2015 Guide to the “CMO Technology Blueprint for Midsize B2B Companies” Infographic

Contributing Analyst(s): Ian Michiels
2015 Guide to the “CMO
Technology Blueprint for Midsize
B2B Companies” Infographic
DEEP DIVE

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Entire content © 2015 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction is prohibited.
2015 Guide to the CMO Technology Blueprint for Midsize B2B Companies
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You have permission to reproduce or
distribute this asset (and the infographic)
unaltered and with attribution.
We intend to publish annual or bi-annual
revisions to the infographic and the guide,
so we encourage any form of feedback -
negative or positive.
Special thanks to the ChiefMartec and LUMA
Partners for creating insightful and powerful
infographics featuring thousands of vendor
logos organized by categories. These can
and should be used in conjunction with
Gleanster Blueprints to help navigate the
complex marketing technology ecosystem.
As Marcel Proust once said, “The real voyage
of discovery consists not in seeking new
landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Executive Summary
The Midsize B2B CMO Technology Blueprint is designed to be a tool for mid-to-early enterprise
business-to-business companies with between 50 and 1,000 employees. While there are a variety
of ways we can cut the market, including revenue, the complexity of managing go-to-market
strategy grows exponentially as employee headcount expands to over a thousand - so this was
our threshold for classifying mid-size organizations.
While interesting and widely referenced, many of the logo-centric infographics are not all that
useful for determining which technologies to invest in – and, more importantly, why. This Deep
Dive will provide practical and detailed advice about the technologies recommended in the 2015
CMO Technology Blueprint for Midsize B2B firms. You’ll notice that a tiny subset of the available
technologies are actually recommended in the blueprint. That’s because not all technologies
are appropriate or realistic for the vast majority of midsize B2B firms. (Yes, we may have missed
some, so shoot us a note at research@gleanster.com if you’re passionate about something we
missed.)
In fact, you should make a special note of technologies we have classified as “mission critical.”
These represent tools that are 1) widely adopted among Midsize B2B Top Performing
organizations from our survey data and 2) good sources of competitive differentiation
RESOURCES
Marketing Catetgory Research Portal
BLUEPRINT PUBLICATION AGENDA
2015 Marketing Technology Blueprint for
B2B Small Businesses
2015 CMO Technology Blueprint for
Enterprise B2B Companies
2015 Marketing Technology Blueprint for
B2C Small Businesses
2015 CMO Technology Blueprint for
Enterprise B2C Companies
2015 CMO Technology Blueprint for Midsize
B2C Companies

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How Should You Use the CMO Blueprint?
As you are probably well aware, there are a dizzying variety of marketing technologies you could
invest in. But should you? As a CMO there’s no doubt your inbox is flooded with outreach from
vendor sales reps peddling the “next big and unique software for B2B marketing firms just like
yours.” It’s okay to roll your eyes at these pitches.
We will highlight a handful of “featured sample vendors” in each category as examples – and
you are encouraged to use the existing supergraphics or the Gleanster.com vendor directories
organized by topic area to explore a vendor landscape further. Featured vendors did not pay us
to be featured, but we fully intend to charge them in the future, because we want to showcase
vendors who display a serious interest in paying to get in front of targeted industries and
company sizes. These are the firms you should focus your finite time on. If they are investing in
brand exposure with you in this targeted study, they probably do have viable solutions that can
address your company size and industry
NAVIGATING THE TECHNOLOGY BLUEPRINT
From a business value standpoint, your job as a CMO is threefold: cost savings and efficiency,
revenue growth, and customer satisfaction. All of your management objectives, incentives, and
variable compensation metrics can be directly or indirectly linked to these three areas of business
value. In a B2B environment a CMO is typically tasked with maximizing customer lifecycle
engagement. Although according to research over 70% of CMOs are evaluated and compensated
based on customer acquisition metrics. (Don’t forget that you can automate retention and
expansion efforts with the same technology that is used to drive customer acquisition revenue.)
There are only four areas of strategic investment you can focus your budget, time, resources, and
energy on: marketing operations, brand awareness/customer acquisition, customer retention/
customer expansion, and customer loyalty. All marketing technologies directly or indirectly
address one of these four areas – or they are virtually useless to you from a return-on-investment
perspective. That makes it a little easier to segment the vendor landscape. However, as you can
see, lots of technologies are actually quite good at addressing multiple priorities, and we had to
make some tough decisions about where to draw the line. That also means there may be some
overlap in the features and technologies you invest in to support marketing. That’s okay and
you probably can’t avoid it. But you do want to avoid having multiple systems that clearly deliver
identical functionality – for example multiple email tools, an email and marketing automation
tool, etc.
PLATFORM IS THE NEW P IN THE MARKETING MIX
Over the last 5 years there was a great deal of consolidation in the marketing landscape,
largely among best-of-breed providers, and it had an impact on midsize B2B companies. You
probably experienced vendor relationships that suddenly turned into Oracle or Salesforce.com
relationships through acquisitions. Today the concepts of a “marketing cloud” and “customer
experience” are common terms for defining consolidated portfolio offerings among large suite
providers like Salesforce.com, Oracle, and Adobe. The truth is, we are probably 7-10 years
from widespread adoption of comprehensive suite offerings that are currently positioned as

