Adobe named a Leader in 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms

We’re excited to share that Adobe has been named a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms. This is the 10th consecutive year that Adobe has been a Leader — recognized for its Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. Gartner had given this Magic Quadrant a new name this year, and Adobe is placed highest in Ability to Execute and placed furthest in Completeness of Vision.

The last couple of years have been a wild ride for marketers (and their employers). Agility has never been more important. More than that, the ability to pivot marketing channels, campaigns and content quickly while operating at scale, has become nothing less than essential, and a key differentiator between winners and losers in the market. Meanwhile, the trends driven by digital technology evolution continue unabated — new business and go-to-market models, ever-increasing customer expectations, and, with that, the desire for marketing teams to not just drive leads, pipeline and revenue, but also to expand their role to orchestrate a broader set of engagement and experiences with customers and other strategic audiences.

We believe that our consistency as a Magic Quadrant Leader rests on our most important and relevant differentiator — flexibility. Since we serve a broad market from SMBs with small marketing teams to the largest enterprises with complex, globally-distributed marketing teams, it’s always been critical that our product and offerings flex to serve all of them equally well.

What’s our secret? Well, after all these years, maybe it’s no secret! It’s working side-by-side with our passionate customers and partners to continue pushing B2B Marketing Automation forward as marketers’ needs evolve. Yet, always focused on enabling the marketer to achieve their growth and career goals at every level, provide agility at scale, and deliver just the right engagement and experiences to every person and account. These unmatched capabilities help marketers of all sizes extend their team’s reach and execute multiple, unique campaigns at scale, faster and easier than any other Marketing Automation solution on the market. Adobe Marketo Engage has also focused on supporting a uniquely broad range of use cases, including B2B, B2C for highly considered purchases and B2B2C use cases.

Of course, Adobe Marketo Engage is just one offering of our industry-leading Adobe Experience Cloud — leading in virtually every category we touch.

The greatest reward for us is hearing directly from customers about their success. Many of them have written about their experiences with Marketo Engage on Gartner Peer Insights, saying:

• “Marketo is an incredibly powerful tool that allows me to market and track my marketing initiatives in a meaningful and scalable way. Marketo is both incredibly powerful and also incredibly user friendly.”
• “Marketo is the leader in B2B Marketing Automation. It is extremely robust and flexible. It has a ton of native integrations, or you can customize pretty much anything you want.”
• “Marketo Engage is a great solution for lead management. It is especially beneficial for B2B marketers who want to engage with customers at every stage of their buying journey.”

Let’s take a look at 3 key areas that our customers have told us are important to them. These are areas where we continue to innovate every day — keeping them at the forefront.

Working at the speed of digital

As we all adjust to a more virtual, digital work life, being able to work quickly and with fewer impediments has become even more important. True, your colleagues are just a message away, but there are fewer shoulders around to tap at a moment’s notice. That’s why we’ve been making Adobe Marketo Engage smarter, faster and more intuitive.

Marketer-friendly artificial Intelligence is the ultimate productivity booster and done right will get you better results. With AI-powered “lookalike” audiences and content personalization, Adobe Marketo Engage helps marketers build highly targeted, highly personalized campaigns, now for every campaign type. And with AI you can use “out-of-the-box,” it should feel magical, not mysterious. Recently, we added more visibility into the top behaviors driving our Predictive Audiences to give marketers the insights powering the AI — there’s a shoulder to tap when you need it!

To make Adobe Marketo Engage faster and more intuitive, we’re rolling out our next-generation user experience to all customers this year. With new global navigation and a new tree menu for accessing all campaigns and assets, marketers can find what they need faster. And the streamlined design, leveraging Adobe’s world-class design system, makes everything more consistent and intuitive.

Finally, integration with Workfront for planning and managing marketing workflows, speeds campaign development and time to market.

Data as the foundation of marketing and IT partnership

The shift to digital has bestowed marketing teams with nearly infinite amounts of customer data, but the challenge has been making use of it to create more consistent, personalized experiences. Connecting data in the right way and getting it to where it’s needed quickly, while still ensuring it’s being used appropriately, have been the main culprits. IT teams have invested years in connecting and securing the data, but these “lakes” don’t support the “rivers” of engagement that are the hallmarks of modern B2B marketing.

That’s why we announced the new B2B Edition of our Real-time Customer Data Platform (CDP), built on Adobe Experience Platform, at Adobe Summit in April. Available this year, the B2B Edition of our Real-time CDP unifies person and account profiles across systems to give go-to-market teams a complete and trusted understanding of their customers. Real-time profiles and patented data governance give B2B companies the right foundation for building high-precision audiences and delivering consistent, personalized, account-based experiences quickly and at scale.

With a data management system that’s tailor-made for B2B marketing use cases, and that lives in harmony with broader-scope IT data management systems, marketing and IT can have a seat at the table, together, as “besties.”

New ways to connect and interact

Given the neck-breaking pace of innovation for personal communication, it shouldn’t be surprising that people are ready for more flexible ways of communicating in their professional lives as well. It’s not just about supporting more flexible work environments, it’s about respecting someone’s time and helping them get what they need quickly, whether through self-serve or connecting with a person, which in the end creates a better experience.

To help marketing teams provide these experiences, we’ll begin to roll out Dynamic Chat, a set of essential chat capabilities for websites, to all Adobe Marketo Engage customers later this year. Marketing teams just getting started with chat can engage leads and accounts on their website, personalize content offers and book meetings with sales. As part of Adobe Marketo Engage, customers can integrate chat into their cross-channel marketing efforts and leverage Adobe Marketo Engage’s powerful personalization to drive more conversions, more opportunities and end-to-end experiences.

We’re honored by Gartner’s recognition of Adobe as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms (formerly CRM Lead Management) and we’re more inspired more than ever by the B2B marketing renaissance resulting from the most important innovation happening in the industry — our customers’ marketing innovation. We’re honored to be the B2B Marketing Automation Platform of choice for these fearless marketers and couldn’t be prouder of the results they’ve achieved, which you can see in a Total Economic Impact of Marketo Engage study, commissioned by Adobe and conducted by Forrester Consulting (spoiler alert: 267 percent ROI on Adobe Marketo Engage based on real customer interviews). To share in the inspiration, check out these amazing customer stories and you’ll see what drives us every day to push the boundaries of what technology can do for marketers around the world.

View the full Gartner report here.

Disclaimer: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, Noah Elkin, Julian Poulter, Christy Ferguson, Ilona Hansen, Jeffrey Cohen, 20 September 2021

The report was earlier named as Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management till 2020

In October 2018, Marketo was acquired by Adobe. Marketo was recognized as Leader in the 2012,13,14,15,16,17,18 reports Gartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved

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