Content Marketing
Who’s Winning the Master Data Management (MDM) Market?

Who’s Winning the Master Data Management (MDM) Market?

October 28, 2020
9 min read

For the past 10 years or more, I’ve been analyzing, strategizing, building, optimizing, and measuring the content marketing programs for companies in just about every industry and sector there is.

In fact, in my last count, we have done fully customized content marketing strategy workshops for more than 80 different companies.

Those workshops were all meant for the marketers running content marketing for those brands. In some cases, they have followed the guidelines of the roadmaps we presented. And experienced amazing marketing results.

In other cases, they have gone back to creating random acts of promotional content that make their internal executives happy. But doesn’t meet customer needs and doesn’t move the needle on leads or revenue.

And in some cases, they have completely abandoned content marketing because they couldn’t explain how content marketing out-performs promotion in today’s noisy world.

The basics of content marketing aren’t that difficult. The challenge is in convincing the rest of your team that it’s the right thing to do. Anyone can buy ads. The best marketers find a way to deliver marketing ROI through helpful, customer-focused content, published consistently.

So I’ve decided to help. We’re going to start challenging the marketers in our industry. Using data, and tools, and research that’s publicly available to anyone, we’re going to conduct a content marketing analysis of various industries.

And we’re starting with Master Data Management – one of those technologies that is deeply technical, somewhat hard to explain to the average person, but critically important to the efficient running of various kinds of businesses.

In short, an industry where content marketing is critical to educating buyers.

What Is MDM and Why Is It Important?

In today’s world, every company is an information company.

Organizations need effective market, product, competitor and customer data in order to succeed. Master Data Management [MDM] can help to fuel your business with better data that is more centralized, organized and manageable.

MDM is the process of linking a company’s critical business data to a single point of reference, reducing errors and limiting redundant tasks.

If used appropriately, MDM has the ability to improve data quality, reduce time and costs, avoid data duplication, increase data accuracy, and promote a site’s visibility across platforms.

But if you Google “What is MDM?” only one of the leading vendors in this market has an answer on page 1 of the search results where more than 80% of clicks go.

If you don’t show up on page 1 of Google for the keywords your buyers use, you don’t exist!

Why Is This Report Useful for MDM Companies?

This report can help MDM companies better understand their own competitive advantages in the market, and what the winners are doing differently.

By the end of the report, our goal is for each MDM company to understand their stance in the industry and what they could do to improve their awareness, search rankings, website traffic, and leads derived from their website.

In this report, we will not comment on the efficacy or features of Data Management Platforms as we aren’t experts there. However, we have great experience in data analytics for marketing as well as analyzing visibility of SaaS platforms across digital channels.

So we have conducted research in how these Data Management platforms fare on Google search and content marketing (because B2B buyers get most of their information from search and it is an instrumental part in converting them).

Methodology

  1. Identified top companies based on Forrester’s research and other studies.
  2. Narrowed down the list to companies providing specialized MDM/CDP services (as opposed to IBM or SAP who have multiple services).
  3. Checked the performance of their websites against key metrics to gauge search visibility.

Introducing the Players

These are the companies who focus mainly on MDM/CDP (customer data platform). The description was pulled from their websites.

