About This Constellation ShortList™
Business to business (B2B) marketing automation tools have Artificial Intelligence (AI) for a renaissance, focusing the spotlight on growth-driving platforms delivering more automated, intelligent, creative and focused journeys for a digital-first buyer. With AI embedded across all marketing automation tools, B2B organizations are now enjoying a new age of contextual, account-centric individualization. Most recently, generative AI capabilities have welcomed advanced segmentation of markets and new analysis of engagement networks to reshape how precise personalization can become…and can generate the creative assets and content to deploy.
Large organizations, with multiple lines of business and typically more than 3,000 employees, require the ability personalize interactions at scale with rich analytics and intelligence that empower marketers to initiate, build and track relationships that directly demonstrate revenue contribution.
B2B marketers must closely integrate marketing activities and relationships with sales, customer support and service, embracing the entirety of the customer experience value chain. This has driven marketers to adopt tools with advanced lead capture, scoring and alert features to better connect marketing qualified leads with profitable sales actions. Marketers expect automation tools to be data driven and creative, delivering targeted, personalized interactions with dynamic, attention-grabbing design.
Account based marketing capabilities, recommendations from machine learning and AI, out-of-the-box workflows and open architectures to allow for frictionless connections to a broad portfolio of sales, service, ERP and data solutions are increasingly baseline considerations in this mature space.
Threshold Criteria
Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:
- Ease of use, application and utilization across intended users
- Integration into CRM systems, sales visibility
- Cross-functional connection and collaboration capability
- Quickly and easily design campaigns, visual workflow
- Cross-channel content and asset management and measurement
- Thoughtful lead capture and scoring, supports account-based marketing
- Dynamic creative asset creation, delivery and personalization
- Robust reporting and analytics suite, including role-based reporting
- Attribution analysis and modeling
- Testing, A/B and in-flight optimization
- Product vision and road map
- Scalable to manage large, distributed teams
- Flexible workflows for addressing compliance and regulatory needs
- AI- machine language-powered recommendations
- GenerativeAI and advanced AI models for real-time campaign, content and engagement assistance and recommendation
- AI/ML capabilities to ingest and analyze data for smart segmentation and data enhancement/augmentation
- Well-thought-out architecture, microservices, API connections
- Post-sale support and community for large teams and global users
The Constellation ShortList™
Constellation evaluates 50 solutions categorized in this market. This Constellation ShortList is determined by client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share and internal research. Constellation also considered the specific needs and demands faced by large enterprises managing complex sales cycles, large teams and multiple brands and lines of business all working from a central cloud solution. In alphabetical order:
- Adobe Marketo Engage
- Creatio
- HCL Unica
- HubSpot
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing
- Oracle Fusion Marketing
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement
- SAP Emarsys Customer Engagament
Frequency of Evaluation
Each Constellation ShortList will be updated once per year. There could be an update after six months, should the analyst deem it necessary.
Evaluation Services
Constellation clients can work with the analyst and research team to conduct a more thorough discussion, vendor selection and contract negotiation.
