approaches across multiple organizational designs and operating models. They provide multiple execution approaches that are grounded in value-based decision making and the time-to-value perceptions of their customers. Organizations need tools to support the integration of traditional development practices alongside agile, adaptive and hybrid ways of working while driving high levels of productivity from contributors and team members. The dynamic and complex multiple organizational operating model design of all organizations makes the correct governance approach imperative, yet difficult to achieve. To drive organizationwide outcomes, APMR tools need to support adaptive decision making without incurring additional bureaucracy.
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 the collaborative work management (CWM) market as the market for stand-alone software tools that provide task-driven workspaces to enable end users to plan, coordinate and automate their work. These tools provide an integrated assembly of user-friendly capabilities for work planning, in-context collaboration, content collaboration, workflow and automation, reporting, analysis and dashboarding, intelligent assistance, and use-case acceleration on a platform that handles data management and administrative operations. Tools are defined by their purpose (work planning and execution), target users and breadth of functionality.
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.
Corporate learning technologies help organizations train, develop, engage and analyze their learners. They help organizations with compliance, certifications, onboarding, talent development, upskilling, collaboration, coaching and mentoring, sales training, partner education, and customer training.
CCM software is defined as both a strategy and a market-fulfilled by applications that improve the creation, delivery, storage and retrieval of outbound and interactive communications. It supports the production of individualized customer messages, marketing collateral, new product introductions and transaction documents. It is a collection of computer programs that composes, personalizes, formats and delivers content acquired from various sources into targeted and relevant electronic and physical communications between an enterprise and its customers, prospective customers and business partners. It delivers targeted communications through a wide range of media including mobile, email, SMS, Web pages, social media sites and print. The CCM market has evolved from the convergence of document generation/composition and output management technologies. Current CCM solutions include the core elements of a design tool, a composition engine, a workflow/rule engine and multichannel output management.
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.
Gartner defines digital commerce as the technology that enables customers to purchase goods and services through an interactive and self-service or assisted experience. The platform provides necessary information for customers to make their buying decisions and uses rules and data to present fully priced orders for payment. The commerce product must support interoperability with customer data, product content (e.g., price, availability) and order functionality and data via APIs. Digital commerce is commonly delivered as single or multitenant SaaS, or as single-tenant hosted or managed hosted (PaaS) applications. It could be offered for on-premises implementations in some circumstances. Digital commerce enables customers to purchase goods and services through an interactive and self-service or assisted experience, providing the necessary information for customers to make buying decisions.
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.
Digital Rights Management software helps in protecting digital assets and files by preventing them from being shared across unauthorized channels and from being copied without explicit permission from the owner/provider. DRM software creates a digital barrier between the asset and the user , restricting the usage in several ways by preventing editing, sharing, locking documents to specific IP addresses, screen grabbing, and watermarking files. DRM software takes a proactive approach, to safeguard from non-compliant content use that can cost millions in legal penalties, campaign rework, and negative PR. DRM software is used by digital marketing studios, creative agencies, publishers, and technology companies.
Gartner defines document management as the tools and practices used to capture, store, process, and access documents and content in support of personal, team and enterprise needs. It is used for a wide range of collaborative and operational purposes, enabling the digital workplace, content collaboration, content-centric processes, content services for enterprise applications and content governance. Gartner estimates that 70% to 80% of enterprise information is unstructured, posing a significant challenge for organizations that must unlock the potential and mitigate the risks of content. Document management tools are critical to enterprise application strategies that need to support unstructured information or content.
E-commerce optimization services are specialized strategies designed to improve and optimize the performance and effectiveness of an online store. These services focus on various aspects, including enhancing the user experience, increasing website traffic, boosting conversion rates, and ultimately driving more sales. They deliver personalized content based on user behavior and implement algorithms to suggest relevant products. They also generate detailed reports that provide insights into site performance and areas for improvement. The overall goal of ecommerce optimization services is to fine-tune every element of an online store, making it more effective in attracting visitors, converting them into customers, and maximizing revenue.
