All the latest martech and adtech news this week from Siteimprove, Microsoft, LiveTiles, Twilio, Zylotech, Bomora, SurveyMonkey, GetFeedback, inMarket, Thinknear, PromoteIQOpens and MessageMedia
SurveyMonkey to acquire GetFeedback for US$68m
SurveyMonkey has entered into an agreement to acquire customer experience management vendor, GetFeedback.
A top-rated feedback solution for Salesforce, according to the Salesforce AppExchange, GetFeedback serves 10,000 leading brands including enterprise customers like Cisco, 3M, Caterpillar, Johnson & Johnson, Walgreens and Salesforce.
Under terms of the agreement, SurveyMonkey will acquire GetFeedback for approximately US$68 million, comprised of a mix of cash and equity. Salesforce Ventures, an existing investor in both companies, will receive equity consideration in the transaction. The acquisition is expected to close in Q3 2019 subject to certain customary closing conditions, and be accretive to revenue growth for the full-year 2019.
The acquisition of GetFeedback is being described as a strategic move for SurveyMonkey, which is scaling its enterprise offerings and continuing to invest in integrations with customers’ systems of record. SurveyMonkey said GetFeedback aligns with its vision to help customers collect important feedback by offering solutions that can be deployed in days
“SurveyMonkey’s deep expertise on feedback collection and analytics combined with GetFeedback’s rich capabilities in integrating feedback within the Salesforce ecosystem will allow us to be the premier customer experience solution for our customers," said SurveyMonkey CEO, Zander Lurie.
Siteimprove’s new product releases
Siteimprove, a SaaS company, has released two new products: Siteimprove Ads and Siteimprove Performance. The two technologies are designed to automate, optimise and visualise the complexity of website performance by showing marketers exactly how visitors from around the world experience their website.
The aim is to give marketers control of their martech stack and build better return on ivestment (ROI) by simplifying the Google Ads minefield and making website performance data understandable and actionable.
Siteimprove Ads aims to do this by providing analysis, insights and prioritised recommendations across three unique pillars. The Google Ads Quality Score, a significant influencer of ad costs, is aggregated and possible Quality Score cost savings from applying recommended improvements are visualised. Secondly, all ad landing pages are automatically checked for 30+ conversion blockers and a prioritised list based on severity levels is created to help marketers quickly fix the things preventing visitors from turning into customers.
Lastly, the budget analysis segments ads budget into justified and unjustified spend to aid further optimisation.
Twilio launches Verified By Twilio, SendGrid Ads, Conversations
Twilio, a cloud communications platform, has debuted a new Verified By Twilio service it says will give consumers the confidence to answer the phone again.
Twilio has partnered with several call identification apps, including YouMail, Hiya and CallApp, in order to help more than 200 million consumers know exactly who is calling them and why. The Verified By Twilio service is available in private beta for testing and adoption by other carriers, mobile operating systems and apps.
To power Verified By Twilio, the vendor is creating a repository that hosts verified information from businesses and their associated brands and will be populated into user screens as a consumer call comes in. Through the programmability of the Twilio platform, organisations will also be able to dynamically assign a purpose for each call to give even further context.
Alongside this, Twilio has unveiled Twilio SendGrid Ads, a capability within its Marketing Campaigns tools, designed to help marketers create cohesive, multichannel engagements. Launched in beta, Ads gives marketers the tools to extend existing email campaigns to a broader set of channels by building targeted display and social ad campaigns within the same platform they are already using.
Twilio has also taken the wrappers off Twilio Conversations, an API to enable developers to unite experiences for their customers across multiple messaging channels. Twilio Conversations does this by allowing developers to leverage one unified API to scale group conversations across SMS, MMS, chat and WhatsApp.
Zylotech partners with Bomora
Zylotech, a self-learning B2B customer data platform (CDP), has struck a new partnership with B2B intent data provider, Bombora.