  1. ActionIQ – The ActionIQ Customer Data Platform enables you to align your people, technology, and processes to deliver exceptional customer experiences across every touchpoint.
  2. Data Service Inc. – Partner with Data Services, Inc. to deploy a combination of technology and services to solve your most pressing data management challenges.
  3. EnterWorks – EnterWorks allows you to create, maintain, and share trusted data and digital assets across the systems that power your business—all at the speed the market demands, and all in a single platform.
  4. Informatica – Informatica helps you unleash the value of data across your enterprise at scale.
  5. Infosolve Technologies – Infosolve Technologies provide businesses access to efficient, industry leading data solutions in an innovative and simple business model: Zero Based Solutions.
  6. Magnitude – Magnitude integrates data across diverse and distributed systems, increases productivity with no-code process automation tools, and helps businesses make better decisions with self-service process analytics and business intelligence for leading ERP platforms.
  7. Pimcore – Pimcore manages, aggregates, and distributes any digital product and master data for any channel and delivers user-centric personalized customer experiences on any device.
  8. Reltio – Reltio renews the MDM category with modern architecture and advanced features.
  9. Riversand – Riversand provides “an attractive MDM and PIM entry point for small and midsize organizations, with the simplicity of SaaS and range of capabilities that meet core needs.”
  10. Semarchy – Semarchy empowers organizations of any size to build trusted data applications quickly, with fast time to value using a single software platform for governance, master data, reference data, data quality, enrichment, and workflows.
  11. Stibo Systems – Stibo Systems accelerate data maturity by providing the accuracy, visibility and clarity needed to drive digital business success.
  12. Syniti – Syniti delivers data transformation with speed, agility, and faster time to value
  13. Tableau – Tableau Data Management helps you better manage the data within your analytics environment, ensuring that trusted and up-to-date data is always used to drive decisions.
  14. TIBCO Software – TIBCO’s Intelligence platform connects any application or data source; unifies data for greater access, trust, and control; and predicts outcomes in real time and at scale.

Overall Domain Authority and Organic Traffic

When we look at overall domain authority, traffic, backlinks and paid budgets, Tibco and Informatica are the elephants in the room of MDM.

But below these 2 market leaders, there is a high degree of competitiveness.

Site Authority Score Organic Traffic Keywords Backlinks Domains Paid Keywords Paid Costs
tibco.com 67 365.5K 362.2K 2.5M 12.9K 17.7K $613.8K
informatica.com 64 391.9K 409.6K 644.8K 9.9K 3.8K $163.1K
pimcore.com 45 27.2K 22.1K 123K 1.6K 106 $19.4K
winshuttle.com 38 15.9K 26.7K 176.8K 1.6K 974 $69.6K
stibosystems.com 48 14.2K 10.3K 114K 1.2K 103 $6.8K
semarchy.com 38 7.6K 4.3K 3.5K 494 0 $0
magnitude.com 38 4.5K 6.4K 44K 777 29 $196
reltio.com 42 4.3K 3.1K 34K 699 140 $18.2K
syniti.com 36 3.7K 5.6K 91K 488 174 $1.9K
dataservicesinc.com 33 2.8K 2K 4.3K 235 0 $0
riversand.com 67 1.9K 4.3K 16.2K 277 81 $870
tableau.com/products/add-ons/data-management 47 969 175 494 60 2 $0
infosolvetech.com 13 32 41 1K 41 19 $140

Source SEMrush

MDM Myths & Facts

It is easy to misunderstand the overall purpose of MDM. Here are some myth busters to help clarify common misconceptions about MDM platforms.

And these form the basis of where we would start in our content marketing strategy for an MDM company.

Myth: MDM is a large enterprise problem

Fact: The principle of MDM is applied whenever two or more business processes must view or share (master) data. This means most companies have the need for MDM.

Myth: MDM is expensive

Fact: Your organization does not have to spend a ton of money to be able to successfully use MDM. The selling price is lower than you think due to competition between vendors and its operating expense. MDM solutions are becoming increasingly more accessible to small and companies at lower costs.

Myth: My business does not need MDM, we have an enterprise data warehouse.

Fact: MDM should/will span the organization across all business units and processes (including data stores, operational and analytical).

Myth: MDM is an IT effort

Fact: MDM must be driven by the business and supported/enabled by IT.

Which Are the Leading Sites in Terms of Search Traffic?

According to Alexa, The average technology website gets 45% of it’s traffic from organic search, 38% from direct traffic (visitors typing the company website name into their browser), 15% from referral traffic (other websites linking to the company) and just 1% from social media.

Source: Alexa

We look at organic search primarily, but also referral and social media traffic as a measure of how well a company can attract visitors who don’t know who they are (direct traffic) or without paying for the visit (paid).