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TheGleansterCMOMarketingTechnologyBlueprintfeaturesselectionsfrom57differentcategoriesofmarketingandsalestechnologytrackedbyGleanster.Itisinspiredbytheexhaustiveeffortsof
LumaScape,ChiefMartec,andourowncoveragetoinforminvestmentsinthe1,937plusvendorswithintheMarketingTechnologylandscape.Thisblueprintisintendedtoaugmentexistingsupergraphicsand
helpCEOs,CMOs,andCIOsmakeinformeddecisionsaboutexpandingtechnologylandscapeandthestrategicimpactofdifferenttechnologyinvestments(bycompanysizeandgo-to-marketbusinessmodel).
*Additionalresearchandcomprehensivedirectoriesofvendorsforeverycategoryinthistechnologyblueprintcanbefoundonwww.gleanster.com.
BUSINESSVALUE:CostSavings/EfficiencyRevenueGrowthCustomerSatisfaction
CUSTOMERENGAGEMENT COREPLATFORM OPERATIONALEXCELLENCE
MARKETINGMANAGEMENTAWARENESS/ACQUISITIONRETENTION/EXPANSIONLOYALTY
FOURPILLARSOFSTRATEGICINVESTMENTFORMARKETING
InteractiveContent:Surveys,PersonalizedCall-to-Action,InteractiveLeadGen.|48Solutions
GamificationPlatforms|16Solutions
Retargeting|30Solutions
SEM&SEO|119SolutionsText&SpeechAnalytics|50SolutionsCustomerFeedbackManagement|45Solutions
InfluenceMarketing|10Solutions
SocialMediaMonitoring|92SolutionsSocialMediaMarketing|96Solutions
Platform-as-a-Service|22Solutions
MarketingAutomation|130Solutions
DigitalAssetManagement|72SolutionsPredictiveMarketing&Sales|10Solutions
ChannelMarketing/LeadMgmt|39Solutions
DataManagement&SalesIntelligenceData|45Solutions
MissionCriticalTechnologybyIanMichiels|@InsightFanatic|www.gleanster.com
2015CMOMarketingTechnologyBlueprint:MidsizeBusiness-to-BusinessCompanies
EmailMarketing&CampaignManagement|102Solutions
CustomerRelationshipManagement(CRM)|206Solutions
WebContentManagement&CustomerExperienceManagement(CXM)|107Solutions
Web&MobileAnalytics|46SolutionsWeb&MobileDevelopment|48Solutions
LoyaltyManagement|18Solutions
ContentMarketingOperations|11Solutions
ContentCuration|49Solutions
OnlineCustomerCommunities|49Solutions
SocialLogin|12SolutionsAdvocateMarketing|14Solutions
WebOptimization/Testing|20Solutions
MarketingAnalytics|71Solutions
ProjectManagement|240Solutions
Events&WebinarPlatforms|27Solutions
TIP:Printthisandhighlightallthetechnologiesthatyourorganizationcurrentlyuses-thenlookforgapsinthefourpillarsofstrategicinvestment.

