Report:

Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms

Top Vendor Products for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms in 2023

• Adobe
• Creatio
• HubSpot
• Microsoft
• Oracle
• Salesforce

B2B Marketing Automation Platforms Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

• Adobe - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Complementary marketing solutions suite: Adobe's robust suite of marketing solutions complements Marketo Engage, such as Adobe Real-Time CDP, Adobe Experience Manager Assets (a web content management solution) and Adobe Workfront. Adobe Real-Time CDP adds significant data activation and integration capabilities; Adobe Experience Manager Assets enables marketing teams to reuse content and assets at a global scale; and Adobe Workfront streamlines workflows.
  • Customer success programs: For onboarding, Adobe provides product guides, an onboarding journey, a dedicated onboarding team, a customer community and learning platform, and a help center in six languages. After onboarding, it provides a video tutorial library, extra-cost instructor-led curriculum, the Marketing Nation community of 50,000 members and certification at multiple levels.
  • Integrations with non-Adobe applications: Marketo Engage supports native integrations with several major CRM/SFA and ABM providers. Its Salesforce Sales Cloud integration offers noteworthy features, such as highlighting "interesting moments" to sales reps with notifications and enabling Salesforce users to add contacts to Marketo campaigns. For account-based marketing, it integrates with Demandbase, Terminus, RollWorks and others.

  Cons:

  • Product packaging: Some advanced B2B MAP functionalities are not offered natively in Marketo Engage, requiring purchasing additional solutions from Adobe. For example, predictive lead scoring requires buying Adobe Real-Time CDP. Prospects should clarify if additional Adobe solutions are needed to support their desired use cases, and estimate licensing and implementation costs accordingly.
  • Pricing visibility: Adobe doesn't share product pricing on its website. In proposals reviewed by Gartner experts, line-item pricing isn't disclosed. Prospective buyers must engage directly with its representatives to understand pricing, which may disrupt their desired research approach.
  • Customer journey analytics: Marketo Engage lacks detailed customer journey analytics. While it offers metrics like journey stage conversion and velocity, more detailed metrics are only available through other products in its portfolio. These products, like Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, must be licensed separately.


• Creatio - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Ease of use: From its composable platform architecture to its business-user-ready no-code customization approach, Marketing Creatio empowers marketers. Creatio's improvements include continuing to enhance aspects of its UI and integrating ChatGPT capabilities into the platform.
  • Lead scoring and qualification: Creatio's simple lead scoring interface offers a sophisticated capability. Scoring rules can be manual, sourced from machine learning models or the combination of both, and can apply to contacts and accounts. It offers a graphical user interface for training machine learning models, and all models are highly explained, showing factors included in the model and how each contributes to high-scoring leads.
  • AI-assisted lead workflow design: When designing lead workflows, users can view AI suggestions for next steps (e.g., channel) that are most relevant to that particular workflow. Additionally, users can view suggested workflows for individual accounts on account record pages.

  Cons:

  • Suite of complementary marketing products: Creatio offers a suite of CRM-adjacent products for marketing, sales and service. Other Leaders in this research offer suites that extend beyond CRM, such as loyalty, content management, advertising and back-office applications.
  • Customer support: Creatio relies on third-party partners for most implementations. Other Leaders in this research directly engage existing customers with broader support that includes follow-the-sun models and multiple modalities such as chat, email and phone, larger user communities, and broader and deeper certifications than those Creatio offers.
  • Measurement and reporting: Creatio has undifferentiated advanced measurement capabilities. Attribution is limited to single-touch approaches, preventing marketers from allocating credit across multiple marketing touchpoints using rule-based or algorithmic approaches that other vendors offer.


• HubSpot - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Onboarding and training: Abundant educational resources help marketers develop expertise with the platform. HubSpot Academy offers more than 35 certification courses and singular topic courses, in six languages, focused on inbound marketing, sales and customer service. Its community provides additional learning opportunities, with a robust list of members, community champions and user groups around the world.
  • Customer journey analytics: HubSpot offers robust reporting capabilities that enable clients to track audience conversion rates and drop-off points across touchpoints in a customer journey. These insights are accessible through easy-to-interpret Sankey diagrams that can be configured to include the touchpoints and/or journey stages that are most relevant to the client's customer journey orchestration use cases.
  • Pricing model: Whether starting out with a small number of customers and prospects or more advanced with complex data governance needs, HubSpot's Marketing Hub accommodates growth starting with its freemium model. More advanced customers have access to tools for keeping data organized where governance, usability and templating are emphasized.

