CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 19 May 2022

All the latest martech and adtech news from Tableau, Salesforce, Curious Thing, Robotic Marketer, IAS, Creatio, mParticle and Similarweb.

Tableau takes it to cloud level

Tableau has taken the wrappers off Tableau Cloud, the next generation of its Online offering that’s more integrated with Salesforce Customer 360.

The vendor said the latest enterprise platform includes enhanced analytical tools to help users uncover insights and confidently make data-driven decisions. Top of the list is Data Stories, which adds automated plain-language data explanations to Tableau dashboards at scale.

Tableau is also expanding its Accelerators customisable dashboards and capabilities of Tableau Exchange, a hub of third-party, add-on offerings. The vendor now has more than 100 Accelerators on the Tableau Exchange, including those built across the Tableau Partner Network. There’s also new in-product capability, enabling customers to explore and use Tableau Exchange applications directly in the product without requiring a separate download.

In addition, Tableau has introduced Advanced Management to help customers manage, secure and scale analytics across the enterprise. Customer-managed Encryption Keys can be used to meet organisational compliance standards and provide an additional layer of protection for data, while an Activity Log provides detailed event data to help administrators keep track of how individuals are using Tableau plus permission auditing. Admin Insights then ensures data is retained for up to one year to help track dataset usage, licence adoption and visualisation load times.

Salesforce’s artificial intelligence layer, Einstein, is also being further infused into Tableau to deliver deeper insights across the Salesforce Customer 360 platform. For example, Model Builder enables business teams to collaboratively build and consume predictive models, using the Einstein Discovery engine, without having to leave Tableau workflows. Text Clustering leverages machine learning models to extract keywords from large text fields to quickly reveal hidden insights, and bias detection for multiclass models expands the use-cases for multi-class models by rooting out bias by variable, preventing the need to re-train an entire model.

Finally, as part of the Tableau Cloud launch, Tableau is working with Snowflake to provide an extended promotional trial which includes Cloud licences for Snowflake customers and, subject to program requirements, credits upon conversion to a Tableau Cloud customer.

Salesforce acquires Troops.ai

Our second Salesforce news item this week is an acquisition. The vendor has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Troops.ai, a provider of a revenue communications solution used to improve sales velocity, forecasting, visibility and collaboration across teams.

Established seven years ago, Troops has been building tools to deliver real-time insights from systems of record like Salesforce to systems of engagement like Slack. By connecting their employees, customers, partners, tools, and workflows on a single platform strengthened by powerful integrations, the company said teams benefit from a shared view of their customers and projects and can act on real-time insights in the platform they’re already working in.

Salesforce’s acquisition of Troops is expected to close in the second quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2023, 31 July 31, 2022, subject to customary closing conditions. Upon the closing of the acquisition, Troops will become part of Slack, a Salesforce company. Financial terms were not disclosed.  

Similarweb scoops up Rank Ranger

Our second acquisition this week is by Similarweb, which is picking up Rank Ranger, a provider of SEO and search rank tracking technology.

The acquisition expands Similarweb’s capabilities as a SEO and digital intelligence suite provider by combining its keyword research and analysis capabilities with Rank Ranger’s search term rank tracking. The companies said this will give search professionals and marketing leaders a better understanding of their relative ‘market share’ beyond the key words they track.

Users will be able to monitor, track and report on the rank of keywords over time across all major search engines, connecting how they rank for key search terms with the actual traffic those terms are driving. Rank Ranger’s tools enable search professionals to monitor progress against search marketing goals, while measuring, optimising and reporting on the impact of specific strategies.

Purchase price and financial details were not disclosed. Rank Ranger will continue to operate as Rank Ranger, a Similarweb company.

Australian company, debuts AI-based marketing strategy dashboard

AI-powered marketing strategy technology platform company, Robotic Marketer, has unveiled a new digital marketing dashboard to complement what it says is the world’s first marketing strategy technology platform.

The technology uses data-driven benchmarking, peer-sourced insights, data mining and machine learning to help marketing teams create and execute more effective marketing strategies. After successfully beta testing the proprietary technology suite, Robotic Marketer is releasing the technology to the B2B market.

The marketing dashboard aims for transparency across digital assets, presenting in a single view competitor performance, Google Analytics, CRM, email marketing, keyword, hashtag, influencer listings and blog heading curation. The company said outputs from its technology include a comprehensive marketing strategy, with media, awards and event lists as well as a detailed social media analysis, which typically results in a 40-50 pages marketing report, processed in approximately 20 minutes. In addition to providing an executive overview, the technology output includes a 12-month implementation planner that integrates into project management software.

“Marketing teams not only want data in one place in real time, but also deeper insights into industry best practice and tactical actions that will amplify the effectiveness of their marketing programs,” said Robotic Marketer founder, Mellissah Smith. “The integration of third-party marketing technologies is key to giving marketers and entrepreneurs a full view of the performance of their marketing function. Being able to interact with this dashboard is next level and will continue to drive better performance from marketing strategies.

