Austin, Texas, USA, May 16, 2025
Building on the Strength of Data Cloud and AI, Salesforce Retains a Leading Position Within the Marketing Automation Software Market
Although CRM and ERP systems are increasingly getting more attention in the business press and from CIOs, marketing automation remains critically important for driving personalized messaging and outreach at scale, particularly in an increasingly digital world. Both B2C and B2B companies leverage email, SMS, web, video, and social media channels, and require dedicated automation functionality in order to extract the most value from marketing assets.
As such, enterprises have largely chosen to leverage software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors to provide this functionality, usually opting for applications that support multi-channel or omnichannel engagement, lead nurturing, campaign management, segmentation, analytics, and reporting. Major packages also provide capabilities for integrating with other systems, web tracking, and personalized content.
“Despite the increasing incorporation of customer engagement features within CRM and other applications, many organizations find there is no substitute for a dedicated marketing automation solution,” Keith Kirkpatrick, Research Director, Enterprise Applications with the Futurum Group, said. “Given the growing complexity of marketing and engagement across multiple channels, combined with continuing focus on customer privacy, data security, and greater automation of marketing activities, it’s no surprise that customers remain committed to using a dedicated marketing automation solution.”
Based on Futurum’s survey of IT Decision Makers conducted in late 2024, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud software was the most frequently used marketing automation solution among vendors surveyed, capturing nearly 50% of the market. Hubspot took the next position, with 34.4% of those surveyed indicating that they utilized this vendor’s offering, followed by Oracle Eloqua and Adobe Marketo Engage, both of which captured 29.5% of the market.
Figure 1: Current Marketing Automation Vendors, All Company Sizes
Futurum’s research reveals several key developments shaping the marketing automation software landscape:
- AI will personalize customer experiences, including content, offers, and interactions.
- Chatbots and other conversational platforms will continue to evolve, providing more sophisticated customer interactions via reasoning agent technologies.
- Predictive analytics will be used to better understand customer behavior and improve lead scoring.
- Marketing automation will be used to trigger specific actions based on customer behavior.
- AI will assist in writing marketing copy, including personalized messages and website content.
- Automation and AI will play a larger role in cleaning and organizing data for marketing purposes.
- AI will be used to make marketing automation systems smarter through reinforcement learning.
- Businesses will focus on collecting and utilizing first-party data to personalize customer experiences and comply with privacy regulations.
Notably, while Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the market leader across companies of all sizes, for organizations with more than $25 billion in annual revenue, Oracle Eloqua (59.3%) has overtaken Salesforce Marketing Cloud (55.6%) and Hubspot (37%). This reflects the need of the largest organizations to purchase an application built to run on a highly scalable platform such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, to account for a high volume of inbound and outbound activity.
Figure 2: Current Marketing Automation Vendors, Organizations with Revenue >$25 Billion
“The ability to scale and integrate new technologies, including generative AI, agentic AI, and asset creation tools, along with multiple modalities for engagement, will be critical for all marketing automation vendors to survive and thrive in the market,” Kirkpatrick said. “Customers expect seamless integration with other applications and data sources, and the vendors that quickly and intuitively manage these challenges will continue to win customers.”
Read more in the 2H 2024 Enterprise Applications Decision Maker Survey on the Futurum Intelligence Platform.
About Futurum Intelligence for Market Leaders
Futurum Intelligence’s Enterprise Applications IQ service provides actionable insight from analysts, reports, and interactive visualization datasets, helping leaders drive their organizations through transformation and business growth. Subscribers can log into the platform at https://app.futurumgroup.com/, and non-subscribers can find additional information at Futurum Intelligence.
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Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
