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.

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

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

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.

Phase 1

Understand Core MMS Features

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.

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

Understand MMS table stakes features

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

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.

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:

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

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.