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.
Conversational marketing is a customer-centric approach that leverages real-time, personalized interactions between companies and customers and mimics human dialogue for the vendor at scale. These technologies employ AI chatbots and automation to design session-based, cross-channel exchanges in the form of natural language dialogue, using a blend of text and audio. Unlike traditional marketing methods that often rely on one-way communication, conversational marketing employs session-based two-way dialogues which foster meaningful relationships and enhance the customer journey and experience. Conversations occur across various channels — primarily live chat, SMS, email and voice. Integrations across the revenue tech stack facilitate personalized interactions. Conversational marketing strategy is used by digital marketers as well as sales and customer service teams to improve engagement, increase conversion and increase seller capacity.
Gartner defines email marketing as 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. Email marketing helps marketers deliver information to their audiences after obtaining an email address. This can take the form of product or service updates, new promotions, transaction updates and more. As a relatively inexpensive method for communicating at scale with contacts, email provides value for different use cases across the full customer-engagement life span. Email is the most effective channel for several marketing objectives, including demand generation, conversion to sales, and customer loyalty and advocacy.
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.
Owned media software refers to any digital platform or tool that a company controls and uses to publish and distribute content directly to its audience. This include the company’s website, blogs, mobile apps, and social media accounts. The main characteristic of owned media software is that the organization has complete control over the content, its presentation, and how it’s distributed. Typical users of this software include large enterprises and organizations across various industries such as retail, finance, technology, healthcare, and manufacturing. These users have substantial content creation and distribution needs, as well as complex marketing strategies requiring sophisticated tools for content management, integration of content across social media platforms, and data analytics.
Revenue operations (RevOps) enablement suites enable an end-to-end operating model based on shared data, observability and workflow across marketing, selling and customer support functions with the primary aim of accelerating predictable revenue growth across the entire customer life cycle. Key capabilities include prospect/customer relationship management, revenue-generating opportunity tracking, and customer experience programs and services. These suites unify marketing, sales and customer service in one platform, aligning the company with centralized processes, shared data and continuous customer engagement, all focused on revenue generation. All client-facing and revenue-generating resources can leverage RevOps enablement suites, which are typically delivered as SaaS. RevOps enablement suites are all-in-one solutions that integrate marketing, sales and customer service, offering startups and early-stage tech providers a ready-made platform for predictable revenue outcomes. Such revenue technology (RevTech) solutions allow companies to have a communal data-first approach across customer-facing and revenue-generating individuals and groups within the company. In addition, they allow companies to streamline their operations, implement cross-team collaboration and establish a continuous customer engagement (CCE) approach through the entire customer life cycle. This allows time-saving automation, the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) to improve revenue and scale internal operations at lower costs. It also prevents the creation of silos in the business and unnecessary handoff points, and increases the opportunity for performance improvement feedback loops.
Sales engagement applications (SEAs) streamline how sellers execute sales activities and deal workflows at scale. They optimize seller productivity by combining three key capabilities into a single interface: multichannel engagement (e.g., email, voice, SMS, video, social media), outbound workflow execution and time-saving AI/automation. Sellers rely on SEAs to streamline guidance into whom to engage and when, and what messaging to use, while capturing sales activities back into sales force automation (SFA) platforms.
Gartner defines sales force automation platforms as AI-augmented tools supporting automation and capture of sales activities, processes and administrative tasks, facilitating initiation, engagement and documentation of buyer-seller interactions through multiexperience and channel-agnostic approaches and devices. They leverage advanced analytics to support actionable insights, tracking and monitoring sales contact, pipeline and opportunity management; guided selling; and forecasting process execution. Optimal UX for sales managers or leadership extends beyond internal use cases, and is scalable to support buyer-seller intermediation and shared prospect/customer experiences. These platforms incorporate AI features beyond add-on products in predictive and prescriptive analytics, ML and NLP, enhancing processes and customer interactions. Sales force automation (SFA) is a foundational sales technology implemented to automate and augment an organization’s core sales processes. Leveraging AI and advanced analytics, it enhances the seller’s ability to engage with customers across various interaction touchpoints and devices. It not only streamlines administrative tasks, but also provides actionable insights for improved sales contact, pipeline and opportunity management.
Value selling tools are solutions designed to support the value selling methodology, where the focus is on demonstrating the unique value of a product or service to potential customers. These tools help sales teams quantify and communicate the specific benefits and ROI of their offerings through ROI Calculators, tailored to the unique needs and challenges of each customer. Features often also include value calculators, proposal generators, customer insight analytics, and integration with CRM systems, all aimed at enhancing the effectiveness of sales strategies by clearly articulating how a product or service can solve specific customer problems.