Report:

Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms

Top Vendor Products for Content Marketing Platforms in 2024

• Optimizely
• Sitecore
• Skyword
• Sprinklr
• Storyteq

Content Marketing Platforms Vendor Product Comparisons 2024

• Acquia - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Overall viability: Acquia's suite-based solution includes an open-source Drupal CMS, CDP, DAM and DXP, offering all the elements to support modern content marketing. It offers insights spanning customer data management, personalization and machine learning (ML) to help create more engaging content across distributed channels. Users can monitor content performance throughout the customer journey, including intranet and employee portal use cases.
  • Innovation: Acquia's platform can support the most sophisticated use cases and multiple scenarios across the suite to enable customer data management, scalable modular content, personalization and ML through channel distribution fueled by advanced AI. ChatGPT integrations allow users to generate text content, images, content analysis and AI assistant chatbots to increase operational efficiency.
  • Operations: Acquia excels in integrating knowledge and generating insight across capabilities to produce content faster, enabling marketing teams to advance their practice. Its adaptive and iterative platform updates incorporate real-time user feedback to give users the features they need when they need them.

  Cons:

  • Market responsiveness: Acquia doesn't directly position itself as a CMP, despite meeting the capabilities with its composable DXP offering. The platform focuses on integrations available via Acquia Exchange, which requires a greater IT lift than other vendors in this market. Prospects looking to meet content marketing use cases should ensure they have the necessary IT support to fulfill the platform's potential.
  • Product or service: Acquia's solution focuses on owned channels like websites and email, offering limited integration with ad networks or digital experience composition platforms. Its limited attention to editorial content lags what traditional CMPs offer.
  • Sales execution/pricing: Acquia extends the capabilities of the open-source Drupal CMS, which includes the platform hosting costs of Drupal. This hosting price structure often involves partnership with IT in the buying process, a complexity that is becoming more common across this market. While portions of the platform are designed for the marketing user, others are designed for the IT or developer user, which may further complicate the buying process.


• Adobe - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Overall viability: Adobe is one of the largest software companies in the world, with nearly $20 billion in annual revenue and more than 29,000 employees. The vendor increasingly generates value from its connected cloud solutions and adoption by in-house and agency creatives. It shows a continued willingness to push toward new and innovative markets.
  • Market understanding: Adobe addresses the need to develop content at scale by embedding features into modular products that organizations already own and use. These products are becoming more integrated and are wrapped in the major market disruption of GenAI.
  • Innovation: Adobe has a reliable track record of iterating new and revised products, uses and updates. It entered the CMP market late, and its strength in innovation and adoption across acquisitions and GenAI has made a fast and significant impact on the CMP market.

  Cons:

  • Sales execution/pricing: Adobe pricing varies widely across many of its product lines. Since capabilities are offered across many connected products, prospective buyers should request pricing upfront and inquire about what products are included in the bundled solutions and what capabilities require additional purchases.
  • Offering (product) strategy: Adobe typically offers its products in tiered packages, with flexibility to add on specific capabilities. The Adobe CMP solution requires buyers to deploy and stitch together multiple modules. CMOs must ensure the tiered packages they own or purchase are fully compatible with all modules needed to serve their content use cases.
  • Product or service: The workflows and processes across the multiple products, including AEM Assets, Workfront and Adobe Express, are integrated. Approval of assets in Workfront will send them to AEM Assets and there is bidirectional integration between AEM Assets and Adobe Express. Other CMPs evaluated in this research automate these processes for standardization and efficiency. Even if the release of GenStudio is a salve for this gap, buyers should be clear-eyed about the limited track record of a new, if promising packaging.


• Contently - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Market understanding: Contently serves content marketing use cases for organizations focused on productivity improvements, increasing the bandwidth of creative teams and improving brand compliance. It supports organizations that are not comfortable leveraging GenAI for content creation. Its core capabilities deliver content strategy through technology and fill additional client gaps through strategic services and a talent marketplace.
  • Customer experience: Contently's focus on service is reflected in a responsive account team that helps navigate onboarding to increase platform utilization across teams. Gartner Peer Insights reviews praise it as a highly responsive tool to streamline content creation and provide cross-team visibility.
  • Product or service: Organizations looking to augment internal teams with a talent marketplace, enable operations with customer workflows and scale content across teams will appreciate Contently's productivity focus. Its content operations metrics and platform cost attribution serve most clients seeking secure future investments in content.