Electronic signatures are a digital representation of an individual’s agreement that is intended to be the equivalent of a “wet” signature. Electronic signatures encompass a set of methods that can be applied to a digital document to capture intent to sign, and consent to sign electronically. They do this by electronically gathering metadata related to all signing events, and creating an audit trail that is cryptographically sealed to ensure document authenticity, nonrepudiation and integrity of the electronically signed document. This audit trail may also contain various supporting evidence of the individuals signing the document, such as names, email addresses, identity proofing and authentication steps. Evidence details may vary with each product, but the audit trail provides evidence to support the legal value of the document. A digital signature (as it relates to document signing) is a type of electronic signature that, in addition to the requirements of an electronic signature, also requires that each signer sign the document with a digital certificate that is explicitly issued to them.
Email marketing is the use of the email channel to deliver and optimize marketing messages — such as brand newsletters or contextually relevant, real-time and personalized communications — in support of engagement across the customer journey. Email service providers often bolster their technology platforms with supplementary managed services to improve the value and scalability of the email channel.
Enterprise video content management (EVCM) comprises products intended to manage and facilitate the delivery of one-to-any, on-demand or live video across internet protocols. It may also include associated network services - content delivery networks (CDN) or enterprise content delivery networks (ECDN) - intended to facilitate the delivery of video. EVCM serves workers and customers who need to watch - and workers who need to share - videos.
Generative AI (GenAI) apps use generative AI capabilities for user experience and task augmentation to accelerate and assist the completion of a user’s desired outcomes. Generative AI refers to technologies that can generate new derived versions of content, strategies, designs and methods by learning from large repositories of original source content. When embedded in the experience, generative AI offers richer contextualization for singular tasks such as generating and editing text, code, images and other multimodal output. As an emerging capability, process-aware generative AI agents can be prompted by users to accelerate workflows that tie multiple tasks together. Apart from helping save time and money, generative AI apps help improve branding of businesses by creating more engaging and effective content while also creating more engaging and immersive experiences for customers. Please note that this market is based on Beta research and is continuously evolving. We will be making changes as and when there are new updates.
The market for 'In-Store Logistics Systems' is emerging and growing. Increasingly, retailers are using store inventory to support online order fulfillment. The key benefits of in-store logistics systems are to manage the fulfillment (picking, packing and dispatch) of online orders at scale within a store environment so that consumers experience an optimal level of on-time and complete fulfillment of their orders, whether being collected in-store or shipped to them from the store. Gartner defines the scope of in-store logistics processes as consisting of seven key functional capabilities which are product receipt, product put-away, inventory management, sales floor replenishment, picking optimization, packing optimization and dispatch process.
Gartner defines marketing work management (MWM) platforms as a self-service system of record for marketing projects and productivity. MWM platforms provide stakeholders a holistic view into past, current and planned work that enables management of marketing initiatives and related resources. MWM platforms can offer a range of capabilities such as intake management, resource allocation, project collaboration, workflow automation, template standardization and asset approval. Native or integrated tools may enable varying degrees of strategic and financial planning, budgeting, and talent management
Meeting solutions are real-time communication services with their associated devices that support live interactions between participants for internal and external collaboration, presentations, learning, training sessions and webinars. Meeting solutions power diverse use cases, such as one-on-one meetings, remote sales engagements, board meetings, telehealth sessions, remote banking and consulting services, to name just a few. Meeting solutions enable rich information sharing and interaction by combining audio and video, in-meeting chat, content and screen sharing, and visual collaboration and whiteboarding.
Mobile app analytics tools collect and report on in-app data pertaining to the operation of the mobile app and the behavior of users within the app. These areas of app analytics are defined as follows: Operational analytics: Provides visibility into the availability and performance of mobile apps in relation to device, network, server and other technology factors. Operational analytics are essential to capture and fix unexpected app behavior (such as crashes, bugs, errors and latency) that can lead to user frustration and abandonment of the app. Such analytics should be applied at both the app testing phase and after release of the app into production. Behavioral analytics: Shows how app users interact with the app to gain actionable insights, drive app improvements and improve business outcomes. Behavioral data can be analyzed based on correlating clicks, swipes, views and other usage stats based on user profiles, segmentation/cohorts, retention, funnel/event tracking and A/B testing.
