Marketers work with a lot of technology vendors. There are thousands of companies selling various combinations of marketing automation, email, loyalty, CDPs, customer service enablement, commerce, analytics and multichannel campaign management.

Implementing, managing and using all of this tech takes a lot of work and a lot of money. B2C brands tend to dedicate more than 11% of their annual revenue to marketing budgets, and a lot of that goes towards technology.

A recent report from Alium reveals the top twenty vendors that brands love most across the crowded landscape of martech and ecommerce technology. Alium interviewed hundreds of marketers at enterprise and commercial brands to learn more about their use of technology to do their jobs and discover what makes a brand like one vendor more than another. How well the technology performs against a marketer’s goals is only part of the reasons why brands love a vendor. Ultimately, vendors need to offer an intuitive solution, great support and unique capabilities that set it apart.

Tech Must Be Easy to Use

Ultimately, vendors that understand that their solution needs to be user-friendly scored the highest. The top two rated vendors, Gorgias and Shopify both received top marks for being easy to use. How marketers define “easy to use” can vary. Some care most about being able to use a solution quickly without much training or custom setup. Other brands with complex tech stacks already in place want the solution to be easily integrated with their tech stack.

Still others want a tool that can easily pull in data, offer intuitive customizations and reporting. Marketers liked other top vendors including Hotjar and Amplitude for their user-friendly interface that allows even non-experts to do what they need to do.

Making a relatively complex technology user-friendly is no small feat. Many of these platforms have thousands of features, enable custom setups and build complicated reports. While marketers are becoming more adept with technology and data, many brands don’t have a team of engineers and data analysts. While some of the largest and most sophisticated marketing teams may not care as much about user friendliness because they have technical experts who can build what they need, many more brands need a tool that’s more intuitive to use.

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Brands Need Service and Support

Many of the top-rated vendors got high marks for their customer service and support. Marketing and ecommerce technology has become so sophisticated, that customer service often resembles strategic consulting more than a nameless person in a call center.

Customer service includes proactive outreach from dedicated team members to ensure that brands can accomplish their goals, and to help them stay competitive by educating them about the more advanced features of a technology. Brands called out Attentive for their “white glove” approach that helps brands use the platform more effectively and use more of its features.

Another key element of customer support is around integration with other technologies and the ability to create data flow between vendors and data repositories. Brands praised Iterable for helping them integrate their platform seamlessly into an existing tech stack.

Larger tools including Adobe Experience Manager was praised for having global worldwide support, which is particularly helpful for a large brand with offices that speak different languages and are in different time zones.

Unique and Powerful Features Matter

For every problem, there are many vendors that will tell a brand they can solve it. Finding the vendor with the unique solution that fits best for their needs requires a lot of research and due diligence.

When a vendor delivers differentiated capabilities, brands take notice. In Alium’s report, solutions that were excellent at a specific part of marketing or ecommerce scored well. Klayvio was called out for their integrated email and SMS functionality that helps marketers build custom multichannel campaigns. Tableau got high marks for their data visualization features, which brands said were not only visually appealing but highly customizable. Semrush scored well for their SEO tools which will not only comprehensive but also diagnostic, ensuring brands could make quick improvements.

Vendors Still Need to Get the Basics Right

Having an easy-to-use solution, great customer service and some stand-out features are the elements that winning vendors have, but it’s not all they have. Top vendors also do the fundamentals well – offering most of what their competitors offer in an affordable package. While price isn’t always the deciding factor, vendor’s need to be seen as offering a good value for the money.

Several vendors were called out for their ability to show marketers how to improve performance against their goals and measure campaign effectiveness including Adobe Target and Loop Returns. Providing a direct line of insight into a technology’s effectiveness shows that a vendor is confident that they provide value.

Of course, brands must work with many vendors that they don’t love either because there are no better options, or because the problem being solved is just too complicated to offer an easy to use interface, including many CDPs, which was a category that didn’t make it into the top 20 of Alium’s list.

In this complex market, Alium’s A-List report reminds us that brands have choices, and when a vendor goes the extra mile to help marketers succeed, they take note.

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*This guest article was a submission by Alium

Alium is the platform for brands seeking honest, in-depth insights into how technology performs in real-world business scenarios.