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“marketing cloud” platforms. To complicate things further, there is actually no standardization
among features and solution offerings in marketing cloud portfolios; it’s a catch-all term for
whatever acquisitions the vendors have made.
Should a midsize CMO be worried about this marketing cloud stuff? Yes and no. It’s very
unlikely you have the resources or budget to rip and replace existing legacy solutions with a
comprehensive marketing cloud stack of technologies from a single vendor. It’s also unlikely that
the single vendor solution will actually deliver a solution that’s integrated at this point. Integration
among acquired offerings leaves much to be desired – despite what the vendors tell you. It still
requires a ton of customization that your limited budget and IT team probably can’t support
without investment in consultants and systems integrators. In most cases from a cost perspective
the marketing cloud as a comprehensive offering is really only accessible to large enterprise early
adopters at this point.
But you should be thinking about your organization’s marketing cloud, which is more than likely
a mishmash of vendors and solutions, some hosted and some on-premise, that support your
go-to-market channels. From this perspective you do want to look for gaps in how you support
the four pillars of strategic investment on the technology blueprint and consider filling those to
round out your marketing cloud. Likewise, you may want to swap out some legacy solutions for
next-generation tools or offerings that don’t support all the channels you want or integrate with
existing CRM, finance, and IT systems.
We recommend you print the blueprint and highlight all the tools you currently use, then take
a look at what’s left over to see if it makes sense for your organization from a business value
standpoint. The remainder of this report will provide additional detail about each category of
technology, specifically evaluating the benefits relative to a midsize B2B organization.
Exploring the Categories on the Midsize B2B
Blueprint
CORE PLATFORM TECHNOLOGIES FOR MARKETING
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
CRM is a no brainer for midsize B2B firms. You want a solution that is flexible to customize,
mobile ready, and can integrate with other marketing technologies like marketing automation. As
a general rule, midsize firms use CRM as the system of record for all customer data (you can then
create bi-directional feeds to other systems).
Featured Vendors: Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle

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EMAIL MARKETING AND CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT
We combined email and campaign management for midsize companies because standalone
email platforms for midsize operations are almost extinct. Virtually every midsize-class email
marketing platform delivers multi-channel digital marketing capabilities (and of course email
marketing). This is marked as a mission-critical tool because in the absence of marketing
automation it can deliver stand-alone value. But you really should be looking at a tool that
includes deep CRM integration and lead prioritization capabilities via business rules. When
midsize firms invest in both email marketing and marketing automation it’s usually for customer
lifecycle engagement in separate stages; sending newsletters versus lead nurturing.
Featured Vendors: Salesforce Exact Target, IBM Silverpop, Lyris
MARKETING AUTOMATION
To compete effectively in 2015 a midsize B2B firm needs marketing automation. These are
out-of-the-box solution that allow you to automate relevant and personalized engagement
based on customer behavior at any stage in the customer lifecycle. No, they aren’t just for
acquisition marketing either; Marketing Automation should be used to automate engagement
with customers to maximize cross-sell and up-sell revenue. It also allows you to easily embrace
inbound and outbound engagement from a single solution – although most vendors have
cracked down significantly on outbound non-opt-in communications to purchased lists.
Featured Vendors: Act-On, Salesforce Pardot, Marketo
WEB CONTENT MANAGEMENT & CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT
These days most organizations actually support multiple web content management platforms
– a combination of packaged solutions and open source. You’re definitely going to need a blog,
and it will likely be hosted on an open-CMS platform like Wordpress or Drupal. This is a mission-
critical technology. You should be looking to upgrade your site to responsive design (mobile
optimized) and have deep integrations with marketing automation, web analytics, and email
marketing platforms. Most of this integration is fairly easy through pixel and tracking codes. If
your organization has a large volume of products to manage you should look at packaged WCM
solutions because they usually have built-in workflow and approval that will simplify keeping the
web updated by product and marketing managers.
Featured Vendors: Sitecore, Kentico, Wordpress