In order to acquire new customers, a company must attract new visitors to it’s website. Ideally, without having to pay for it. This is why Content Marketing provides such high ROI.

In the MDM category, Data Service Inc. and Syniti are listed at the top of the organic search traffic chart at 100%, while Reltio and Infosolve Technologies are at the bottom with less than 3%. Even though Infosolve has 0% search traffic, it has 100% for referral traffic.

It is important to note that some of these stats may be a reflection of the relatively low traffic and less brand recognition some of these companies have relative to the market leaders.

Source: SEMRush

For companies with a small percentage of traffic from organic search, the chart below shows where they are deriving traffic from (ex. direct, paid, social or referral). Some companies pull traffic in from direct, paid, social and referral, while others only traffic from one specific area.

Source: SEMRush

In an ideal world, the percentage of traffic from search, referral and direct sources would be closer to the industry averages of 45% from search, 38% direct, and 15% referral.

What Are MDM Buyers Searching For?

In SEMRush, our team searched each of the key players using the key term “data management.” These trending subtopics show the most popular subtopics over the last 60 days across the internet.

This ultimately means that the number of articles on these subtopics is growing and it could be a great opportunity for your business to follow the trend.

The mind map visualization below shows the keywords and questions these potential customers are using when they search the internet for answers. This could serve as the starting point for an annual content marketing plan.

Any MDM company who answers these questions WILL increase their organic search, rankings for important keywords and attract relevant traffic to their website.

What Are the Important Keywords in MDM?

When we work with clients, we start by identifying the most important keywords in the industry that reflect buyer interest.

The keyword analysis we do also allows us to understand where a company’s organic search traffic is coming from. The keywords that SEMrush pulls are terms that people enter into search engines to find various types of information.

The following keyword research details would help any MDM business effectively reach their target audience, increase sales, obtain quality leads, improve ad campaigns and build brand awareness.

We took each of the players in the research model and separated their search terms into brand related and non-branded keywords. Of course it’s great to have lots of people searching for your brand. But these are people who already know who you are.

In order to grow, you want to find people who don’t know you!

The top 3 companies that have the highest number of non-branded related keywords are Tableau, TIBCO Software, and Magnitude.

The businesses that struggle with attracting visitors from non-branded keywords are Reltio, Infosolve Technologies, Enterworks, Syniti, Semarchy, and Riversand. These companies would benefit the most from a strategic content marketing program. The rest of the key players lie in the middle with a few non-branded and branded keywords.

How Many Keywords Are MDM Companies Ranking for and What Is It Worth?

As you can see from the chart below, the top 5 companies that are driving the most keywords are Tibco, Informatica, Winshuttle, and Stibo.

While  Infosolve and Tableau’s MDM product page only rank for small number.

Site Keywords
tibco.com 362.2K
informatica.com 409.6K
pimcore.com 22.1K
winshuttle.com 26.7K
stibosystems.com 10.3K
semarchy.com 4.3K
magnitude.com 6.4K
reltio.com 3.1K
syniti.com 5.6K
dataservicesinc.com 2K
riversand.com 4.3K
tableau.com/products/add-ons/data-management 175
infosolvetech.com 41

Backlink Analysis

Backlinks are valuable for search engine optimization because they represent a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. Ultimately, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content.

Good content leads to more backlinks. The more backlinks a site has, the better its site authority,  traffic, customers base, and rankings are.

Site Backlinks Domains Authority Score
tibco.com 2.5M 12.9K 67
informatica.com 644.8K 9.9K 64
pimcore.com 123K 1.6K 45
winshuttle.com 176.8K 1.6K 38
stibosystems.com 114K 1.2K 48
semarchy.com 3.5K 494 38
magnitude.com 44K 777 38
reltio.com 34K 699 42
syniti.com 91K 488 36
dataservicesinc.com 4.3K 235 33
riversand.com 16.2K 277 67
tableau.com/products/add-ons/data-management 494 60 47
infosolvetech.com 1K 41 13

Content Engagement

We used Buzzsumo to determine how often these brands are publishing content and how well that content sees engagement relative to each other.