  Cons:

  • Innovation: Contently remains focused on calculating the ROI of content using the value of organic search, a space disrupted by search generative experience and chatbot engagement. As a result, CMOs may struggle to measure the value of content and tie it to growth in an increasingly complex ecosystem of channels and customer engagement.
  • Sales execution/pricing: Annual membership is team-based, not user-based, resulting in potential payment for employees not using the platform. Tiers further complicate a complete understanding of capabilities purchased and what costs extra. Gartner Peer Insights reviews say the platform is not cost-effective and is too expensive for organizations with limited or constricting budgets. Potential customers must ensure the deal price includes desired features.
  • Offering (product) strategy: Executive turnover and year-over-year decline in revenue threaten Contently's capacity to execute and invest in the future. It faces an uphill battle to compete in a market where more technically advanced suite-based providers offer similar capabilities with easier integrations.


• CoSchedule - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Customer experience: CoSchedule serves customer needs without lengthy implementation or additional paid services because training, onboarding and campaign set-up services are included. Enterprise customers have a customer success manager, priority email support and 24/7 phone support. Live chat, email, social direct messages and in-app communications support help nonenterprise customers during business hours, with 24/7 chatbot support.
  • Vertical/industry strategy: CoSchedule's Marketing Suite is easily configured out of the box to solve challenges unique to vertical industries. Its understanding of regulated industries' compliance and privacy needs, and technology companies' fast-paced production and workflows makes the solution adaptable to all verticals.
  • Market responsiveness/record: CoSchedule's release cadence keeps pace with customer needs, without overwhelming users. Recently delivered AI innovations, such as AI Prompt Library with 500-plus structured templates and guidance for marketing teams to incorporate AI into their content workflow and enhance content creation without overhyping.

  Cons:

  • Business model: CoSchedule remains focused on the core use cases of a CMP for small and medium-sized businesses, which serves its target audience well. However, continued success with this direction relies on both its ease of use for small teams and maintaining its role as a platform connector. The market is seeing a rapid flux in overlapping capabilities, which will challenge CoSchedule to stand apart from the crowd.
  • Innovation: CoSchedule's stand-alone CMP competes with larger vendors and broader, interconnected product offerings with greater capacity to innovate across more areas of the product. Its focused approach means that although some GenAI features were successfully released, other enhancements were limited in scope and not as robust as competitors.
  • Market understanding: CoSchedule's market view is based on the current challenges of its customer base, rather than a more forward-looking view of what features might enable a content marketing function experiencing rapid change. Enterprise marketing teams have moved beyond conversations about reduced budgets, siloed teams and high content demands. Its approach to AI suits smaller teams in less sophisticated organizations.


• Optimizely - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Market responsiveness/record: Optimizely quickly adapted its product roadmap to respond to its clients' growing and evolving need for AI in content marketing. Its AI capabilities go beyond image and text prompts, with "in-context" AI embedded from planning to ideation and performance analysis. Its expanded AI capabilities allow you to bring your own AI integrations through various partners.
  • Product or service: Optimizely has invested in providing high levels of "content fidelity" to creators, allowing them to meet the requirements of various channels and build an omnichannel experience from one platform. Its ability to enable distributed teams and complex global/regional variations is a differentiator in this market.
  • Overall viability: Several factors bode well for Optimizely's longevity in the CMP market. Although privately held, it reported double-digit growth in 2023. While this growth is anchored by DXP/DAM products, its CMP business serves over 500 accounts, including large global B2B enterprises, with 100 employees focused on its CMP. Its roadmap focuses on AI across the content production journey, automating work-allocation decisions and supporting analytics capabilities across multiple dimensions of content measurement to remove waste, which is where we see the market moving.

  Cons:

  • Marketing strategy: Optimizely has promoted "Optimizely One" across its website, press and events, investing heavily in this position to lead the market. CMOs should confirm they can leverage these progressive features and functions without leaning on the vendor to guide business needs.
  • Sales execution/pricing: Although the pricing tiers are clear and well-defined, even Optimizely's biggest advocates say it has a high total cost of ownership, according to comments from Gartner Peer Insights. Prospective buyers starting with free or "freemium" features might be surprised when adding more features to maximize the product's value.
  • Customer experience: Optimizely constantly adds features to its already robust CMP, making it hard to fully utilize for all but the most high-performing content teams — a common challenge in this market. Discussions with Gartner clients, together with evidence from Peer Insights, indicate a steep learning curve and requests for more walk-through and beginner tours.


