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Marketing Management Suite Software Selection Guide

Streamline your organizational approach to selecting a right-sized marketing management platform.

  • Selecting and implementing the right MMS platform – one that aligns with your requirements is a significant undertaking.
  • Despite the importance of selecting and implementing the right MMS platform, many organizations struggle to define an approach to picking the most appropriate vendor and rolling out the solution in an effective and cost-efficient manner.
  • IT often finds itself in the unenviable position of taking the fall for an MMS platform that doesn’t deliver on the promise of the MMS strategy.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • MMS platform selection must be driven by your overall customer experience management strategy. Link your MMS selection to your organization’s CXM framework.
  • Determine what exactly you require from your MMS platform; leverage use cases to help guide selection.
  • Ensure strong points of integration between your MMS and other software such as CRM and POS. Your MMS solution should not live in isolation; it must be part of a wider ecosystem.

Impact and Result

  • An MMS platform that effectively meets business needs and delivers value.
  • Reduced costs during MMS vendor platform selection and faster time to results after implementation.

Marketing Management Suite Software Selection Guide Research & Tools

1. Marketing Management Suite Software Selection Guide – A deck that walks you through the process of building your business case and selecting the proper MMS platform.

This blueprint will help you build a business case for selecting the right MMS platform, define key requirements, and conduct a thorough analysis and scan of the current state of the ever-evolving MMS market space.


Marketing Management Suite Software Selection Guide

Streamline your organizational approach to selecting a right-sized marketing management platform.

Analyst perspective

A robustly configured and comprehensive MMS platform is a crucial ingredient to help kick-start your organization's cross-channel and multichannel marketing management initiatives.

Modern marketing management suites (MMS) are imperative given today's complex, multitiered, and often non-standardized marketing processes. Relying on isolated methods such as lead generation or email marketing techniques for executing key cross-channel and multichannel marketing initiatives is not enough to handle the complexity of contemporary marketing management activities.

Organizations need to invest in highly customizable and functionally extensive MMS platforms to provide value alongside the marketing value chain and a 360-degree view of the consumer's marketing journey. IT needs to be rigorously involved with the sourcing and implementation of the new MMS tool, and the necessary business units also need to own the requirements and be involved from the initial stages of software selection.

To succeed with MMS implementation, consider drafting a detailed roadmap that outlines milestone activities for configuration, security, points of integration, and data migration capabilities and provides for ongoing application maintenance and support.

This is a picture of Yaz Palanichamy

Yaz Palanichamy
Senior Research Analyst, Customer Experience Strategy
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive summary

Your Challenge

  • Many organizations struggle with taking a systematic and structured approach to selecting a right-sized marketing management suite (MMS) – an indispensable part of managing an organization's specific and nuanced marketing management needs.
  • Organizations must define a clear-cut strategic approach to investing in a new MMS platform. Exercising the appropriate selection and implementation rigor for a right-sized MMS tool is a critical step in delivering concrete business value to sustain various marketing value chains across the organization.

Common Obstacles

  • An MMS vendor that is not well aligned to marketing requirements wastes resources and causes an endless cascade of end-user frustration.
  • The MMS market is rapidly evolving, making it difficult for vendors to retain a competitive foothold in the space.
  • IT managers and/or marketing professionals often find themselves in the unenviable position of taking the fall for MMS platforms that fail to deliver on the promise of the overarching marketing management strategy.

Info-Tech's Approach

  • MMS platform selection must be driven by your overall marketing management strategy. Email marketing techniques, social marketing, and/or lead management strategies are often not enough to satisfy the more sophisticated use cases demanded by increasingly complex customer segmentation levels.
  • For organizations with a large audience or varied product offerings, a well-integrated MMS platform enables the management of various complex campaigns across many channels, product lines, customer segments, and marketing groups throughout the enterprise.

Info-Tech Insight

IT must collaborate with marketing professionals and other key stakeholder groups to define a unified vision and holistic outlook for a right-sized MMS platform.

Info-Tech's methodology for selecting a right-sized marketing management suite platform

1. Understand Core MMS Features

2. Build the Business Case & Streamline Requirements

3. Discover the MMS Market Space & Prepare for Implementation

Phase Steps

  1. Define MMS Platforms
  2. Classify Table Stakes & Differentiating Capabilities
  3. Explore Trends
  1. Build the Business Case
  2. Streamline the Requirements Elicitation Process for a New MMS Platform
  3. Develop an Inclusive RFP Approach
  1. Discover Key Players in the Vendor Landscape
  2. Engage the Shortlist & Select Finalist
  3. Prepare for Implementation

Phase Outcomes

  1. Consensus on scope of MMS and key MMS platform capabilities
  1. MMS platform selection business case
  2. Top-level use cases and requirements
  3. Procurement vehicle best practices
  1. Market analysis of MMS platforms
  2. Overview of shortlisted vendors
  3. Implementation considerations

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3

Call #1: Understand what a marketing management suite is. Discuss core capabilities and key trends.

