Generally speaking, CDPs are designed to collect customer data from all sources, normalize that data and build unique unified profiles for each individual customer. Sounds great, but there are a number of things marketers should consider if embarking on the purchase process.

“What you need to get out of a platform is oftentimes a differentiator for organizations when they’re trying to make a choice,” said Craig Howard, VP of technology and chief solution architect at Merkle during a MarTech session yesterday. “Some platforms will kind of expect you to bring nice clean data to them. Other platforms will give you a lot of really powerful tooling to help you with the data quality problem within the platform.”

You also need to do the research. Get ready to watch a ton of webinars, read more than a handful of white papers and to dig through spec sheets on the platforms.

Thirdly, demos: “The first round ends up being more of an education process” said Howard, “where you’re understanding the variety that’s out there as you talk to different vendors and then you get a sense of what’s maybe the best flavor for your organization. And then you have a little better idea of what to look for in subsequent demos, and you have more ability to ask difficult questions and probe into certain capabilities that are really important to you.”

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MarTech Today’s “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market for B2B marketing automation software platforms. This report includes profiles of 13 leading B2B marketing automation vendors, capabilities comparisons, pricing information, and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing.

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“If you think about all the work that marketers do across demand gen, brand, product marketing…there are many different aspects. When you talk about market research, the term seems narrow and specific — but my point-of-view is that it’s really vital to lean into feedback from the customers, prospects, audiences and stakeholders that matter to you.”

That’s the point-of-view of Leela Srinivasan, CMO of SurveyMonkey, which admittedly has skin in the game. But she emphasizes the increased importance of tapping into feedback, given the rapidly adjusting relationships between customers and brands. “The world has never been changing faster than it is today,” said Srinivasaran. “The way people feel about things is evolving all the time. That’s made it even more important to understand how your customers will react to, say, the launch you have up your sleeve.”  

With brands increasingly focused on customer experience, Srinivasaran is seeing marketers think more deeply about research and feedback gathering, and voice-of-customer data. In digital channels, for example, it’s important to gather feedback at the right time, and make it easy to give feedback.

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Back in January if you told us virtual events would be one the hottest topics in martech in 2020 we would have told you to hold our booth swag, but what did any of us know about 2020 back then? These online gatherings are here to stay, and marketers are looking for creative ways to execute them. 

We had our own marketing chief Marc Sirkin and Growth Marketing Conference CEO Vasil Azarov talk about how they donned their citizen developer hats and are building virtual experiences. Their takeaways are crucial if you are an organization that is looking to scale virtual events while trying to trim costs associated with all-in-one platforms.

Watch it here (registration is free). »

Now that video-based calling is pretty much how professionals connect these days, here comes another platform.

Wire, a communications app backed by Skype co-founder Janus Friis, has launched a videoconferencing and collaboration platform with some unique features. First, the platform will not let more than 12 people in a video call, citing research that says calls of that size or smaller are more productive (they may be on to something). But the main feature Wire cites is enhanced security which it claims can thwart fishing attacks and other outside threats.

Why we care: The importance of videoconferencing and digital collaboration tools can’t be understated in a remote work reality. And it’s interesting that it is putting in features aimed at improving productive use of the tools. But as we have seen with other conferencing platforms, security is a real concern. We can’t attest to Wire’s effectiveness, but we surely support any features that keep us and our employers safe from bad actors.

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“We can’t go back to normal. [Brands] have to see this as an opportunity to be more meaningful to people.” Brian Solis, Salesforce.