Content marketing vendor LookBookHQ has expanded its product to select content based on long-term impact on buyer behavior, ingesting data from CRM and marketing automation systems to make this possible. Reflecting a fundamental shift in its business, the company has renamed itself PathFactory.

I’ll spare you yet another survey on lack of preparation for GDPR and instead point to this Forrester study, done for Dun & Bradstreet, reminding us why collecting data is worth the trouble. Forrester rated respondents on data management maturity and found leaders are roughly twice as successful as laggards at uncovering new business opportunities, personalizing customer experience, measuring campaign results, and buying the right technology. Leaders also outperformed laggards at improving metrics ranging from sales cycle speed to customer lifetime value. You get the idea: good data pays.

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.