• Sitecore - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Innovation: Sitecore's AI Copilot puts users ahead with capabilities to develop an initial strategy based on prompts and inputs that inform content types, and workflow tasks that consider the customer journey. This gives teams a head start on work and faster, more insightful speed to market.
  • Offering (product) strategy: Sitecore's AI-assisted Content Hub helps marketing teams unite fragmented content pipelines and eliminate inefficiencies while the platform automates workflows to aid collaboration across disjointed workforces. The integrated system ensures better brand consistency, localization efforts, and unified tracking and publishing across channels.
  • Operations: Sitecore's integrated, suite-based strategy allows customers to leverage GenAI for content marketing through its combined capabilities with other Sitecore (search, DAM, CDP, commerce, etc.) products. It's a versatile choice for those who need all technology simultaneously, or piecemeal.

  Cons:

  • Customer experience: Marketing teams are impressed with and understand the need for the capabilities Sitecore offers. However, the solution is technically sophisticated. Organizations need in-house technical talent to fully utilize the platform, as customer service and support is ranked lower than other vendors in this market, according to anecdotes from Gartner Peer Insights.
  • Product or service: Sitecore's ideation capabilities, including organic-search-based insights and keyword analysis with content ideation tools for large organizations, are basic compared to the capabilities offered by leaders in the market. Its social media and competitive insights lag those offered by others in this space.
  • Sales execution/pricing: Sitecore's sales strategy takes a top-down approach with a strong emphasis on the IT buyer. Customers cite a lack of transparency in pricing metrics and the entitlements algorithm that Sitecore uses, according to anecdotes from Gartner Peer Insights. Some products have add-ons, integrations or additional functionality that increase cost, but customers must seek specifics and clarity as to how much of a cost impact it will mean for them.


• Skyword - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Market understanding: Skyword's robust talent marketplace fills a critical gap for marketing teams looking to create more branded content. The Skyword360 platform allows users to vet, negotiate, hire and pay content writers globally. Its AI capabilities also make intuitive creator recommendations based on user content needs.
  • Product strategy: Skyword continues to evolve its roadmap, balancing AI with human-centric strategic involvement. Its ATOMM GenAI augmented capability quickly creates derivative, persona-specific content from human-generated content, greatly reducing error potential and maintaining intellectual property protections. Ongoing investment includes new GPT models and prompt parameters for more precise and brand-compliant outputs.
  • Customer experience: Skyword's stand-alone CMP is not bundled with other software or products, enabling a sharp focus on content creation. Its UI is intuitive and user-friendly, and configuration and onboarding usually take less than a week. Gartner clients and Peer Insights reviews cite the interface's simplicity and the support team's proactivity.

  Cons:

  • Product or service: Skyword's native performance analytics emphasizes SEO and search metrics as a proxy for success. Given the regulatory environment and how GenAI is redefining content ranking, there are many questions about the future of traditional SEO. As other vendors develop more sophisticated content measurement models, its reliance on legacy SEO may challenge marketing teams to measure content impact across channels in the face of declining customer engagement with brand websites. For an additional cost, Skyword integrates with clients' existing analytics stack for greater visibility into how content impacts lead generation goals, sales engagement and more.
  • Sales execution/pricing: While Skyword's AI capabilities have expanded through ATOMM over the past year, not all these features are offered through the standard CMP product. For example, users who need editorial services, likely for review of AI-generated work, must pay additional fees.
  • Business model: Skyword focuses on the "human" side of content operations, from a large freelancer network to dedicated account teams. It also focuses on providing clients with a personal touch by employing experienced content marketing teams and strategic consultative services. The reliance on this business model could saddle it with a cost structure or supplier relationships that are exposed to volatility given AI's impact, including GenAI, on marketing content.


• Sprinklr - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product or service: Sprinklr continues its all-in approach to social, combining its unique social listening capabilities with past content performance data and other insights to enable a robust content planning and content ideation process. Its creative analytics and productivity metrics enable more efficient content production. This closed feedback loop offers a confidence boost for CMOs needing to make the case for content spend. Users heavily focused on social will benefit from this product.
  • Innovation: Sprinklr has expanded into new channels, added integrations and evolved its AI capabilities to include automated brief drafting and content review. Gartner clients and Peer Insights reviews cite its regular updates as a key benefit. This is particularly valuable for users with an expansive content marketing strategy seeking a CMP that can keep pace.
  • Overall viability: Sprinklr reports impressive financial performance, with double-digit growth for its content marketing business, more than 650 customers covering a variety of verticals and 3,800 employees. These indicators of robust viability are partly due to a track record of customer retention and expansion within large B2B organizations with several business lines.