Call #2: Build the business case
to select a right-sized MMS.

Call #3: Define your core
MMS requirements.

Call #4: Build and sustain procurement vehicle best practices.

Call #5: Evaluate the MMS vendor landscape and short-list viable options.


Call #6: Review implementation considerations.

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

The MMS procurement process should be broken into segments:

  1. Create a vendor shortlist using this buyer's guide.
  2. Define a structured approach to selection.
  3. Review the contract.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

What are marketing management suite platforms?

Our Definition: Marketing management suite (MMS) platforms are core enterprise applications that provide a unified set of marketing processes for a given organization and, typically, the capability to coordinate key cross-channel marketing initiatives.

Key product capabilities for sophisticated MMS platforms include but are not limited to:

  • Email marketing
  • Lead nurturing
  • Social media management
  • Content curation and distribution
  • Marketing reporting and analytics
  • Consistent brand messaging

Using a robust and comprehensive MMS platform equips marketers with the appropriate tools needed to make more informed decisions around campaign execution, resulting in better targeting, acquisition, and customer retention initiatives. Moreover, such tools can help bolster effective revenue generation and ensure more viable growth initiatives for future marketing growth enablement strategies.

Info-Tech Insight

Feature sets are rapidly evolving over time as MMS offerings continue to proliferate in this market space. Ensure that you focus on core components such as customer conversion rates and new lead captures through maintaining well- integrated multichannel campaigns.

Marketing Management Suite Software Selection Buyer's Guide

Info-Tech Insight

A right-sized MMS software selection and procurement decision should involve comprehensive requirements and needs analysis by not just Marketing but also other organizational units such as IT, in conjunction with input suppled from the internal vendor procurement team.

MMS Software Selection & Vendor Procurement Journey. The three main steps are: Envision the Art of the Possible; Elicit Granular Requirements; Contextualize the MMS Vendor Market Space

Phase 1

Understand Core MMS Features

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

1.1 Define MMS Platforms

1.2 Classify Table Stakes & Differentiating Capabilities

1.3 Explore Trends

2.1 Build the Business Case

2.2 Streamline Requirements Elicitation

2.3 Develop an Inclusive RFP Approach

3.1 Discover Key Players in the Vendor Landscape

3.2 Engage the Shortlist & Select Finalist

3.3 Prepare for Implementation

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

  • Level-set an understanding of MMS technology.
  • Define which MMS features are table stakes (standard) and which are key differentiating functionalities.
  • Identify the art of the possible in a modern MMS platform from sales, marketing, and service lenses.

This phase involves the following participants:

  • CMO
  • Digital Marketing Project Manager
  • Marketing Data Analytics Analyst
  • Marketing Management Executive

What are marketing management suite platforms?

Our Definition: Marketing management suite (MMS) platforms are core enterprise applications that provide a unified set of marketing processes for a given organization and, typically, the capability to coordinate key cross-channel marketing initiatives.

Key product capabilities for sophisticated MMS platforms include but are not limited to:

  • Email marketing
  • Lead nurturing
  • Social media management
  • Content curation and distribution
  • Marketing reporting and analytics
  • Consistent brand messaging

Using a robust and comprehensive MMS platform equips marketers with the appropriate tools needed to make more informed decisions around campaign execution, resulting in better targeting, acquisition, and customer retention initiatives. Moreover, such tools can help bolster effective revenue generation and ensure more viable growth initiatives for future marketing growth enablement strategies.

Info-Tech Insight

Feature sets are rapidly evolving over time as MMS offerings continue to proliferate in this market space. Ensure that you focus on core components such as customer conversion rates and new lead captures through maintaining well- integrated multichannel campaigns.

Marketing through the ages

Tracing the foundational origins of marketing management practices

Initial traction for marketing management strategies began with the need to holistically understand the effects of advertising efforts and how the media mix could be best optimized.

1902

1920s-1930s

1942

1952-1964

1970s-1990s

Recognizing the increasing need for focused and professional marketing efforts, the University of Pennsylvania offers the first marketing course, dubbed "The Marketing of Products."

As broadcast media began to peak, marketers needed to manage a greater number of complex and interspersed marketing channels.