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OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE MARKETING TECHNOLOGIES
ADVOCATE MARKETING
Advocate marketing and loyalty marketing are not the same thing. Advocate marketing
technologies are designed to engage customers who are already loyal. These platforms help
engage the tiny subset of your customers who are not only loyal (and regularly doing repeat
business with the brand) but willing to offer their time and resources to champion your brand –
often through points, rewards and other incentives. In a sense, advocates become an extension
of your internal workforce and will share, promote, and validate your unique brand promise
and value propositions. Advocacy technology provides the infrastructure for this engagement
and allows marketers to measure success. Be mindful of the vendors you engage; most of the
advocate marketing platforms are for B2C, not B2B.
Featured Vendors: Influitive, Zuberance, Marketo (Crowd Factory)
CHANNEL MARKETING
Channel marketing technology (also commonly referred to as partner relationship management
(PRM)) is largely designed for lead management and collaboration for B2B organizations with a
large volume of partners or value-added resellers. As your organization grows it quickly becomes
too cumbersome to try to manage these relationships within your core CRM, and one-off shared
drives or email processes aren’t scalable. These solutions generally offer partner portals, shared
resources, collaboration, lead management & tracking, market development fund management,
training, and workflows.
Featured Vendors: Treehouse Interactive, Channeltivity, CSG Openline
CONTENT CURATION
There are a lot of “content-related” technologies and acronyms out there. Content curation is
ultimately about finding content related to a theme or topic. Content curation platforms are
subscription-based services that essentially use keywords or RSS feeds to crawl the web and help
you sort through the hellish volume of “relevant” content to share via social media or create your
own perspective on the topic. You use content curation so your blog and social properties aren’t
overwhelmed by self-serving promotional banter. These tools are NOT designed to automatically
post content to your blog, but they can be configured to automatically post things to your social
media properties (automation is dangerous on social and often too robotic). More sophisticated
curation platforms actually use algorithms to learn what type of content you like and highlight the
best content for you to focus on.

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Content syndication is not the same thing as curation. Syndication is about republishing your
content on other sites or accepting content on your site. There are open-source and paid
platforms that will allow you to repost a blog from another site within a blog on your site, but they
are designed to add the blog as reference inside your blog post so you can provide commentary
or perspectives. These platforms will automatically add attribution text to the syndicated post
(“Originally posted on…”) so Google doesn’t flag you as an aggregator. Remember it’s all about
originality, so if you’re going to syndicate or curate, ALWAYS link unique copy and creative to the
curated content. You don’t exactly need to pay big money for content curation capabilities; there
are plenty of low-cost or free solutions that will be more than sufficient for a midsize B2B firm.
Featured Vendors: Curata, PublishThis, Feedly, Pocket
CONTENT MARKETING OPERATIONS
Content marketing operations (CMO) platforms are designed for mid-to-large enterprises, and
they may be overkill for most midsize B2B companies unless content marketing is a large focus
of your marketing strategy. For brands with high volumes of content and a network of fulfillment
vendors (freelance writers, agency, creative, globally dispersed internal contributors or marketing
teams) it’s pretty complex to manage these processes across multiple channels. CMO platforms
are sort of like project management tools designed exclusively for content marketing processes.
You can configure tasks, workflows, and approvals for each type of content (ebooks, whitepapers,
blog posts, case studies, etc.) and centralize collaboration inside the system. You can also
configure alerts and view a central calendar of all content that is in production or planned. These
systems come pre-configured to integrate with most marketing automation and CRM systems.
Some can even track engagement with content via social, mobile, and email.
Featured Vendors: Kapost, Compendium
DATA MANAGEMENT & SALES INTELLIGENCE
The days of data being a proprietary or unique competitive advantage are over. If you have
money you can pretty much fix any data problem for your organization. That includes purchasing
lists of target leads, augmenting customer records, and linking email addresses to IP addresses.
Today, most data providers are buying data from each other (even the big guys). You’ll also notice
many data or sales intelligence vendors are shifting their strategy to focus more on dynamic
personalization for known and unknown prospects or to uncover new leads that look like existing
customers. So you basically pay them to give you information on website visitors, augment
customer records, and maximize conversion online. While list data is available, you probably can’t
use it on email or marketing automation platforms unless your list is opt-in – hence the sudden
shift in business models for the list providers.