Bombora’s intent data feed will now be a feature of the Zylotech CDP, providing marketing and sales teams with a single solution for insights about a B2B customer’s path to buying. The integrated offering identifies key accounts and personas helping drive Account-Based Marketing (ABM) revenue.
With the new partnership and technology integration, joint customers now gain direct access to Bombora’s Company Surge in the Zylotech platform. Zylotech’s business users can utilise the feature set to analyse the business content consumption of millions of B2B organisations and identify when prospects are indicating active demand for products and services.
Zylotech’s self-learning CDP unifies, cleanses and enriches customer data, while its prediction and recommendation engines automate the development of customer profiles for micro-segmentation.
inMarket to acquire Thinknear
inMarket has announced its intention to acquire Thinknear, a rival provider of location-based services, from Telenav.
Under terms of the deal, Thinknear's team and intellectual property will join inMarket in exchange for Telenav receiving a minority equity interest in the company. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to be completed during the quarter ending 30 September 2019. Financial terms have not been disclosed.
Combining the Thinknear and inMarket businesses will create a marketing technology platform with clients across the automotive, quick service restaurant, retail, finance, healthcare and consumer-packaged goods industries.
"InMarket and Thinknear combined have almost two decades of successful location technology innovation, yet have tackled the opportunity of timing and targeting in very complementary ways," said inMarket CEO and founder, Todd Dipaola. "Combining these thriving solution sets allows us to further delight our clients and help them grow by consistently delivering high ROI consumer engagements."
Microsoft acquired PromoteIQOpens
Also on the acquisitions trail this month is Microsoft, which picked up PromoteIQOpens, a provider of vendor marketing technology to online retailers and brands.
PromoteIQ has pioneered the private marketplace approach to digital vendor marketing. PromoteIQ’s technology strategically complements Microsoft’s current retail advertising offerings, to enable retailers with a portfolio of technology solutions to modernise their e-commerce platforms and maximise their monetisation opportunity.
"With this acquisition, PromoteIQ clients — which include leading global retailers such as Kroger, Kohl’s and Overstock.com — will continue to benefit from the PromoteIQ platform and team, and will now benefit from more resources and support from Microsoft," corporate VP of Microsoft Advertising, Rik van der Kooi, said.
PromoteIQ will maintain its brand and become a division within Microsoft Advertising.
In related news, Arq Group, an Australian digital solutions partner, has signed an agreement to join the Microsoft Advertising partner program. The new partnership will enable Arq Group to deliver more targeted, personalised and timely connections for customers, either directly through Bing or through the myriad of Microsoft-integrated hardware and software available in the current market. The offering will be served via Arq’s small and medium business brand, Netregistry.
Formerly known as Bing Ads, Microsoft Advertising is a search advertising tool that connects businesses with millions of potential customers.
MessageMedia partners with Adobe
MessageMedia has partnered with Adobe Campaign, a move it hopes will help marketers elevate their campaigns by integrating SMS into existing automation workflows .
Adobe Campaign is a marketing automation platform within the Adobe Experience Cloud suite. Using SMS within Adobe Campaign enables businesses to create targeted messages with dynamic content to deliver real-time, personalised experiences within one platform. MessageMedia is a global messaging provider.
According to MessageMedia, the integration will allow businesses to automate SMS into marketing campaign workflows to get the right message to customers in real-time to achieve valuable business outcomes.
Microsoft and LiveTiles co-selling AI cybersecurity solution
LiveTiles has struck a reseller deal to actively sell LiveTiles technologies alongside Microsoft to enterprises across Asia-Pacific, North America, South America and Europe into key target verticals.
LiveTiles will continue to leverage the strong relationship and support of Microsoft and its partners to bring its artificial intelligence (AI)-based cybersecurity solutions to customers in these regions. The significance of the Microsoft co-sell program is that Microsoft offers internal incentives to their field salesforce who introduce third-party solutions to customers, such as the LiveTiles suite of technologies.
The AI Cybersecurity solution was developed in conjunction with Nucleus Cyber and added as a premium feature of LiveTiles Intelligent Workplace Platform in June 2019.
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