The introduction of television ads in 1942 offered new opportunities for brands to reach consumers across a growing media landscape. To generate the highest ROI, marketers sought to understand the consumer and focus on more tailored messaging and product personalization. Thus, modern marketing practices were born.

Following the introduction of broadcast media, marketers had to develop strategies beyond traditional spray-and-pray methods. The first modern marketing measurement concept, "marketing mix," was conceptualized in 1952 and popularized in 1964 by Neil Borden.

This period marked the digital revolution and the new era of marketing. With the advent of new communications technology and the modern internet, marketing management strategies reached new heights of sophistication. During the early 1990s, search engines emerged to help users navigate the web, leading to early forms of search engine optimization and advertising.

Where it's going: the future state of marketing management

  1. Increasing Complexity Driving Consumer Purchasing Decisions
    • "The main complexity is dealing with the increasing product variety and changing consumer demands, which is forcing marketers to abandon undifferentiated marketing strategies and even niche marketing strategies and to adopt a mass customization process interacting one-to-one with their customers." – Complexity, 2019
  2. Consumers Seeking More Tailored Brand Personalization
    • Financial Services marketers lead all other industries in AI application adoption, with 37% currently using them (Salesforce, 2019).
  3. The Inclusion of More AI-Enabled Marketing Strategies
    • According to a 2022 Nostro report, 70% of consumers say it is important that brands continue to offer personalized consumer experiences.
  4. Green Marketing
    • Recent studies have shown that up to 80% of all consumers are interested in green marketing strategies (Marketing Schools, 2020).

Marketing management by the numbers

Key trends

6%

As a continuously growing discipline, marketing management roles are predicted to grow faster than average, at a rate of 6% over the next decade.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021

17%

While many marketing management vendors offer A/B testing, only 17% of marketers are actively using A/B testing on landing pages to increase conversion rates.

Source: Oracle, 2022

70%

It is imperative that technology and SaaS companies begin to use marketing automation as a core component of their martech strategy to remain competitive. About 70% of technology and SaaS companies are employing integrated martech tools.

Source: American Marketing Association, 2021

Understand MMS table stakes features

Organizations can expect nearly all MMS vendors to provide the following functionality

Email Marketing

Lead Nurturing

Reporting, Analytics, and Marketing KPIs

Marketing Campaign Management

Integrational Catalog

The use of email alongside marketing efforts to promote a business' products and services. Email marketing can be a powerful tool to maintain connections with your audience and ensure sustained brand promotion.

The process of developing and nurturing relationships with key customer contacts at every major touchpoint in their customer journey. MMS platforms can use automated lead-nurturing functions that are triggered by customer behavior.

The use of well-defined metrics to help curate, gather, and analyze marketing data to help track performance and improve the marketing department's future marketing decisions and strategies.

Tools needed for the planning, execution, tracking, and analysis of direct marketing campaigns. Such tools are needed to help gauge your buyers' sentiments toward your company's product offerings and services.

MMS platforms should generally have a comprehensive open API/integration catalog. Most MMS platforms should have dedicated integration points to interface with various tools across the marketing landscape (e.g. social media, email, SEO, CRM, CMS tools, etc.).

Identify differentiating MMS features

While not always deemed must-have functionality, these features may be the deciding factor when choosing between two MMS-focused vendors.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

A DAM can help manage digital media asset files (e.g. photos, audio files, video).

Customer Data Management

Customer data management modules help your organization track essential customer information to maximize your marketing results.

Text-Based Marketing

Text-based marketing strategy is ideal for any organization primarily focused on coordinating structured and efficient marketing campaigns.

Customer
Journey Orchestration

Customer journey orchestration enables users to orchestrate customer conversations and journeys across the entire marketing value chain.

AI-Driven Workflows

AI-powered workflows can help eliminate complexities and allow marketers to automate and optimize tasks across the marketing spectrum.

Dynamic Segmentation

Dynamic segmentation to target audience cohorts based on recent actions and stated preferences.

Advanced Email Marketing

These include capabilities such as A/B testing, spam filter testing, and detailed performance reporting.

Ensure you understand the art of the possible across the MMS landscape

Understanding the trending feature sets that encompass the broader MMS vendor landscape will best equip your organization with the knowledge needed to effectively match today's MMS platforms with your organization's marketing requirements.

Holistically examine the potential of any MMS solution through three main lenses:

Data-Driven
Digital Advertising

Adapt innovative techniques such as conversational marketing to help collect, analyze, and synthesize crucial audience information to improve the customer marketing experience and pre-screen prospects in a more conscientious manner.

