By Martin Kihn & Todd Berkowitz, Analysts, Gartner
Summary
Consumers’ demands for more personalized and relevant marketing and advertising put pressure on marketing leaders to step up data integration, analysis and use. This research introduces five vendors who provide smart algorithms and other methods to help data-driven marketers succeed.
Overview
Key Findings
Datorama provides a flexible and scalable integration platform designed for marketers and agencies.
Persado provides a platform that automates the creation of marketing messages and heralds the dawn of the robowriters.
Social analytics vendor Affinio focuses on consumers’ networks, not their conversations, and offers a novel approach to customer research and social ad targeting.
B2B-focused provider EverString offers an account-based marketing solution for enterprises, while Radius aims its predictive engine at marketers who want to target small and midsize businesses.
Recommendations
Determine whether specific areas of your data-driven marketing and analytics programs could benefit from a new solution for data integration, content generation and testing, social insights, or B2B lead generation.
Investigate new marketing data and analytics providers, such as the five featured in this research, to appreciate what’s possible and expand your provider consideration set.
Weigh the risks of using new and less established providers, as well as the technical and operational risks of employing less mature technologies, before you buy.
Review your existing data integration and analytics toolsets at least quarterly, since the data-driven marketing provider market changes frequently.
Analysis
This research does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
What You Need to Know
Data-driven marketing spans the tools and techniques used to identify, manage, analyze and make use of the ever-growing swell of information available to marketers. To succeed and gain competitive advantage, marketers are building up their own capabilities, turning to capable partners and adopting new tools. This research describes five vendors that offer “cool” tools that help marketers integrate, analyze and activate their data.
Affinio
Halifax, Nova Scotia ( www.affinio.com )
Analysis by Martin Kihn
Why Cool: Most customers don’t bother to engage with brands on social channels and rarely post an opinion, good or bad. To mine insights from public social networks such as Twitter and Tumblr, marketers typically use social analytics platforms to aggregate comments that mention them and generalize from there. Affinio provides a social analytics solution that takes a more creative — and potentially more insightful — approach. Rather than analyzing the posts and comments that mention a product or service explicitly, Affinio focuses on the social networks of the people making the comments, as well as the other brands, media and even celebrities they like. The platform uses machine-learning methods, such as graph analysis and text analytics, to build up “tribes” of people around an audience or other interests. These can be used to help marketers construct a deeper, more three-dimensional profile for messaging and offers, as well as new and less obvious targets for advertising and look-alike modeling. The company has raised about $6 million since 2013.
For example, a gaming company wanted to promote an event it was co-sponsoring with a cycling club. The company used Affinio to analyze the social networks of people who had shown an interest in the club (either by liking it or mentioning it positively) and rapidly returned a report of the media, locations and celebrities favored by the cycling club’s own “tribe.” It used this information to set up endorsements and buy ads.
Affinio’s network analysis can be used to build better personas and segments by incorporating unusual, even counterintuitive, information; for media targeting and distribution deals; to identify potential partnerships and promising geographies; and to educate and inform frontline staff, including sales. By identifying networks of public social handles, Affinio can also enable targeted advertising on Twitter. Since it relies on public posts, Affinio can be used to build out profiles of competitors’ customers as well.
Challenges: Social analytics is a crowded space — Gartner actively follows about two dozen vendors — and any platform is hard-pressed to rise above the din. In addition, Affinio relies on public social networks, which makes it vulnerable to future restrictions imposed by Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Marketers and advertisers are also likely to have a relatively mature social analytics practice and a preferred set of vendors, which makes Affinio another line item requiring proof of incremental value.
Who Should Care: Affinio can be a useful next-gen research tool for B2C or B2B marketers who would like to get more from their social analytics insights and whose customers (or prospects) are likely to be engaged in public social networks. Marketers in competitive industries with rapidly changing dynamics, such as entertainment and beauty, could benefit from Affinio’s potential to provide interesting insights into competitors’ customers. Agencies looking to give clients a new spin on social analytics should consider adding Affinio to their provider mix.
