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 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 a cohesive set of integrated technologies designed for the composition, management, delivery and optimization of personalized digital experiences across multiple channels in the customer journey. A DXP orchestrates multiple applications to allow the creation, management and presentation of seamless digital experiences. It forms part of a digital business ecosystem via API-based integrations with adjacent technologies. DXPs serve B2C and B2B use cases.
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.
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 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.