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Sales intelligence providers have proprietary and sophisticated crawling tools that will mine the
internet for changes in data and determine how accurate a record actually is. You can also turn
the data on inside of CRM to give your reps a leg up in finding accurate contact information.
When augmenting or scrubbing customer records, keep in mind that there are no 100% accurate
databases out there. What you are hoping for is that a provider can scrub or augment about 30-
40% (at a minimum) of your data – which translates to real revenue if your marketing and sales
teams practice best practices in B2B customer engagement.
Featured Vendors: LinkedIn (Bizo), NetProspex, Salesforce Data.com, Demandbase, LeadLander
DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT
Most of the time midsize B2B organizations don’t have requirements for a robust stand-alone
DAM for marketing. Google Drive, DropBOX, and SharePoint still provide for the vast majority of
asset management requirements in B2B. If content marketing is a focus, you’ll want to look for a
DAM or a WCM with a DAM that can export assets in different formats. There’s no reason to be
formatting 5 different versions of an image for use in print, web, email, and social.
Featured Vendors: Elateral, Sharepoint, Canto Flight
LOYALTY MANAGEMENT
Loyalty management is an eclectic topic in B2B. Despite how critical this is, there aren’t turnkey
solutions devoted to B2B. In most cases you would actually be buying both services and
technologies from a vendor because most loyalty programs are going to require a custom touch.
There are customer feedback management platforms designed to capture net-promoter score,
reviews, and feedback but they aren’t loyalty–specific. Honestly, your best bet is to sit down and
have marketing create some automated campaigns in marketing automation and trigger them off
of customer records or purchase history.
Featured Vendors: ConfirmIt, Aspect, Fuel Rewards
MARKETING ANALYTICS
In a way, every vendor can check the marketing analytics box. Probably the closest thing to
turnkey marketing analytics solutions is coming out of the evolving on-demand business
intelligence space. Data visualization and BI tools are getting easier to use, and there are a

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litany of tools that you can use to create dashboards for marketing. You will of course want to
look for tools that can deliver simple insights across any platform – desktop, mobile, and tablet.
Unfortunately, the nature of what you want to analyze will dictate the best solution. For generic
dashboards look at on-demand BI. For lead analytics, check out Predictive Sales & Marketing
solutions. For core digital analytics, check out Web Analytics, Social Media Monitoring, and Mobile
Analytics.
Featured Vendors: DOMO, Klipfolio, Chartio
ONLINE CUSTOMER COMMUNITIES
Online customer communities are typically powered by enterprise social networking solutions,
which combine collaboration software, community software, and social applications to provide
the infrastructure for a customer community. Customer communities and user groups can
actually offset some of the demands on your customer service department. You can of course
use online community tools for internal collaboration, and many early enterprise organizations
use them like an intranet for marketing and sales collaboration.
Featured Vendors: Jive, Lithium, Socious
PREDICTIVE MARKETING & SALES
Predictive marketing and sales solutions are ideal for B2B firms with HIGH volumes of leads.
These technologies use millions of data points on your customers and prospects via CRM and
other external sources (data that is often collected and never fully acted upon) to optimize
customer engagement, target new audiences, and improve sales effectiveness. Predictive
marketing unlocks the potential in existing customer data. These solutions will mine your existing
customer records and marry them with external data that could be pertinent to a buyer’s
propensity to purchase. Vendors essentially sell you a predictive model to determine how you
should segment your database or focus sales efforts. Some solutions provide not only insights
but also the B2B contact records or lists of companies in line with what the model recommends.
While the promise of big-data and data-driven decisions weighs heavy on the marketer’s mind,
these tools must do two things well to work.

