Every year Gartner releases the Multichannel Campaign Management Magic Quadrant in May. Gartner clients can find last year’s here. In the last three years, the market has shown campaign management’s trek towards digital marketing’s strange new world.
Without exception, every vendor on the magic quadrant leads with a digital channel story. In fact, references from marketers who have purchased a multichannel campaign management offering cite e-mail and the web as their top channels and use (direct mail was third in our 2012 findings; social, mobile, and search are quickly rising up the charts each year). However, the traditional campaign management vendors have not fully addressed the digital marketing ecosystem, leaving vendors from other markets, such as e-mail marketing, web content management, and social marketing vendors to formulate their own multi-channel campaign management strategies. Are these multiple markets all competing for the digital marketing space? Well, yes, yes they are.
The 2013 Multichannel Campaign Management MQ will be published in May. So far, there are four preliminary findings I’d like to share.
1. E-mail, e-mail, e-mail: Multichannel campaign management providers are seeing e-mail as their foot in the door for new deals. E-mail is still a “budget approvable” first step for marketing departments in virtually every industry. Campaign management’s added value will be e-mail as an integrated channel in which more emphasis will be placed on the “what to send” instead of just the “how to send”. It will include how e-mail is orchestrated with other channels like the web, social and mobile.
2. Social Marketing Campaigns Version 1: While some of the vendors still are partnering with others or even taking a wait and see approach to social marketing, others have taken the first step with functionality such as tweeting or posting trackable campaign content on social networks. Most of this is still version 1 type efforts.
3. Attribution metrics is still on the “roadmap” for many vendors: Pushed by customer demand, all vendors have noted the need for comprehensive attribution metric capability, for both online and offline campaigns. This is a holy grail for marketing. However, many vendors are still in development, in pre-development, or have pushed original plans out.
4. Content Marketing Gap: Mobile offers, trending user-generated social content, product catalogs, video, whitepapers, direct mail, e-mail – Multichannel Campaign Management is by definition, the ability to orchestrate and manage all this for marketing. Fully orchestrated online, offline content management has yet to be realized for this market as a whole.
Please expect to see the full report and findings in the published Multichannel Campaign Management MQ in two months time.