Report: Gartner recognises the best multichannel marketing players

Adobe, IBM, Marketo, Oracle, SAP, SAS and Salesforce have been named as ‘leaders’ in Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs report.

The report says marketing budgets have levelled off to around 11.2 per cent of company revenue (2108), with 63 per cent of CMOs expecting their budgets to increase in 2019. Marketing technology grabs the largest share of marketing budget (29%), up from 22 per cent.

With more CMOs recognising they need to invest in technology to facilitate personalisation, in fact 87 per cent of B2C marketers already personalise marketing communication, customer insights are vital. This means customer data and profile management is the new battlefield for marketing hubs, the report finds.

“As such, marketers want MMH vendors with strong customer intelligence and analytics capabilities,” according to the report.

Multichannel marketing hubs (MMH) are defined as a technology that orchestrates communications across customer segments and multiple channels. The report finds leaders are facilitating unified customer profiles, strengthening machine learning (ML) and delivering insights to drive relevant interactions in real time for better personalisation. 

Gartner said MMH vendors stay relevant by collecting and unifying customer data from various sources, performing segmentation, improving the timing and targeting of personalised messages, responding to various consumer touchpoints, and attribute results and provide insights.

Adobe was recognised as a leader due to its comprehensive suite within Adobe Campaign, embedded intelligence and data flexibility. Watson Campaign Automation within IBM was recognised due to its AI functionality, reporting and analytics, and platform flexibility.

Marketo, which was acquired by Adobe last year, was recognised for its integrations, attribution capabilities and for being a robust platform. Similarly, Oracle’s CX Cloud has good campaign execution, modular AI and profile management vision.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud impressed with its capability breadth, native AI and extensibility, while the SAP marketing cloud was mentioned for its practical ML, segmentation and consent and preference management. The final leader, SAS Customer Intelligence 360, was noted for its campaign automation, advanced analytics and implementation and support.

"We are honored that Adobe and Marketo were both named a leader in this recent report," director of product marketing for Adobe Campaign, Kristin Naragon, said.

"We were pleased to see that Adobe was included twice in this report, evaluating our B2C campaign management (Adobe Campaign) and B2B marketing automation (Marketo) capabilities. For the second consecutive year, Adobe was positioned furthest to the right for completeness of vision. And for the third consecutive year, Adobe and Marketo have both been positioned as Leaders."

For this year’s Magic Quadrant, Gartner focussed on vendors that offer the most relevant and compelling marketing solutions with at least 20 customers using the MMH, at least 15 new customer wins in the last 12 months and at least $15 million revenue in the 2018 fiscal year.

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