CDPs don’t have all the funding fun: PR measurement company TrendKit has added $16 million to its $36 million investment total. What’s to measure, you might ask? Lots of stuff, including readership, share of voice, sentiment, social amplification, and message pull-through, as well as impact on search engine ranking, Web traffic, and audience engagement. And they package all this in presentation-ready graphics.
Tableau announced plans to become a complete data platform, extending backwards from its data visualization interface to data preparation tools, a high-scale in-memory database, natural language queries, and machine learning-based recommendations. Customer data is just one part of the picture but surely an important one.
In largely unrelated news, research firm Forrester and software vendor Verint have partnered to embed Forrester’s Customer Experience Index surveys within Verint Enterprise Feedback Management deployments. Forrester will analyze data from the surveys, compare them to benchmarks, and display the results within the Verint solution. This will help companies measure the quality of the experiences they’re providing and identify areas for improvement.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.