Digital Marketing Platforms – Cut Through The Provider Hype

The 2015–16 report, Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting a Digital Marketing Platform, 2015–16, has crowned Adobe the King of Digital Marketing Platforms. IBM, Oracle and Salesforce rounded out the top four.

According to Gartner, “Digital marketing platforms are designed to support an extensible set of requirements within a single neighborhood or two. A digital marketing platform exposes key elements as standardized services via a programmatic application programming interface for building custom applications, extensions and integrations with other custom and commercial applications and data sources.”

A Word Of Caution

• When it comes to marketing technology or tools, there’s an abundance of choices. According to this chart, those choices doubled in the last year from 947 in Jan 2014 to 1846 in Jan 2015.

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• Understand your requirements and evaluate multiple value propositions. Some providers may have inflated their value propositions by claiming to be a “digital marketing platform” or a “marketing cloud” when in fact they aren’t. Inflated claims may lead to loss and disappointment in terms of your dollars spent, your time wasted and your expectations not met.
• Digital marketing platforms are complex inter-disciplinary systems, and work best when the CMO and CIO have a unified technology strategy to guide the organization’s digital marketing transformation.
• Unicorns are awesome – but we have not yet found one. Have realistic expectations of the tools and technology you choose to implement. Your expectations will be met if and only if the tools are used by people who leverage the correct processes to extract value from your marketing technology stack.

There are a lot of tools and software that can help make a digital marketer’s job a success. The trick is to choose the right tools and technology that cater to your specific needs at any given point of time.

Let us know if marketing technology has increased the efficiency and responsiveness of your marketing organization?