CDP Institute

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.

Into pain, are you? Then you’ll enjoy a Forbes Insights report on top pain points related to data-driven marketing strategy.  Culture and management support head the list, followed by technology and internal skills. Funding is less of a problem. In fact, 27% of respondents said they spend more than half their marketing budget on data, up from just 12% a year ago. Another 39% said they spend 26% to 50%, up from 28% last year. That seems crazily high but numbers don’t lie, right?

Accenture Interactive is already the world’s largest digital agency, according to Ad Age, and has bought thirteen firms in the past five years to get there.  So is it really news that they just made their fourteenth acquisition, interactive agency Wire Stone? Probably not, but, then, you might not have realized how big they are already.

You might also not realize how many industry-specific marketing systems there are. So we’ll mention that Imprev Automated Marketing Services is used at firms representing more than 20% of U.S. real estate agents. The system automatically creates and updates print, digital, and social media marketing packages for real estate listings. They earn style points for not calling this “artificial intelligence”. Today’s news is their system was just adopted by Intero Real Estate Services, a 3,000-agent brokerage firm.

Chances are you also haven’t given much thought to physical product packaging, unless that’s your specialty. But the folks at Danaher have, since they own and several businesses related to it. They sponsored a CMO Council survey that found 66% of marketers believe their customers are very sensitive to alignment between physical and digital experience. Oddly enough, they didn’t ask how many actually achieve such alignment. But they did find that changes to physical presentation take much longer than digital changes. Duh.

Personalization vendor Evergage, whose product includes a Customer Data Platform, announced a $10 million Series C funding, bring total funding to $31.5 million. Evergage does real time personalization for Web sites and mobile apps.

Start-up PB Data Services announced a self-service online data append tool for list hygiene and data append. It’s not clear what’s new compared with an announcement they made in March, but it doesn’t really matter. I’m just posting this as an example of how easily marketers can access this type of information. Plenty of vendors offer similar services.

It’s a slow news day. So here’s a good piece from Adweek about brand marketers building their own audience databases so they are less reliant on Google and Facebook. It’s a core CDP use case. The author works for cross-device identity solution Drawbridge.

Personalization vendor Evergage, whose product includes a Customer Data Platform, announced a $10 million Series C funding, bring total funding to $31.5 million. Evergage does real time personalization for Web sites and mobile apps.

Start-up PB Data Services announced a self-service online data append tool for list hygiene and data append. It’s not clear what’s new compared with an announcement they made in March, but it doesn’t really matter. I’m just posting this as an example of how easily marketers can access this type of information. Plenty of vendors offer similar services.