“The digital dashboard gives marketing managers an ability to manage their entire marketing strategy in one place and provides an easy platform for reporting to senior management.”

Robotic Marketer was founded in 2016 and is and Australian-owned business. It has channel partnership programs with SAP, Oracle and Mitel and is available on Atlassian and Zift marketplaces.

MParticle sets sights on next-gen audience journeys

Customer data management company, mParticle, has launched a new Journey Builder for marketers to design audience sequences and continuously update audience membership across the lifecycle.

To do this, the tool combines multi-path journey analysis, testing and orchestration into a single workflow, helping brands continuously optimise the customer journey and deliver personalised experiences.

Key features include Journey Analytics, which is powered by Indicative, plus Journey Builder, which can be used to design multi-stage journeys via a visual interface using cross-channel behavioural event or user data, define key milestones and sequences within the customer journey. Journey Integrations then syncs audiences in real-time to any of mParticle's Audience API partners such as Meta, Twitter, Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Google.

Because of the bi-directional nature of the integrations, mParticle said teams can close the loop on performance by incorporating cross-channel engagement metrics such as email opens and clicks, SMS responses and attribution data back into mParticle.

Journeys has been in beta with select customers, and a series of additional investments are planned throughout 2022.

Curious Thing secures $7m for voice AI communication platform

This week’s investment round news comes from local Voice AI communication platform, Curious Thing, which has closed a $7 million pre-series A funding round.

The round was led by private investment firm, Hawkstone, with participation from Blacksheep Capital, January Capital and return investors, Reinventure and Qualgro. Curious Thing previously raised $1.5 million from Reinventure and Qualgro in 2019.

The funding will support Curious Thing’s accelerated growth in the fin services, health and tech verticals as well as its expansion in South East Asia and the US. The expansion is being led by co-founders, Sam Zheng (CEO), Dr. Han Xu (CTO) and David Mckeague (chief strategy officer).

Curious Thing said the latest investment comes after a period of strong growth, driven by the decision to pivot away from HR tech into customer engagement. Since inception, Curious Thing has experienced 1340 per cent year-on-year growth and has been recognised among the Top 5 Rising Stars at the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 awards for 2021.

Australian clients include Quitline, Calvary, Brighte, Humm Group and a number of state and local governments. In 2021, the platform processed over three million minutes of AI-human conversations.

The company also noted it has grown its core team in Australia to 30 employees, with additional team members in the US. With this new funding, the company will add talent to its commercial, sales, marketing and customer success teams.

“We are proud to be trusted by our clients, especially for the socially impactful work we do in the health sector,” Zheng commented. “We look forward to using this funding to continuously build our unique voice AI technology as well as deepen our expertise in human-AI trust and conversational user experience - at a time when voice AI rapidly emerges from a ‘good to have’ to ‘strategic business tool’.”

IAS measures up TikTok

Integral Ad Science (IAS) has extended its digital media quality services to encompass TikTok.

Under the new partnership, IAS will now be able to measure viewability, invalid traffic (IVT) and app-level brand safety, allowing brands and agencies globally to effectively monitor the quality of their media buys on TikTok’s platform. It’s doing this through its third-party measurement platform, which is built on the Open Measurement Software Development Kit, which is governed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

“It is more important than ever for marketers to engage with users on social platforms and ensure that their ads appear next to brand safe and suitable content on a global scale.  We are thrilled to deliver a holistic solution on TikTok and provide new levels of transparency and precision for these campaigns,” said IAS CEO, Lisa Utzschneider.

The adtech vendor said the new offering will provide granular reporting with 24/7 access to the IAS Signal UI, allowing advertisers to take action and stay informed on campaigns.

Creatio expands A/NZ presence

No-code workflow and CRM automation vendor, Creatio, has struck a partnership with Experieco to further expand its presence in the Australia and New Zealand markets.

Experieco is a New Zealand owned and operated business with skillsets in developing low-code and no-code technologies. Creatio said the new partnership will bring more New Zealand and Australian businesses a with prebuilt industry solutions and advanced no-code tools to allow midsize and large enterprises to automate more workflows and CRM processes.

Creatio’s suite includes a no-code platform (Studio Creatio), CRM applications (marketing, sales and service), industry workflows for 20 verticals and marketplace add-ons.  

“Coming off the heels of our expansion in Australia and New Zealand, we are delighted to welcome our new partner Experieco onboard. Together we’ll help organisations in the region enjoy the freedom of automation with the cutting-edge no-code platform and support of the partner with an in-depth industry expertise,” said Creatio SVP, global channels, Alex Donchuk.

Don’t miss out on the wealth of insight and content provided by CMO A/NZ and sign up to our weekly CMO Digest newsletters and information services here.  

You can also follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, follow our regular updates via CMO Australia's Linkedin company page 

 

 

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