CDP Institute

Since we’re looking at the sales process today, let’s finish with a study from the Content Marketing Institute about buyers’ content preferences. They most want information related to their specific needs and product/service specifications.  Testimonials and case studies were less useful.  Nearly all buyers start their research before talking to vendors.

B2B data compiler ZoomInfo has been purchased by private equity firm Great Hill Partners. It continues a trend of marketing technology vendors being purchased by private equity firms, although Great Hill hasn’t been particularly active in the martech space. Price was not disclosed.

Why compile B2B data when you can just grab it from LinkedIn? That was the logic behind hiQ Labs’ business, which does analytics based on the public portion of LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn sued to stop them, citing anti-hacking laws, but, a U.S. District Court ruled in hiQ’s favor. The basic logic was that anything not protected by a password is fair game. Expect an appeal.

Then again, some companies can’t even protect their data from their own employees. Uber’s lax security policies led to a 2014 data breach, and has now settled with the Federal Trade Commission. It’s required to implement a comprehensive privacy program, submit to 20 years of data audits, and not misrepresent how it protects consumers’ personal data.

Interactive B2B content platform SnapApp has closed a $10.2 million Series B funding, bringing total funding to $22 million. SnapApp content captures user behavior and data but doesn’t make much use of external information in managing what’s presented.

Here’s some real data-driven personalization: Jivox dynamically generates personalized programmatic ads based on all sorts of inputs and machine learning.. They’ve just teamed with plista to extend their scope to native advertising, which inserts content recommendations within editorial settings. plista has its own data-driven recommendation engine as well as a publisher network.

Of course, all discussions of customer data come back to Facebook, Amazon, Google, and the handful of other mega-aggregators.

Appboy assembles customer data and executes cross-channel campaigns as customers move through different lifecycle stages. They’re big, processing more than 750 million active users per month. They’re getting bigger, having just raised a $50 million Series D, bringing total funding to $95 million. They’re getting more open, having recently announced connectors to feed data to Customer Data Platforms mParticle and Segment, as well as Amplitude and Amazon Redshift.

Speaking of Amplitude: they raised $30 million of their own last week, bringing total funding to $56 million. Amplitude is a Web analytics platform that distinguishes itself by focusing on needs of product managers rather than marketers.

Soffront, an all-in-one marketing and CRM platform, has added services offerings to help clients with search engine optimization, paid search advertising, social media marketing, landing page development, and newsletter design. Such services are often essential for successful deployment because clients can’t do the work for themselves.

B2B marketers have lagged B2C in adopting Customer Data Platforms, in part because many assumed all the relevant data is in their CRM system. But as B2B martech systems proliferate, there’s growing demand for systems to merge CRM data with data from other sources. One beneficiary is Openprise, which merges data from Salesforce.com and marketing automation products. They’ve just launched their product on the Salesforce AppExchange.

What else are people buying? RainKing continuously interviews decision makers to find out. They just released a Technology Spending Trends and Pain Points report that finds security spending is rising across all tech categories. The number of marketers suffering from bad data also rose sharply, from 50% to 57%. Or so says their press release: the promised email with my link to the actual report never arrived. Maybe you’ll have better luck.