Gartner defines mobile marketing platforms (MMPs) as software solutions that help organizations create, activate, execute, analyze and optimize mobile marketing campaigns and experiences. The platforms target audiences on their mobile device through multiple message types such as SMS/text, push notifications, messaging apps and in-app messages. These platforms enable marketers to engage customers and prospects through a range of mobile-specific tactics — spanning mobile websites, mobile applications, smart device engagement, messaging (such as SMS and native applications), push notifications (such as on mobile apps and off websites), location-triggered interactions and mobile wallet cards. Mobile tactics are particularly suited to, for example, providing time-sensitive notifications to audiences, whether that’s in response to a live event, location-specific moment or a fulfillment update. MMPs also help measure and optimize the effectiveness of mobile strategy. MMPs can operate as stand-alone solutions within a marketing organization’s tech stack, or operate alongside other marketing technology. These technologies can include a set of capabilities within a multichannel marketing hub (MMH), marketing automation platform (MAP), customer data platform (CDP) or other marketing automation applications. Stand-alone MMPs are a more specialized solution, often used in conjunction with an MMH, email platform or B2B MAP.
Multi-touch attribution software is used in marketing to evaluate the effectiveness of different marketing channels and touchpoints in a customer's journey towards a conversion (like a sale or a sign-up). It tracks and analyzes the various interactions a customer has with a brand across different channels (like email, social media, ads) and assigns value to each touchpoint (like paid advertising, organic search, email marketing, content marketing and offline channels), helping to understand which marketing efforts are most effective in leading to conversions. It also offers real time reporting capabilities to enable quick decision making through insights generation and integrates data from various CRM systems to provide a comprehensive view of marketing efforts. It helps businesses make data-driven decisions about where to allocate their marketing resources for maximum impact.
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.
Online Proofing Software is a SaaS tool designed specifically for handling automation and processes for review and approvals and digital, online proofing of various types of marketing-produced content and digital assets. Online proofing tool often can handle complex or large file types as those used for video, product images or designs, and potentially CAD-CAM or 3D drawings or concepts. Typically, it includes functionalities such as concept and design collaboration, commenting directly onto the digital assets and comparing latest to previous versions. This software can be integrated with other martech tools but which are focused solely on digital proofing of marketing and creative assets. Online Proofing Software is primarily used by used by marketing teams, designers, content or creative teams.
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.
Photo Management Software is a program that organizes, manages and stores digital photos. It helps users to find image files quickly while also offering features such as photo editing, categorization, tagging, indexing, and searching. It also facilitates sharing of photos directly to social media or other platforms. It is a valuable tool for anyone who takes a lot of digital photos but is particularly useful for marketing and advertising agencies, journalists and media professionals as well social media managers.
Predictive analytics software uses advanced analytics capabilities to analyze current and historical data to make predictions about future events. This software connects data from different data sources and employs techniques like data mining and statistical analysis to forecast future trends, detect patterns, identify potential risks and opportunities, and plan for the best possible outcome. As a result, organizations can make better business decisions with machine-generated analytics, visualization, and reporting on predictive insights. These can be used in a wide range of industries, including healthcare, finance, marketing, and manufacturing.
Programmatic segment-based advertising refers to a method of delivering targeted programmatic ads by using automated systems to buy and place ads in real-time through real-time bidding on ad exchanges, based on predefined audience segments. These segments are typically created using data about users' demographics, behaviors, interests, or other characteristics. Instead of showing ads to a broad audience, advertisers use programmatic advertising technology to target specific groups of people who are most likely to be interested in their products or services, improving the relevance and effectiveness of digital advertising ad campaigns aimed at the target audience.