  Cons:

  • Sales execution/pricing: Sprinklr offers a per-seat tiered pricing model, which means planning for the number of users is more important for customers considering this vendor. Customers seeking consumption-based pricing or bundled-pricing might find this approach challenging. Additionally, customers should assess pricing structure for nonauthoring users, particularly those with a large number of content approvers.
  • Offering (product) strategy: In early 2024, Sprinklr brought in a new interim chief operating officer and a new chief customer officer. While it's too early to tell what changes they bring, prospective buyers should assess how new leaders will impact the product and/or service. Sprinklr is a legacy social and customer care platform, with the majority of its revenue and recent innovation focused on those core products.
  • Customer experience: Sprinkler offers additional training and implementation support for a fee, but Gartner clients and Peer Insights reviews cite a steep learning curve with the product. Implementation can last as long as eight weeks, which is longer than most vendors. Users should prepare for quarterly updates with this solution.


• Storyteq - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Innovation: Storyteq's investments in AI capabilities are advanced for the market. AI has been incorporated into most components, from planning through distribution, to shorten the entire content life cycle and increase performance. Unique features enable users to understand the provenance of content and promote the ethical use of AI.
  • Overall viability: Storyteq's integrations with AI and attention to the entire content life cycle include paid — with media partnerships such as Publicis Media, Mediaocean and Extreme Reach — earned, shared and owned channels, along with e-commerce. This unified approach supports users looking to streamline content insights creation, distribution and analysis across channels.
  • Market understanding: Storyteq leads the way among vendors with its vision of how a CMP can be the central engine fueling paid, shared, owned and commerce content. The CMP's content connectivity is progressive, with a clever use of AI that enriches and analyzes data from third-party martech platforms. This feature helps in understanding marketing and campaign objectives and proactively suggests ideas to optimize content and channel spend.

  Cons:

  • Customer experience: Small organizations seeking a single solution to inform and develop content may lack the resources to manage the Storyteq platform or take advantage of its full capabilities. Nascent teams requiring an entry-level CMP may want a vendor with fewer special features and more attention focused on smaller customer needs.
  • Sales execution/pricing: Storyteq offers various products, including Planner, Brand Portals, Workflow, analytics, Creative Automation, Resource and DAM. It describes its set-up fees and annual licensing fees as ranging from simple to sophisticated, with pricing based on the breadth of IP used, user volume tiers and value to the recipient organization. These many options can make the buying process complex and time-consuming.
  • Operations: The Storyteq deployment schedule focuses on big releases, rebrands and acquisitions like Pixelz.ai and ReviewStudio rather than minor customer-focused improvements. Its attention to complex updates can leave customers struggling to keep pace and fully utilize the platform.


• Upland - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Marketing strategy: With its focus on B2B enterprise customers, Upland's Kapost recognizes the shift toward a more comprehensive content operations suite with a DAM and CMS, even though those capabilities are not offered in its CMP. Its own strategy considers the content needs of other functions beyond marketing, such as customer success and product marketing.
  • Sales execution/pricing: Kapost's pricing follows a simple tier structure of users in groups of 10. Each tier is bundled with a number of consumer users who have limited access, usually for approval. Enterprise features, such as advanced security and advanced member management, are available at additional cost.
  • Customer experience: Kapost provides support through a community forum, dedicated customer success managers, email and phone during core North American business hours. Urgent or outage support is available 24/7. Customer service chat is available for users with a Premier Support Plan. A typical deployment involves cross-functional collaboration, focused on establishing workflows, approval processes, integrations, reports and dashboards, supporting stronger collaborations across sales and marketing that B2B organizations require for success.

  Cons:

  • Innovation: Upland has spent the past few years catching up to the rest of the market with basic enterprise features. Currently, Kapost does not include AI capabilities, but the roadmap includes several straightforward AI enhancements, such as automated tagging and predictive analytics.
  • Market responsiveness/record: Kapost has not kept pace with market direction. Even with an understanding of the enterprise state of content, Upland is slow to bring features to market compared to other vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant. Drawbacks include a lack of advanced features to support content strategy, ideation insights and GenAI content creation.
  • Offering (product) strategy: Kapost is built to primarily serve B2B content use cases. Its centralized content operations platform allows marketers to create various content types and distribute them across multiple channels. This narrow focus results in a platform with less attention to features and functions that are common across vendors in this market that serve a more varied client base.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms, 8 May 2024, ID G00790322

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