What’s Changed: 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms

Source: Gartner

Analyst house Gartner, Inc. recently released the 2020 version of its Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms. Content marketing platforms (CMPs) refers to software solutions that primarily support the practice of content marketing. This includes the following the capabilities to support ideation, editorial planning, collaboration, and workflow; tools and services to create, curate, and publish content of all types; analytics and insights to measure and optimize content performance; integrations to connect CMPs to existing marketing technologies.

In order for marketing leaders to create relevant content at scale and demonstrate ROI, CMP vendors must provide ideation, editorial planning, content sourcing, and analysis capabilities. Content development, production, and delivery remain a high priority for marketers. The challenge is that creating a consistent pipeline of content consumes a large portion of marketing resources; these problems are also exacerbated by continued struggles in measurement and demonstration ROI of content marketing efforts.

The current CMP marketplace is experiencing a period of rapid growth populated by vendors whose legacy solutions are evolving to meet broader content marketing needs. Buyers need to look beyond features and technology when assessing new vendors and providers to understand how a mix of platform and service can meet customers’ growing needs for high quality content production.

In this Magic Quadrant, Gartner evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of 8 providers that it considers most significant in the marketplace and provides readers with a graph (the Magic Quadrant) plotting the vendors based on their ability to execute and their completeness of vision. The graph is divided into four quadrants: niche players, challengers, visionaries, and leaders. At Solutions Review, we read the report, available here, and pulled out the key takeaways.

Gartner adjusts its evaluation and inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as software markets evolve. As a result, ScribbleLive has been dropped for no longer meeting Gartner’s inclusion thresholds, and Sitecore has been added.

NewsCred once again tops this year’s Leaders quadrant with a comprehensive and easy-to-use integrated platform. Its intuitive platform offers a variety of capabilities including data-driven ideation, agile planning, workflow management, and performance measurement. Customers also praise NewsCred’s high quality and personalized customer support. In addition to helping clients understand the software, it eliminates risk and maximizes their ROI. Sprinklr has crossed into this year’s Leaders quadrant, offering data-informed content planning driven by AI text and visual analysis. It also offers strong workflow capabilities and a rule engine capable of supporting the needs of complex and geographically dispersed organizations.

Contently maintains its position as a Leader, combining services and technology to offer a unified collection of tools. Its global talent network provides users with new content from over 140,000 content creators in more than 20 countries. With a unique intake form and talent-matching algorithm, clients can develop highly personalized content. This vendor also continues to receive strong ratings for its focus on ongoing customer success. Percolate continues to expand its capabilities beyond traditional content marketing. Acquired by Seismic in November 2019, this vendor offers a highly configurable data model and easy integration with common enterprise tools and social media platforms.

Upland Kapost is the sole Challenger in this year’s Magic Quadrant. Its platform features strong capabilities in editorial planning, workflow, and performance analytics. It offers a much more expansive set of built-in integrations than any other vendor in this report. In addition to strong content and campaign planning features, Upland Kapost offers comprehensive content analytics tools. This enables marketers to track performance against factors such as business goals, budgets, personas, customer journey stages, and more.

Skyword is alone in this year’s Visionary quadrant. Its agency model provides full-service offerings that best benefit global enterprises looking to address complex content use cases. Users have access to profiles of thousands of content creators and influencers from 60 countries, along with their content performance metrics. Skyword also received the best score out of any vendor in this report for multibrand/multi-geography support.

Sitecore is new to this Magic Quadrant, standing out as a leading Niche Player. Its Content Hub extends beyond content marketing to enable content production collaboration and reuse across enterprises. Capabilities include campaign management, digital asset management, and project planning. CoSchedule’s CMP platform streamlines and scales creation by focusing on content organization and workflow. In addition to providing an intuitive interface and user experience, this vendor’s marketing calendar provides an easy-to-use home base for all direct-publishing integrations.

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