Datorama
New York, New York ( www.datorama.com )
Analysis by Martin Kihn
Why Cool: One of marketers’ bete noires is integrating data from dozens of different sources to make it available for analysis. Datorama provides a flexible and scalable solution that focuses on the marketing data integration problem, offering a data management and analytics tool aimed at marketers, agencies, publishers and platforms. Unlike more traditional data integration tools, which were designed for IT users, Datorama was built for hard-working marketers who need to pull information from a bewildering portfolio of data management, marketing analytics, campaign management, social media, sales and other platforms. Its clients add an average of 70 data streams per year, which Datorama maps to a common marketing data taxonomy and makes available to dashboards, analytics and other applications. Since its founding in 2012, the company says it has raised about $20 million, and signed up 200 agencies and 1,900 brands.
Datorama provides two ways for marketers to integrate data: via API; or through its TotalConnect interface, which imports files in any format and automatically suggests a mapping of fields to a flexible marketing data model. The model itself includes common marketing entities, is not preset, and can adapt as needed to accommodate changes in the data sources or the addition of new sources. By providing a regularly updated, clean source of information, Datorama functions as a central repository for one or more data marts that can make existing reporting and analytics processes more efficient. In addition to integration, Datorama also offers an analytics center, which provides dashboards and reports with visualization capabilities, as well as basic forecasting and support for more advanced analytics such as predictive R functions.
Challenges: The data integration space is crowded with a number of different potential solutions and many hyperbolic claims. Most marketing and advertising technology companies promise to provide a “single view of the customer” and advanced analytics capabilities. Datorama must work to differentiate its core offering — a critical but behind-the-scenes part of the marketing stack — from apparently similar but functionally distinct data visualization, dashboard and analytics tools such as Domo, Beckon and Origami Logic.
Who Should Care: Users who face the infamous “siloed data” issue and are seeking a way to integrate and analyze disparate datasets should consider Datorama. Advertisers exploring bringing some programmatic media buying in-house should consider the platform’s campaign pacing reporting tools for trading desks. Agencies with a portfolio of brands with disconnected data can white label Datorama to provide a basis for reporting and analysis.
EverString
San Mateo, California ( www.everstring.com )
Analysis by Todd Berkowitz
Why Cool: Marketing leaders are increasingly turning to predictive analytics applications to improve their demand generation efforts and focus on the buyers with the greatest propensity to purchase. EverString is a new entrant to this field (it was founded in July 2014) that has quickly made its presence felt, thanks to its proprietary database of 11 million B2B companies, 20,000 different attributes and rapid deployment of models across many points in the funnel. In October 2015, the company raised $65 million in a Series B round and made the shortlist for numerous Gartner clients.
Because it has both lead and account-level data, EverString is also making an aggressive foray into account-based marketing (ABM). While ABM is traditionally used to target a known set of accounts (based on revenue, industry or opportunity), many marketers are unsure about which accounts offer the greatest potential and should be included in ABM programs. EverString’s predictive account models enable marketers to identify high-potential ABM candidates and then push them to third-party ABM platforms for use. The company is also building partnerships with publishers and other players in the online advertising ecosystem, offering the potential for a “one stop shop” for marketers seeking predictive-analytics-driven ABM solutions.
Challenges: Within the fast-growing, but still nascent, predictive demand-generation and lead-scoring markets, there are several established and well-known competitors, such as Lattice and Mintigo. Differentiation is becoming harder to identify, and even their model deployment time is less of an advantage, especially in larger, more complex deals where time to market is not a primary concern. Some vendors also offer solutions that cover upsell/cross-sell use cases that EverString may be forced to address in the near future.
Who Should Care: Marketers and demand-generation leaders with large volumes of leads and mature demand-generation programs should consider EverString to improve conversion rates and increase pipeline contributions. Companies with free trials or “freemium” solutions and teams of sales development reps (SDRs) are particularly good candidates, but these types of solutions are broadly applicable across industries. Marketers at small and midsize companies can still see significant benefits from using EverString, as long as they have a sufficient number of win-loss transactions to train the predictive models.