Our findings are pretty shocking:

  • The average article published received just 4 social engagements. (MIG averages 85)
  • 3 companies receive fewer social engagements than articles published (MIG received 10x engagements to articles published)
  • Press releases make up the largest percentage of content published

This is common in technology industries that spend much of their time sharing press releases about analyst reports. While sharing this information is important, it focuses on a very specific moment in the buyer journey.

Leading companies are helping to educate their market long before someone is looking for analyst validation.

Effective Content Marketing Will Increase Google Rankings

So if you’re an MDM company, what should you do?

We would suggest starting a content marketing program right away. Your goals should be to improve overall rankings in visibility, traffic and engagement by targeting the best keywords, creating content for those keywords, and publishing 1-2 times per week.

Our 7-step content marketing strategy helps you:

  1. Identify your mission, purpose and goals.
  2. Understand your audience.
  3. Establish your content priorities.
  4. Plan your strategy.
  5. Create your content.
  6. Promote your content.
  7. Track and evaluate your content performance.

That sounds like a lot of work right? Why should you consider this?

Because our clients see an average increase of 138% in organic search after the first year and achieve 7x ROI after 6-8 months. Because of this, we see tremendous opportunity for the MDM market to apply content marketing best practices.

Outsourcing Content Creation

Maybe you don’t have the time, staff to do this, or budget? Our clients spend only $4,000-$8,000 per month. That’s less than the cost of an event sponsorship and much more effective.

Outsourcing content marketing frees you up to focus on your marketing strategy, on finding the best talent, activating your employees, and showing your executive team the amazing ROI we’re delivering for you.

As you can see below, many in the MDM industry are buying traffic with an average monthly spend of $201,000. We could help these companies double their organic traffic for 4% of that cost!

Site Paid Costs
tibco.com $613.8K
informatica.com $163.1K
pimcore.com $19.4K
winshuttle.com $69.6K
stibosystems.com $6.8K
semarchy.com $0
magnitude.com $196
reltio.com $18.2K
syniti.com $1.9K
dataservicesinc.com $0
riversand.com $870
tableau.com/products/add-ons/data-management $0
infosolvetech.com $140

Choosing a Content Marketing Agency

Choosing a content marketing agency can be a tough feat. Companies can claim that they “do” content marketing, but can they prove ROI?

A content marketing agency, at the very least, should:

  • Understand how to attract the right audience
  • Provide lead generation and customer acquisition
  • Map your customer journey to content
  • Focus on building search rankings with content and external links
  • Provide basic content promotion services and guaranteed traffic
  • Report progress based on pre-decided metrics and KPIs

Of course, we offer all these things and best of all, we love to help our clients measure the success.

So what do you say? Let us help you develop a successful content marketing strategy for your business. Contact us today!

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Work Cited
https://www.to-increase.com/business-integration/blog/importance-of-master-data-management-for-business-success
https://www.to-increase.com/business-integration/blog/master-data-management-benefits
https://www.dataversity.net/myths-facts-master-data-management/
https://www.itbusinessedge.com/slideshows/show.aspx?c=86839&slide=4
https://moz.com/learn/seo/backlinks
https://www.stibosystems
https://www.semrush.com/blog/how-to-use-semrush-keyword-research/

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Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is an international keynote speaker, author of "Mean People Suck" and "The Content Formula", and Founder of Marketing Insider Group. Recognized as a Top Content Marketing expert and Digital Marketing Leader, Michael leverages his experience from roles in sales and marketing for global brands like SAP and Nielsen, as well as his leadership in leading teams and driving growth for thriving startups. Today, Michael delivers empowering keynotes on marketing and leadership, and facilitates actionable workshops on content marketing strategy. Connect with Michael today.