Next Best Action Marketing

Next best action marketing (NBAM) is a customer-centric paradigm/marketing technique designed to capture specific information about customers and their individual preferences. Predicting customers' future actions by understanding their intent during their purchasing decisions stage will help improve conversion rates.

AI-Driven Customer
Segmentation

The use of inclusive and innovative AI-based forecast modeling techniques can help more accurately analyze customer data to create more targeted segments. As such, marketing messages will be more accurately tailored to the customer that is reading them.

Art of the possible: data-driven digital advertising

CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING INTELLIGENCE

Are you curious about the measures needed to boost engagement among your client base and other primary target audience groups? Conversational marketing intelligence metrics can help collect and disseminate key descriptive data points across a broader range of audience information.

AI-DRIVEN CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING DEVICES

Certain social media channels (e.g. LinkedIn and Facebook) like to take advantage of click-to-Messenger-style applications to help drive meaningful conversations with customers and learn more about their buying preferences. In addition, AI-driven chatbot applications can help the organization glean important information about the customer's persona by asking probing questions about their marketing purchase behaviors and preferences.

METAVERSE- DRIVEN BRANDING AND ADVERTISING

One of the newest phenomena in data-driven marketing technology and digital advertising techniques is the metaverse, where users can represent themselves and their brand via virtual avatars to further gamify their marketing strategies. Moreover, brands can create immersive experiences and engage with influencers and established communities and collect a wealth of information about their audience that can help drive customer retention and loyalty.

Case study

This is the logos for Gucci and Roblox.

Metaverse marketing extends the potential for commercial brand development and representation: a deep dive into Gucci's metaverse practice

INDUSTRY: Luxury Goods Apparel
SOURCE: Vogue Business

Challenge

Beginning with a small, family-owned leather shop known as House of Gucci in Florence, Italy, businessman and fashion designer Guccio Gucci sold saddles, leather bags, and other accessories to horsemen during the 1920s. Over the years, Gucci's offerings have grown to include various other personal luxury goods.

As consumer preferences have evolved over time, particularly with the younger generation, Gucci's professional marketing teams looked to invest in virtual technology environments to help build and sustain better brand awareness among younger consumer audiences.

Solution

In response to the increasing presence of metaverse-savvy gamers on the internet, Gucci began investing in developing its online metaverse presence to bolster its commercial marketing brand there.

A recent collaboration with Roblox, an online gaming platform that offers virtual experiences, provided Gucci the means to showcase its fashion items using the Gucci Garden – a virtual art installation project for Generation Z consumers, powered by Roblox's VR technology. The Gucci Garden virtual system featured a French-styled garden environment where players could try on and buy Gucci virtual fashion items to dress up their blank avatars.

Results

Gucci's disruptive, innovative metaverse marketing campaign project with Roblox is proof of its commitment to tapping new marketing growth channels to showcase the brand to engage new and prospective consumers (e.g. Roblox's player base) across more unique sandboxed/simulation environments.

The freedom and flexibility in the metaverse environments allows brands such as Gucci to execute a more flexible digital marketing approach and enables them to take advantage of innovative metaverse-driven technologies in the market to further drive their data-driven digital marketing campaigns.

Art of the possible: next best action marketing (NBAM)

NEXT BEST ACTION PREDICTIVE MODELING

To improve conversion propensity, next best action techniques can use predictive modeling methods to help build a dynamic overview of the customer journey. With information sourced from actionable marketing intelligence data, MMS platforms can use NBAM techniques to identify customer needs based on their buying behavior, social media interactions, and other insights to determine what unique set of actions should be taken for each customer.

MACHINE LEARNING–BASED RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS

Rules-based recommender systems can help assign probabilities of purchasing behaviors based on the patterns in touchpoints of a customer's journey and interaction with your brand. For instance, a large grocery chain company such as Walmart or Whole Foods will use ML-based recommender systems to decide what coupons they should offer to their customers based on their purchasing history.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

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A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

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Guided Implementation 1: Understand Core MMS features
  • Call 1: Understand what a marketing management suite is. Discuss core capabilities and key trends.

Guided Implementation 2: Build the business case and streamline requirements
  • Call 1: Build the business case to select a right-sized MMS.
  • Call 2: Define your core MMS requirements.
  • Call 3: Build and sustain procurement vehicle best practices.

Guided Implementation 3: Discover the MMS market space and prepare for implementation
  • Call 1: Evaluate the MMS vendor landscape and short-list viable options.
  • Call 2: Review implementation considerations.

Author

Yaz Palanichamy

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