Persado
New York, New York ( www.persado.com )
Analysis by Martin Kihn
Why Cool: Despite the imperative to deliver more personalized messages, marketers face real limits on their ability to create and test copy at scale. Founded in 2012, Persado represents a new breed of personalization tool that addresses the challenge by automating portions of the creative copywriting and testing process. Using sophisticated text analytics and a library of taxonomies, Persado creates far more versions of a marketing email subject line, body copy, website content or other textual material than human copywriters could, and it uses testing algorithms to further refine the copy. In addition to owned channels such as email and websites, Persado can be used to create and test messages in search and dynamic banner advertisements. It has raised $66 million and claims around 75 enterprise clients.
Persado inhabits the promising, but still emerging, field of cognitive content. This includes the use of smart machines to generate messages algorithmically optimized to get people to do something, such as make a purchase or submit a form. To create versions of a text-based message, Persado parses the message into what it calls its five “genes,” or content types (emotions, descriptions, calls to action, formatting and position). It further dissects the genes into a hierarchical set of tags that its machine-learning software uses to “understand” what makes people act. (For example, emotion words denoting joy might be shown to lead to more purchases.) What is cool about this approach is its unique incorporation of emotion into the text generation formula, which is usually concerned only with turning data feeds into sentences. Despite its patina of robowriting, Persado is more of an adjunct than replacement for an in-house or agency copywriting team, allowing them to increase productivity while maintaining control over the basic message.
Challenges: Robowriting solutions in general face the early-market problem of convincing buyers that they work and will improve results. Marketers outside the direct-response category may be particularly skeptical, since the immediate impact of copy changes is harder to measure. In addition, Persado faces the obstacle of entrenched habits and in-house or agency teams of (human) creators. More generally, cognitive content is an undiscovered country where artificial intelligence intersects with psychology; the conversation about ethics and social impact has only just begun.
Who Should Care: Marketers and advertisers who target a number of subsegments or have a diverse product or service portfolio can benefit from exploring Persado’s approach to automated personalization. In particular, marketers who rely on text to tell their brand stories, have a large and demanding email or website content engine, or are having trouble improving the impact of their marketing messages, should consider Persado. Advertiser or agency teams asked to develop a large number of message versions for dynamic creative optimization (DCO) programs also should consider this company.
Radius
San Francisco, California ( www.radius.com )
Analysis by Todd Berkowitz
Why Cool: Most of the buzz around B2B predictive marketing tools has been around demand generation and lead scoring. Radius, however, has quietly carved out a successful business using predictive analytics to help companies improve targeting and segmentation, especially those selling to small businesses. Through data science models and the Radius Business Graph, the company helps marketers size markets (geographic and vertical) and then identify the best businesses within those markets to target. Through integrations with CRM lead management tools, sales force automation (SFA) applications, social media tools and advertising platforms, marketers can use Radius to quickly run campaigns to those businesses.
Radius offers a clean interface and provides a number of data and analytics tools for marketers to measure success and adjust campaigns. Models can be trained and validated by the user in less than 24 hours, allowing marketers to quickly assess the viability of markets and campaigns. The company has raised more than $125 million and is rapidly expanding beyond its initial focus of predictive go-to-market applications. It announced plans to support additional use cases around demand generation and scoring.
Challenges: The company has had relatively little competition when selling applications for segmentation and targeting of small businesses, especially outside of the high-tech vertical. As Radius looks to expand its offerings, however, it will run into a much larger set of competitors, including several current and former Gartner Cool Vendors such as 6sense. When it comes to product development, sales and marketing, Radius will need to leverage the capabilities that have made it successful to date or be lost in a crowd.
Who Should Care: Marketers and demand generation leaders that target small businesses should consider Radius, especially if they are currently taking broad and expensive approaches to reaching potential customers. While companies across many industries have purchased Radius, the company has had the most deployments with customers in the financial services, insurance, payment processing, office supplies and software markets.
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