  Cons:

  • CRM/SFA solution: Marketing Hub's tight integrations with HubSpot's Sales Hub makes HubSpot a potentially attractive vendor for small and midsize businesses. However, some who responded via Gartner Peer Insights report that the simplicity of its CRM/SFA doesn't meet the needs of their organization, suggesting clients may outgrow Sales Hub.
  • AI transparency: HubSpot lacks transparency when explaining what factors contribute to predictive lead scores. Some vendors in this research show how each variable/input is weighted, with the option of adjusting the model manually and retraining if necessary.
  • Vertical-specific support: HubSpot offers less support for the industry-specific needs of clients in comparison to many other Leaders, such as industry-aligned lead workflows, data models or sales teams. For industry-specific support, HubSpot clients can leverage industry consulting, at an additional cost, or tap into HubSpot's network of third-party partners.


• Microsoft - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Generative AI tools: Dynamics 365 Marketing incorporates generative capabilities like content ideas to take key messaging points and create the content, image recommendations, and AI-driven image tagging, as well as a solution to integrate a conversational chatbot in campaign landing pages. This allows marketers to customize content and incorporate conversational marketing tools without IT or martech stack additions.
  • Enterprise vision for integrating large language models: Microsoft's Copilot is being created on generative AI knowledge from across the Microsoft ecosystem, including Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service, Azure, Teams and Office. This offers leading-edge customization and productivity tools for driving campaigns results while ensuring enterprise-grade security and privacy.
  • Geographic reach: Dynamics 365 Marketing is offered in 41 languages, supporting non-English speakers around the globe. Microsoft offers a worldwide network of support, including its direct cloud solution provider (CSP), partner reseller network and indirect CSP program that includes more than 7,000 resellers and 350 distributors.

  Cons:

  • Native CRM/SFA integrations: Dynamics 365 Marketing is optimized to operate within the Dynamics 365 suite with Dynamics 365 Sales as its connected CRM, while connections to third-party SFAs appear as data source imports in the CDP. Integrations with Salesforce Sales Cloud are through a Dataverse connector, increasing the integration complexity for marketers who use Salesforce or other CRM/SFA platforms.
  • Customer input: While Microsoft maintains client feedback loops, it hasn't demonstrated the breadth of feedback mechanisms that other leading vendors have. Potential users should evaluate the current capabilities and roadmap to ensure the product sufficiently supports their requirements.
  • Support for small and midsize businesses: For SMB enterprises without Microsoft support partners or sufficient internal IT resources, ongoing and implementation support for Dynamics 365 Marketing are not easy to obtain. It offers online self-service support, but marketing users at organizations without partner or internal IT support will need to address these issues on their own.


• Oracle - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Completeness of offerings: Oracle, with extensive complementary solutions and integrations, is evolving its solutions suite, including a CDP, CRM/SFA, content management and loyalty management. Oracle Eloqua serves large, global marketing teams seeking to design, initiate and measure comprehensive marketing strategies from one toolset. It provides native integrations for Salesforce and Microsoft CRM, and more than 300 partner-built apps for implementation, a tool for low-code integration development and integration templates.
  • Campaign development: Oracle introduced Guided Campaigns, a guided wizard tool to create brand-approved, personalized email campaigns, including relevant customer stories and content for targeted accounts. Marketers can use this instead of managing multiple systems for campaigns and content search.
  • Multichannel marketing management: Oracle Eloqua's WYSIWYG editor supports the ability to dynamically personalize content components in emails and landing pages based on contact data. It integrates with SMS and many paid advertising channels, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Ads and direct mail.

  Cons:

  • Generative AI: Oracle Eloqua does not currently offer generative AI capabilities, such as drafting email subject lines or copy. Prospective customers seeking generative AI capabilities should seek visibility into the evolution of Oracle's roadmap, define use cases and assess Oracle Eloqua's ability to support them.
  • CDP dependencies for some capabilities: Some advanced analytics capabilities, such as contact-level predictive lead scoring and next best action logic design, depend on Oracle Unity, a separate product. Prospective customers should clarify which use cases can be supported by Oracle Eloqua alone, and the implications of use cases that require Oracle Unity.
  • Community and certification programs: Oracle Eloqua's community recently relaunched with far fewer members than other Leaders, and Oracle offers fewer certification paths than other Leaders. Prospective buyers should weigh the need for these programs against other options, such as customer success team or implementation partner support.


• Salesforce - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product strategy beyond AI: Salesforce's AI-based generative capabilities and further integration of Einstein grabs the headlines, but its overall product strategy addresses broader marketer needs. This includes investment in ABM content generation to increase engagement with target accounts, and tighter integration and shared functionality with its CDP solution and Slack.
  • Community learning and support: Salesforce supports customer success with self-guided learning on the Trailhead platform, with more than 3 million members in 93 countries in its learning community and its on-demand streaming service.
  • Analytics and measurement: Salesforce's out-of-the-box reporting focuses on key measurement areas critical to marketers, including pipeline with campaign-influenced revenue and an accounts dashboard showing most engaged accounts by region, campaign or company size. A/B testing is part of the basic functionality of building emails and landing pages and can be conducted in a nurture journey with results in the Engagement Studio visual journey builder.