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One, they need to be transparent about the assumptions in the model; marketers need to be able
to tweak assumptions or at least understand key criteria in the model. Two, they need to make
the data they provide actionable via integration with CRM, Email Marketing, Web Analytics, and
most importantly Marketing Automation.
Featured Vendors: Minigo, Lattice Engines, Infer
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Project management software has the capacity to help plan, organize, and manage resource
pools and develop resource estimates. Depending on the sophistication of the software, it can
manage estimation and planning, scheduling, cost control and budget management, resource
allocation, collaboration software, communication, decision-making, quality management
and documentation, or administration systems. Do marketers need it in a B2B environment?
Maybe, but you may also be able to utilize packaged workflow and approval features in content
management.
Featured Vendors: Comindware, Central Desktop, Project Insight
WEB & MOBILE ANALYTICS
For most B2B midsize firms, basic web analytics provided by Google Analytics will be more than
sufficient, but honestly pretty much all the tools are going to give you the same benefits. The gold
standard is Adobe Analytics, but it’s not cheap. Additionally, most of the B2B technologies you
adopt are going to give you varying degrees of analytics through the website tracking codes they
use. You should activate remarketing capabilities on the site and do some search remarketing to
audience profiles that “look similar to” the existing visitors.
WEB & MOBILE DEVELOPMENT
There are hundreds of developers, agencies, and freelance resources who would love to take
on your mobile app requirements. Keep in mind that in a B2B environment you may actually
get more value from mobile apps designed for internal stakeholders like executives who travel
frequently or sales reps.

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WEB OPTIMIZATION & TESTING
Probably the most underutilized and most important part of digital marketing is testing –
especially on email and landing pages. The best B2B CMO in the world could NEVER predict every
single nuance on a landing page that maximizes conversion.
Vendors: Unbounce, Optimizely
CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT MARKETING TECHNOLOGIES
CUSTOMER FEEDBACK MANAGEMENT
CFM solutions help manage customer suggestions and complaints. These are going to be most
valuable for B2B companies to monitor customer satisfaction.
Featured Vendors: Get Satisfaction, UserVoice, Foresee
EVENTS & WEBINAR PLATFORMS
You should be doing at least a couple webinars a year – even if they are recorded and made
available via locked forms. Most webinar platforms are fairly commoditized these days, and
unfortunately they have scaled back features to create price tiers. It’s still shocking how bad and
unreliable webinar platforms are in 2015, but it’s the only game in town and the vendors know it.
Vendors: Cisco Webex, ON24, GotoMeetings, Join.Me, ReadyTalk, EventBrite
GAMIFICATION
Traditionally, gamificaiton platforms were designed for large-volume consumer engagement, and
in fact most vendors don’t even want to sell a B2B company a solution unless they are coming
with thousands of users in the system. But there are benefits to applying gamificaiton to non-
traditional areas in B2B. You might gamify the online customer community to boost customer-
to-customer frequently asked questions and reduce the load on the call center. You may also
apply gamification to the sales environment to foster a more competitive culture in business

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development.
Featured Vendors: Badgeville, Bunchball
INFLUENCE MARKETING
Influence marketing is not the same thing as loyalty marketing. With influence marketing you
are trying to activate, motivate, and engage anyone who has an influence over your target
audience (bloggers, consultants, journalists, customers, etc.). You can do this through incentives
and rewards but you need a way to track engagement and ensure that you incentivize the right
behaviors. These technologies help engage and manage relationships with influencers.
Featured Vendors: TapInfluence
INTERACTIVE CONTENT
This is a catch-all category for a unique group of vendors that provide interactive digital media.
These tools give you the ability to create interactive content to qualify or convert leads. You can
survey a prospect and then offer an automated PDF findings report with analysis on their answer
choices, calculations, or recommendations on products to look at. Generally interactive content
gets much higher engagement than traditional forms of digital content, but of course you still
have to promote the tool.
Featured Vendors: SnapApp
RETARGETING
A decade ago retargeting was not all that valuable for B2B companies. Traditionally these
platforms were applied to B2C online commerce brands which allowed the investment to be
linked to a return (shopping cart abandonment, etc.). But remarketing can be used to make a B2B
brand look bigger than it is for a marginal investment. That’s because remarketing allows you to
market to people who visit your website or online properties when they visit ancillary sites like
Facebook, Forbes.com, and thousands of other popular websites. Ninety percent (90%) of the
retargeting vendors sell to B2C and are looking for large volumes of unique website traffic each
month.

