You already know that marketing is evolving and becoming increasingly digitally focused. That means today's marketers must become much more proficient across various marketing technologies to be fully effective.

But what should a marketer's technology toolkit contain?  If you were only to follow what WCM/WXM vendors promote, you're only seeing a small part of the picture.

In fact, Digital Marketing can mean many things depending on the context.  If you are a marketer, you might want to:

• Create and update your web sites
• Personalize and optimize your interactions with users
• Build landing pages
• Acquire, profile, prioritize, nurture, and manage leads
• Create, manage, and measure the effectiveness of email and other digital campaigns
• Monitor and gather intelligence about your brands
• Engage with people via social media
• Mobile-enable all this interaction
• And so on...

Consequently, you can find many types of tools that claim to provide “Digital Marketing.” If you map these capabilities to tools, you will need one or more of the following and probably some others too:

• Content and Experience Management tools for Web Content Management, Digital Asset Management, Site Management, and Personalization
• Lead Management tools
• Campaign Management tools for creating and managing campaigns using email, social media, web, and mobile
• Social Media Monitoring and Intelligence tools
• Landing Page Management tools
• Combinations of many of the above in self-styled "suites"
• And so on...

As you can imagine, there's a panoply of tools out there. In our forthcoming advisories and research, we will try to de-mystify the highly crowded and fragmented digital marketing marketplace.

As with our other reports, we will also provide a methodology for mapping business needs to technology alternatives, as well as a roadmap for evaluating digital marketing vendors.