  Cons:

  • Customer profile management: Salesforce's ability to manage customer profiles does not stand out compared to other Leaders. Several marketing automation functions require use of Salesforce Data Cloud, its CDP solution, to complete the task, such as advanced segmentation capabilities.
  • Third-party CRM/SFA integrations: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is designed as a B2B MAP specifically for Salesforce Sales Cloud users and doesn't integrate with other CRM/SFA platforms. Prospective buyers must have already adopted the Salesforce platform or consider it as part of the B2B MAP implementation process.
  • Premium edition pricing: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement's premium edition is nearly four times the price of the product's advanced edition. This is targeted to the most mature organizations with its predictive analytics, business units, developer sandboxes, more included contacts and more automation rules. Marketers must confirm their requirements for this edition, as B2B Marketing Analytics Plus is available as an add-on to lower-level packages.


• Zoho - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Anomaly and opportunity detection: Zoho's AI assistant, Zia, has the ability to detect anomalies in sales trends, giving businesses time to avert a drop in revenue or prepare for a surge in incoming leads. It can analyze customer sentiment and also offers prediction builders for any field in any module, which sets it apart from most other vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
  • Campaign operations: Zoho CRM Plus includes campaign management tools that allow marketing teams to collaborate around campaign planning. Users can tag team members in comments, assign tasks and manage campaign tasks via a Kanban view. It intends to add functionality for marketing budget management.
  • User experience: Zoho has completely overhauled the look and feel of its marketing automation to make it more visually appealing and easy to use. Users can navigate to specific functions more easily.

  Cons:

  • Social ad audiences: Zoho users cannot create custom audiences in LinkedIn or on Facebook for ad targeting. Other vendors in this research have dedicated functionality for audience creation, leveraging website visitors, contact/company lists and look-alike audiences.
  • Integrations: While Zoho offers native integrations with third-party CRM/SFA applications, those integrations are not bidirectional. Zoho CRM Plus is designed for organizations looking for a unified MAP and CRM/SFA solution, as opposed to those with separate CRM/SFA solutions. Zoho can integrate with a limited number of ABM platforms, but custom connectors facilitated by third parties may be required.
  • Account scoring: Other vendors offer prebuilt lead scoring capabilities that assess the aggregate engagement of multiple contacts within an account; however, Zoho requires additional customization to execute this. It offers functionality to measure the health of existing accounts, which can be helpful for retention and account growth use cases, although not as useful for new customer acquisition.


• Act-On - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Focus on marketer value: Act-On's straightforward user interface, flexible dashboards and access to AI/ML intelligence emphasize the marketing team's user experience (UX), which drives fast adoption. Its market focus and commitment to usability means marketers experience quick time to value.
  • Market responsiveness: Act-On adapts to changing market conditions in its platform. When Apple's iOS privacy rules changed, it changed labeling email metrics to give greater visibility and reporting flexibility. It responded to changing market conditions by investing in generative content capabilities and other generative campaign functionality.
  • Email and SMS workflows: Act-On allows customers to build and preview an SMS message for every journey step and deliver conditional email messaging adaptable by contact engagement or persona. Its email fatigue feature suppresses addresses based on duplicates, hard bounces, email delivery recency and frequency rules. Its adaptive sending capability uses a contact's prior multichannel behavior to optimize send times.

  Cons:

  • Lead workflow design: Act-On's lead journey design is manually driven and is not infused with the AI/ML-driven features other vendors offer. This requires users to decide next best offers, channels and audience manually or by predefined business rules instead of using a data-driven predictive model.
  • Training and success programs: Act-On does not offer a certification program or the extent of end-user education that other vendors offer. This reflects Act-On's belief that extensive training is not necessary, due to its intuitive UX/UI. Still, this does increase the need for end users to self-educate and seek out peer resources and guidance.
  • Integrations with other applications: Act-On offers native integrations with several leading CRM/sales force automation (SFA) platforms, but not account-based marketing (ABM) platforms or data enrichment providers, such as third-party intent data providers. Marketers considering this platform must create these integrations with APIs or webhooks, or utilize professional services to do so for an additional fee.