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But it’s worth exploring a small investment in retargeting if you want to brand or keep top of mind
for website visitors. It’s money well spent if you assume it’s going to branding and may not be a
directly attributable to ROI.
Featured Vendors: ReTargeter, Adroll
SEM & SEO
There are thousands of vendors who provide SEM and SEO services. The best thing you can do is
tap your network for a recommendation on a good vendor. It is worth bringing in a good expert –
they usually pay for themselves in the first year and the best practices are a moving target.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Social media marketing and social relationship management collided with social media
monitoring over the last 5 years. What used to be an eclectic landscape of vendors in each
category now includes a handful of midsize and enterprise class solutions. These tools allow you
to link all of your brand’s social accounts to one platform to manage and track communications.
They also allow you to monitor brand mentions, sentiment, and engagement with your target
audience. Free or low-cost solutions like HootSuite, SproutSocial, or Buffer are commonly used
in parallel with more expensive offerings. The good news is you have a lot of choices. Ultimately
you pay for structure, workflow, integrated features, automation, and more robust analytics and
monitoring.
Featured Vendors: Spreadfast, Hootsuite, PetaData Labs, SproutSocial, Sprinklr
SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING
Stand-alone social media monitoring tools (also called Social Listening or Social Intelligence
platforms) are designed to do one thing really well: monitor keywords or phrases and aggregate
every mention in one central interface. They do also provide a way to engage or do damage
control from within the platform (for tracking purposes). The secret sauce that makes these
vendors unique is how they interpret context from unstructured information to extrapolate
sentiment, propensity to purchase, and other emotional cues from a target audience. Most
vendors use proprietary algorithms that actually learn and refine the results based on user
engagement or feedback from inside the system.

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Much like web analytics, these tools are capable of pulling massive volumes of data, and it’s not all
that valuable unless the data is prioritized and presented in a consumable way.
Featured Vendors: Salesforce.com Radian 6, Brandwatch, Clarabridge, Converseon
TEXT & SPEECH ANALYTICS
In a B2B environment, text and speech analytics solutions are ideal for extracting value from
unstructured customer feedback via email or call-center engagement. There is of course some
overlap with social media monitoring solutions because the core technology is largely the same.
With a stand-alone text or speech analytics solution you can usually embed the solution inside of
internal systems like CRM or the call center.
Featured Vendors: Collective Intellect, Lexalytics

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Need help navigating the uncharted waters?
If you’re overwhelmed by the number of technologies, fear not. We help hundreds of companies
around the globe with technology selection, technology roadmaps, and recommendations. That
said, we aren’t feet-on-the-ground-for-years-on-end consultants, were analysts. So if you need
our help, we’re looking to rapidly deliver value in our advisory consulting via a 2-3 week IT audit or
executive coaching session. Specific industries of expertise include: high tech, software, hardware,
financial services, insurance, retail, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, franchises, real estate, and
automotive.
We’re like Ferdinand Magellan for your marketing technology strategy and Botox for the frown lines you
just exacerbated by reading this guide.
RESEARCH AND VENDOR LANDSCAPES ON GLEANSTER.COM
Each year we survey tens of thousands of companies to uncover best practices in the topic areas
we cover. We publish these findings on our online research portal and link the research to
comprehensive directories of relevant vendors. We also capture user feedback on the solutions
we cover and provide this to you in the form of a Vendor Ranking FLASH chart; so you can see
how vendors rank on ease of deployment, ease of use, features and functions, and overall value.

About Gleanster Research
Gleanster Research helps business leaders uncover best practices in technology adoption by
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so you can learn from the most successful CMOs on the planet. We do this through a proprietary
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comprehensive directory of vendor showcases (complete with vendor rankings based on reviews
from users).
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2015 Guide to the “CMO Technology Blueprint for Midsize B2B Companies” Infographic