Martech will dominate 2019

2019 will likely be an exciting year for marketing technology, marketing analytics and marketing science. It has already started with a bang - hopefully, you're ready for a ride.

Cision buys Falcon.io

The public relations and earned media coverage company Cision bought the Danish social media marketing platform Falcon.io last week. This means Cision can now offer its clients social publishing, engagement, analytics, and audience development for social media, in addition to its existing social listening capabilities. Cision also provides pitch targeting and relationship management for media publications, as well as a press release service.

With the purchase, Cision is trying to position itself as the platform for earned media marketing, a space that - according to their CEO - has been left open because other major marketing clouds, like Adobe or Oracle, focus primarily on owned and paid media.

The Customer Data Platforms are going strong

Many marketers are seeking a single view of their customers. This creates a need for customer data platforms (CDPs) - i.e. tools that collect and store all your customer data. The sector is (according to the CDP Institute’s latest report) growing steadily and continuously evolving with new features.

The study found a 23% growth rate over the last six months across employment, vendors, and funding. That corresponds to about 15 new vendors, 1,256 new employees and additional funding of $317 million. The newly founded startups are smaller, less funded and distributed across the categories of access, analytics and campaign management.

Swedish CMOs list their most significant problems going into 2019

When Swedish publisher Resumé asked distinguished CMOs what they find hardest in their jobs and the difficulties they see ahead, some trends emerged.

First, balance is tricky - and most CMOs today need to balance what media channels they buy, how much of content production is made in-house versus by an agency, and short-term sales versus long-term strategy.

Second, customer data is not low-hanging fruit. Most organisations are trying to figure out how to use it, how to make their customers not mind them using it, and how to turn data into insights into decisions.

Third, it's still hard to organise and manage marketing. Every so often, CMOs fight organisational silos and a lack of mandate. With the tech landscape moving faster, navigating it gets harder, and so does ensuring your employees have the right skills.

Tool of the week: Hunter.io

Have you ever wanted to contact someone by email instead of via LinkedIn, but didn't know the correct address? Hunter is a neat (and perhaps scary) little tool that collects e-mail addresses and makes them searchable. So, if you know the correct e-mail address domain (for instance amazon.com or wholefoods.com) you can most of the time find the full address with Hunter.io's search engine.

Sure, it might feel like an invasion of privacy, but every single email address Hunter.io collects and distributes in their Domain Search has a public source that they disclaim, along with its discovery dates. So, they've just done the stalking for you.

And well, it comes in handy very often.