PPM software providers covered under this market definition aim to support the selection, planning and execution of a variety of different work packages or containers, including, but not limited to, traditional projects. They often fold in collaboration and communication capabilities and allow work teams and project offices to report, monitor and identify course correction in resource-intensive project and work environments. Providers included in this market offer these capabilities directly through their own products, but frequently recognize that specific integration points may also be needed to connect niche tools or data sources. The PPM capabilities identified as essential or critical include: • Project demand management • Project planning and management • Time management • Resource management • Resource capacity planning • Project portfolio management • Project collaboration • Program management • Reporting services • Security and user management • Integration • Usability
Prototyping software provides tools to create and evaluate early versions of the products and applications before proceeding to the process of production. The software enables the designers to weave visuals, navigational elements, and interactions together to give a representation of the flow and usability of the final product. Prototyping software also allows designers and developers to review the prototypes for testing, providing feedback and collaborating in real-time to iterate rapidly. Some software also extends to the functionality of integrating with the existing tools in the organization.
DOM systems use configurable rule-based procedures to orchestrate the fulfillment of customer orders placed through a retailer’s online channel, although many nonretailers are now also exploring or using DOM capabilities within their own supply chain. The purpose of a DOM system is to allow companies to optimize their order fulfillment performance while balancing two primary constraints: - The customer’s expected lead time for receiving their order on-time, in-full - The company’s desire to meet these customer expectations at the optimum fulfillment cost
Social analytics is the process of collecting, measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas from social media sources. This market examines social analytics solutions covering social filtering, text analytics, sentiment analysis, image analysis and public-facing social media analytics. It focuses on solutions that derive at least 60% of their revenue from software versus solutions that are mainly based on consulting services.
Social marketing management (SMM) tools equip organizations with the ability to orchestrate and manage a wide range of social communication efforts across various marketing teams and social platforms within a single tool. These software solutions help marketing leaders monitor, collect and analyze social data; develop, publish and promote content; identify and engage with their audience; and track the performance and impact of these communications.
Gartner defines Social Monitoring and Analytics as the process of collecting, measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas from social media sources. These solutions are different from social marketing management tools that may include social analytics capabilities as part of a broader platform, which also include capabilities for content publishing, distribution, and engagement and customer service capabilities. Social Monitoring and Analytics vendors enable users to monitor and analyze conversations happening on social media about their brand, competition industry, and topics relevant to their target customer segments. These tools collect data from various online sources and help users analyze themes, sentiment and perceptions
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.
Tag management system (TMS) simplifies the deployment and management of tags. Tags are snippets of code or tracking pixels embedded in a website or app to collect data and facilitate third-party services. These tags are used for various purposes, including analytics, advertising, marketing, and personalization. TMS allows users to add, edit, and manage tags without directly altering the website's code, often through a user-friendly interface. This helps streamline the process, reduces the need for constant IT involvement, and improves website performance by loading tags asynchronously.
Video editing software empowers users to edit, manipulate, and transform raw media files into professional videos by providing a comprehensive set of editing tools and features. The software offers a user-friendly interface for importing media files from different content sources and arranging them in a specific order and timing for precise editing. The techniques for precise editing include cutting, cropping, rotating, adjusting the color, adding transitions, applying effects, and enhancing audio quality. In addition, it saves all the edited videos into different formats and resolutions and shares them across different platforms. The usual users hail from the fields of entertainment, marketing, education, and corporate communications.
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.
Gartner uses the following market definitions: Web analytics tools — Specialized analytics tools used to understand and improve the digital CX, attract and retain users, and analyze operations and actions taken across responsive websites and mobile apps. Product analytics tools — Tools and processes used to understand the behavior of users across products or services to inform decisions about how to improve the product experience and increase product engagement. Digital experience analytics tools — Tools that provide diagnostic insights into visitor activity and the CX on responsive web and mobile apps, enabled by advanced analytics and machine learning, session replay and heat map technology.