Marketing analytics skills are among the most important capabilities in the marketing organization, yet it remains difficult to recruit, hire and retain people with strong skills to support in-house teams. Most marketing teams still struggle with a skills gap in this domain. As a result, marketers seek to augment internal teams by using advanced analytics service providers that offer third-party expert resources, proprietary methodologies and models, and even managed technology to help marketers tackle some of their toughest challenges. Vendors in this market specialize in advanced analytics, including sophisticated methods such as mapping the customer journey, attributing marketing spend to measured outcomes, simulating and measuring business impact of marketing and advertising campaigns, and implementing predictive models. Engagements may be project-based or part of an ongoing partnership, and may include the use of proprietary technology.
Gartner defines search engine optimization (SEO) as the practice of optimizing owned websites and their content to engage qualified traffic and improve placement on search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO analyzes the nature and intent of searches to deliver highly relevant search results and an enhanced user experience. SEO platforms offer tiered subscriptions for access to a comprehensive solution with on-site, off-site and technical SEO capabilities including traffic analysis, competitor insight, link building and content evaluation. They are typically made accessible to users through cloud-based software backed with proprietary and machine learning insights.
Marketing dashboard tools collect and integrate marketing data from multiple sources, visualize it, and enable visualization and exploration through a web-based interface. The technology helps marketers deliver near-real-time data and reporting to stakeholders across the marketing organization and the enterprise. These tools cater to the business user rather than the technical professional, as they do not require you to manage a data warehouse or to define a semantic layer. The market features SaaS-based offerings from large, diversified providers as well as small pure-play vendors. Some of these sell marketer-focused solutions, and others have tailored their IT-focused offerings to this new buyer segment.