CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 3 March 2017

Marketo debuts Project Orion advancements

A year after announcing plans to rearchitect its marketing automation technology to better suit enterprise-sized organisations, Marketo has released its next-generation Engagement platform to the public.

Project Orion, the codename for the new big data architecture and labelled as the largest tech investment by the vendor in its 10-year history, was announced last year. It is part of Marketo’s efforts to extend its marketing automation platform into a customer lifecycle management hub.

There are three components to it. The first, the Engagement Marketing Hub, houses customer identities and data as well as the API connectors to bring data in and out of the core insights engine. On top of this, 12 best-in-class marketing apps are natively built into the platform including account-based marketing, Web personalisation and predictive content. The third element is partner applications, which brings in apps designed by third-party tech players.

Marketo said the platform will allow users to capture customer behavioural and profile data at scale, personalise and automate experiences across channels, and tie marketing efforts to business outcomes such as pipeline and revenue through analytics at each stage of the customer lifecycle.

The new architecture is being rolled out to Marketo customers from now and leverages several foundational technologies including Apache Hadoop, Spark, Kafka and druid.

“The Marketo Engagement Platform underscores our continued leadership and innovation in marketing, as well as Marketo’s commitment to delivering breakthrough solutions that enable organisations to connect with their customers and prospects like never before,” claimed Marketo CEO, Steve Lucas. “This is the industry’s most scalable platform for CMOs to build their brand, grow revenue and thrive in the new digital world we call the engagement economy.”

Brightcove and HubSpot partner up on video analytics

Brightcove has struck an alliance with inbound marketing vendor, HubSpot, to bring its video analytics capabilities into the latter’s platform.

The integration sees viewership data created in the Brightcove Audience offering automatically attached to contacts, and users can also capture leads through custom in-video forms. The data can then be used for lead scoring and automating responses via the HubSpot platform.

The companies claim customers using the integration can score leads of those who watch 75 per cent of a video higher than those who watch 25 per cent and then send a specific follow-up email to email set of prospects based on the video watched.

Earlier this week, HubSpot also announced an integration with Instapage, which provides capabilities to deploy personalised landing pages. This will allow users to create customised landing pages and push leads into their HubSpot database.

Totango platform aims to bring whole business into customer management

US-based customer management vendor, Totango, has launched a new conversational interface aimed at helping bring all business functions into customer experience.

The new Zoe bot has initially been integrated with workplace collaboration tool, Slack, and is designed to deliver customer data and insights through to all employees, not just the support department. Employees engage via natural language interface in order to sign-up and participate in customer initiatives, as well as contribute to the customer management process.

“In the last year, more established enterprise companies are turning to customer success to support their digital businesses. The next step is for companies to enable customer success across all functions,” said Totango co-founder and CEO, Guy Nirpaz. “Zoe product will make huge impact on businesses. There’s nothing on the market that can unlock a company’s true potential to drive customer success the way Zoe can.”

Enterprise customers using Totango’s customer experience management platform include Autodesk, Act-On Software and TrustPilot.

Amobee launches Pinterest advertising in Australia

Adtech player, Amobee, has brought its Pinterest digital advertising solution to Australia.

The Amobee Pinterest Marketing Developer Partners Program allows partners to build tools and services to help brands position themselves on the visual sharing social site. The products, which include Promoted Pins and promoted App Pins, are displayed in search results as well as in category and home feeds.

Amobee A/NZ managing director, Liam Walsh, said the Pinterest platform was made for marketing.

“We are thrilled to be able to offer our advertisers access to such innovative social products through our API partnerships,” he said. “Our partnerships mean that our advertisers get first look at the newest technologies in social and can harness the expertise of Amobee’s in-house social team to plan, manage and execute their campaigns.”

MediaMath brings audiences to Australia

Programmatic adtech player, MediaMath, has brought its suite of audience solutions to the A/NZ market.

There are four proprietary data offerings being released. The first, Lookalike Audiences, allows marketers to run prospecting campaigns by targeting consumers that look like existing customers. This is based on predictive modelling and is on offer via a cross-device integration via the vendor’s DSP.

Targeted Audiences is about understanding what customers browse and buy on other sites to utilise in campaign strategy and messaging. Audience Scoring also uses predictive modelling on observedbehaviour on the Web to identify which of a brand’s existing customers are most likely to engage again. These are complemented by MediaMath Insights, a range of predictive reports on customer behaviour.

“We are helping clients optimise their prospecting campaigns with lookalike audiences at scale, and to boost their remarketing campaigns with informed scoring,” said MediaMath APAC managing director, Rahul Vasudev. “Targeting past site visitors isn’t enough these days. We enable clients to adjust bid strategies and messaging based on customers’ actual online activity across all devices and channels.”

Freshdesk brings on a marketplace

Customer engagement software vendor, Freshdesk, has launched a Marketplace aimed at opening up an ecosystem of complementary third-party applications to its client base.

The Freshdesk Marketplace is being supported by a developer portal and is designed to allow third parties to build apps that work with the vendor’s cloud-based platform, as well as customisations. The ecosystem has been launched off the back of Freshdesk’s acquisition of Pipemonk.

“We want to enable any customisation that our customer need, making it easy for them to find what they are looking for under one roof and drive innovation, while simultaneously incentivising developers into building high quality, useful integrations in customer engagement,” said Freshdesk CEO and founder, Girish Mathrubootham.

Swrve debuts Oracle Marketing Cloud mobile extension

US-based Swrve has launched the latest edition of its mobile marketing engagement application on the Oracle Marketing AppCloud.

The app allows Oracle Marketing Cloud users to trigger push notifications, in-app messages and conversations directly from customer journeys created in the larger vendor’s platform, and is aimed at improving the way marketers personalise experiences via mobile apps. Users can also automate subscription list management and update a mobile app user’s custom data based on their interactions within the Swrve application.

“Oracle marketing Cloud customers already have access to hefty datasets and email marketing capabilities, so adding advanced mobile functionality enables them to execute truly multi-channel campaigns at scale, making for a full spectrum marketing engine and more engaged customers,” said Swrve CEO, Christopher S Dean.

Swrve’s Mobile Engagement Platform is designed to help marketers deliver bespoke mobile experiences to customers. Its app is installed across a range of industries including retail, media, travel and sports.

Vision6 brings event management into marketing platform

Vision6 has integrated its email marketing platform with that of event technology provider, Eventbrite, to bring together event management with marketing communications.

The integration allows users to sync data in real-time as well as monitor activities managed through Eventbrite directly in the Vision6 platform. Users can also designed invitation templates via a drag-and-drop editor, as well as automate communications to event attendees based on their status.

“Customers have been asking us to add event management into the mix for a long time,” said Vision6 CEO, Mathew Myers. “We’re really excited to partner with an industry leader like Eventbrite to enable our customers to take their events to the next level.”

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