• BUSINESSNEXT - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Customization: CRMNEXT supports customization with a composable system design that provides interchangeable components, enabling users to configure solution elements like lead workflow designers or next best action intelligence. Users can build customized ML models with menu-driven field choices to address unique business needs and insights.
  • Process automation: CRMNEXT enables users to build data-driven, intelligent automated journey designs and next best offers. This provides marketers with time-saving capabilities that simultaneously enable journey scaling and customization based on performance insights.
  • AI/ML enhancements: CRMNEXT comes with out-of-the-box ML models for predicting next best offers and campaign designs, complemented by add-on ML customizations with the DATANEXT module. This allows users to access the power of prebuilt intelligence models or to create distinct models with menu-based tools.

  Cons:

  • Industry focus: CRMNEXT's product capabilities, expertise and market positioning are strongly linked to credit unions, banks and insurance industries. Enterprises in other market segments should confirm that the vendor can support required use cases in their industries.
  • Geographic presence: CRMNEXT is concentrated in the APAC region. With this limited market presence and visibility, it does not offer comparable local resources and support like Leaders in this market. Potential customers should anticipate their local support needs when considering the market presence of CRMNEXT as a provider.
  • Predictive segmentation: A segment builder console enables marketers to build new audiences using business rules, as well as predictive segmentation. However, the experience to design and manage predictive segments can be a bit complex, often including advanced clustering algorithms. This will likely require users to have advanced analytics expertise to effectively implement and interpret these predictive models.


• Freshworks - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Commitment to generative AI: Users can leverage GPT functionality to enhance emails with AI-generated subject lines personalized with a specific tone of voice. In 2024, Freshworks plans to release a chat interface to help users launch personalized campaigns by suggesting target segments, generating content, making personalized product recommendations and suggesting optimal campaign timing.
  • Web analytics: As part of the Freshsales Suite, Freshworks offers tools, such as heat maps and session replays, to help users analyze website visitor behaviors. Its Funnel Analysis feature provides reporting on how visitors progress through desired web journeys.
  • Market responsiveness: Freshworks' ability to rapidly iterate product development on functionality such as Freddy AI (its AI assistant), sourcing customer feedback early on, and its dedication to fine-tuning UX experiments contribute to its ability to be agile. This facilitates speed to market and the ability to pivot more nimbly so that customers' needs are met efficiently.

  Cons:

  • A/B testing: Marketers must have the ability to run experiments and continue to iterate on their campaigns so they can optimize marketing program effectiveness. Neither A/B testing nor multivariate testing for emails is currently part of Freshworks' suite.
  • Integrations with CRM/SFA and ABM applications: Marketers need to both push and pull information from CRM/SFAs and ABM tools to optimize strategies and campaign execution in conjunction with sales efforts. While the Freshsales Suite can integrate with several third-party CRM/SFA solutions, those integrations are not bidirectional. Additionally, Freshworks does not offer native integrations with ABM platforms.
  • Support for large enterprises: Freshworks' focus is on small marketing teams. As a result, it lacks some capabilities that are often necessary to support the needs of large, complex marketing organizations, such as the ability to partition the platform for users in different business units (BUs) or regions. Freshworks leverages partnerships with third-party systems integrators in an effort to support the needs of larger, complex clients.


• SugarCRM - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Integrations: SugarCRM provides an integrated solution connecting marketing to sales and service technology solutions. It integrates with eight other CRM/SFAs and provides additional functions through integration partners Triblio for ABM and Oktopost for social media.
  • Capturing and activating of customer voice: SugarCRM collects its voice of the customer insights through surveys and in-app feedback, paired with qualitative responses from user group gatherings to identify focus areas. Improvements have focused on product quality, such as the email builder for more control over template layouts and revised platform navigation to improve the organization of product features.
  • Customer profile management: In addition to automatic imports through connection to multiple CRMs, SugarCRM streamlines importing data from an individual file with deduplication, including selecting multiple key columns. Leads and accounts are enriched with the add-on module Sugar Hint with open-source, third-party data from social profiles, company news and firmographic data for accounts.

  Cons:

  • Product strategy: SugarCRM's integrated marketing platform misses features available from other vendors, such as suggesting a next best action or multitouch attribution. Future capabilities focus on enhancing the platform with industry-standard features, such as SSO and preference management capabilities. The platform has more limited investments in generative AI compared to other vendors evaluated.
  • Purchase process support: Support for organizations evaluating Sugar Market is limited compared to other vendors evaluated. Its focus is on demonstrating buyer-provided use cases in the platform, while other vendors provide tools and in-depth interviews with multiple stakeholders to help determine requirements. Marketers requiring support in understanding their needs may not get that from this vendor.
  • Measurement and reporting: Sugar Market offers basic reporting capabilities that enable users to track campaign, channel and pipeline performance. However, it lacks advanced analytics capabilities like multitouch attribution and customer journey analytics, beyond the ability to view the engagement history of individual contacts.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, 20-Sep-2023, ID G00779387

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