The enterprise marketing software suite forms the foundation of the marketer’s modern marketing technology (martech) stack.  Marketers depend on these solutions to accomplish everything from customer understanding, engagement optimization, and personalization to campaign execution and performance management.

Despite industrywide adoption and success, stubborn challenges have lingered; the solutions typically lack an advanced technology platform, emphasizing brute force breadth of functionality over depth, usability, and efficiency. Loosely tied together or awkwardly assembled from different products, these complex solutions gained a deserved reputation for being difficult to successfully implement and use. Forrester’s legacy term for this technology, “enterprise marketing software suites,” reflected its disparate nature: a collection of different applications and technologies packaged and delivered as a single solution in name only.

Today, as vendors embrace a platform strategy combined with specialization across marketing, customer experience, and data and analytics, we’re observing the dual counterintuitive trends of enhanced product cohesion and diversity of marketing capabilities. So, we’re excited to share our latest Now Tech in this space with a slightly different name: enterprise marketing suites (EMSes).

This report is designed to help buyers of EMSes develop a shortlist of vendors for consideration, based on their functional requirements and current martech stack. While all the solutions in this category offer broad baseline functionality, we’ve identified five functional areas in which vendors emphasize more advanced capabilities:

  • Data and insights vendors provide advanced data management features and customer intelligence based on AI and predictive modeling.
  • Marketing experiences vendors modernize campaign and journey orchestration across channels and customer touchpoints.
  • Advertising experiences vendors unify digital advertising efforts with advertising data and campaigns capabilities.
  • Marketing operations vendors streamline people and workflows to facilitate efficient processes, collaboration, and performance management.
  • Digital experiences vendors extend customer interactions beyond marketing with customer journey orchestration and native functionality in web content management, e-commerce, and contact centers.

Stay tuned! There’s more to come as we kick off our enterprise marketing suites Forrester Wave™ for publication in Q3 2022! In the meantime, if you have questions about assembling your martech stack, feel free to set up an inquiry with us.