The Martech Minute: Sitecore’s new content marketing solution, Salesforce expands footprint into China

The martech week in review: News and announcements in marketing technology this week that you might have missed.

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MarTech Minute briefs always appear first in our daily newsletter throughout the week. Click here to subscribe. The following is our compilation of the past week’s briefs from those newsletters.

Giant Partners acquires Worxstudio Marketing. Data provider Giant Partners is opening a new digital marketing division with its purchase of Worxstudio Marketing.”Our customers always ask us how to best utilize data in the modern marketing landscape. After the acquisition, we not only have great answers for them, but have the ability to help them succeed with a complete digital marketing service.”

Unmetric launches new social mining tool. The new solution includes “outliers” capabilities which allow users to mine granular data for insights from social content with above-average engagement rates. It also allows digital marketers to dive deeper into posts to find key engagement drivers. “Marketers today are data-rich but insight poor — and social media plays a significant part in the ongoing data deluge,” said Lux Narayan, CEO of Unmetric, “Unmetric’s mission has always been to help brands cut through the noise in the battle for mindshare and get straight to the insights that matter most about their competitors’ content. The outliers feature refines this further by taking that universe of social posts from competing brands and spotlighting the most attention-worthy content in its own visual feed that’s easy to follow and react to.”

Act-On partners with Pipeliner CRM. Marketing automation provider ActOn Software has partnered with Pipeliner CRM, aiming to help users improve lead quality and lead gen campaigns. “This new native integration is a great example of the flexibility we’re proud to provide to our customers,” said Act-On CEO Kate Johnson. Pipeliner CRM has been recognized by Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Automation for its ease of use. The CRM platform offers visualization assets and supports a variety of companies across industries. 

TrustRadius gets new round of funding. The software and technology review platform TrustRadius has raised $12.5 million in Series C funding. “We’re experiencing rapid acceleration in the adoption of customer reviews in B2B mirroring what’s already occurred in B2C,” said TrustRadius CEO Vinay Bhagat, “We wanted to partner with an investor that understood this trend — has invested in the consumer review space and enterprise software.” This latest round of investments was led by Next Coast Ventures, with help from returning investors Mayfield Fund and LiveOak Ventures.

Sitecore launches content marketing solution. The digital management platform Sitecore has rolled out a new content marketing platform (CMP) as a stand-alone technology offering. Sitecore’s CMP provides content creation, management and analysis tools. “The release of Sitecore Content Marketing Platform will give marketers a unified and collaborative platform to boost the speed, scale, and impact of content marketing, leading to more sales and better ROI,” said Sitecore CMO Paige O’Neill. According to the announcement, the new CMP solution is fully integrated into Sitecore Experience Platform, making it easy for marketers to build personalized content experiences across channels and touchpoints.

Salesforce adds new channel capabilities to Salesforce Essentials. Small businesses using Salesforce Essentials will be able to engage with their customers directly via Facebook Messenger, Instagram and YouTube. The platform previously only supported Facebook pages and Twitter, allowing small businesses to communicate directly with their customers. In addition to the expanded social capabilities, Salesforce Essentials will also offer real-time chat conversations and out-of-the-box phone support built into the CRM.

Perkuto launches Perkuto Labs. Marketo partner, Perkuto will launch a new business division part of the Open Data Initiative launched between Adobe (which owns Marketo), Microsoft and SAP. The new department will serve as the company’s research and innovation division. “As the only Marketo Platinum partner to remain loyal to one single platform, Marketo Engage, we feel we need to do more than just implement and optimize the platform for customers. It’s our duty to champion the use of Marketo throughout large enterprise organizations and to remove any barriers to entry if the customer is running Microsoft, SAP, or other Adobe products,” said Michelle Miles, Perkuto’s Vice President of Consulting Services.

Salesforce partners with Alibaba to expand footprint into China. The partnership positions the Chinese ecommerce platform as the exclusive Salesforce provider to customers in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Alibaba’s existing cloud service offers Salesforce access to China’s expanding online population through its marketing channels. Salesforce intends to sell offerings including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Salesforce Platform. 

Skyview Networks partners with Amplifi Media to deliver branded podcast, digital audio solutions. The strategic partnership seeks to create custom audio solutions for brands incorporating audio platforms — including branded podcasts — in their strategies. The partnership will deliver a curation resource for branded audio content for agencies and customers. “Branded podcasts are a rapidly emerging segment of podcast revenue, having grown more than 6X to $67 million from 2018-19, and are forecast to increase to $100 million by 2021,” said Steve Jones, President and COO of Skyview Networks. “Working with Amplifi Media, we’ll be better positioned to meet the developing needs of consumer brands that are seeking a voice strategy.”

Study says most shoppers will research holiday purchases on mobile. According to new research surveying nearly 30,00 users of its shopping-rewards app, Shopkick found that while half of consumers intend to make their purchases in-store, 84% plan to use their smartphones to research beforehand. Research includes comparing prices, looking for coupons and deals, and reading productive reviews — all happening in the aisle before buying in the store.

Martech Movers

Kate Fitzgerald has been appointed president of Leanplum, a multi-channel engagement platform. Fitzgerald comes to Leanplum after serving as president of Americas sales for Marketo, and prior to that, group vice president of North American sales for Oracle Marketing Cloud and VP of worldwide sales for Salesforce Service Cloud. “Kate is a respected leader with deep business expertise and the ability to generate value and drive success at scale,” said Leanplum CEO Momchil Kyurchiev. 

Active Campaign has brought on Lori Vaughn as director of compliance and deliverability. Vaughn will be charged with helping improve deliverability for ActiveCampaign customers. “It’s rare to find a deliverability expert with such broad industry experience,” said CEO Jason VandeBoom, “I’m looking forward to seeing the new insights Lori brings to the team, making sure our customers have the highest deliverability in the industry.” Before joining Active Campaign, Vaughn spent time working on ESP and ISP platforms and deliverability for companies like Charter Communications, Oracle and Return Path. 

Rakuten announced it is aligning its family of Americas-based businesses under a new leadership team that will include Amit Patel as CEO and Adrienne Down Coulson as COO. “I’m delighted to welcome Amit Patel into his new role as leader of our growing presence in the Americas,” said CEO and chairman of Rakuten, Inc. Mickey Mikitani. Patel has been CEO of Rakuten Rewards since 2010 and will continue serving as its CEO. Coulson came on board to Rakuten Rewards in 2012 and was responsible for launching its Canadian business. Before joining Rakuten, Coulson served as VP of Operations for MacLaren MRM.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Jennifer Cannon
Contributor
Jennifer Videtta Cannon is a markerting specialist at ShotFlow. She previously was a Senior Editor at MarTech. Jennifer has more than a decade of organizational digital marketing experience. She has overseen digital marketing operations for NHL franchises and held roles at tech companies including Salesforce, advising enterprise marketers on maximizing their martech capabilities. Jennifer formerly organized the Inbound Marketing Summit and holds a certificate in Digital Marketing Analytics from MIT Sloan School of Management.

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