MarTech Minute: Salesforce rolls out new commerce tools, Adobe adds Predictive Audiences

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Salesforce adds commerce cloud templates for the COVID-19 era

CRM leader Salesforce this week unveiled several enhancements to its commerce cloud. The new features give customers the ability to stand up ecommerce sites quickly that respond to the current disruption in how consumers are accessing products. 

For example, “Quick Start Commerce for Grocery and Food Service enables businesses like grocery, food service and quick serve restaurants to go from ‘clicks to curb’ by building new commerce sites fast, and allowing customers to buy online and pick up curbside,” the company said in the announcement.

In addition to the grocery and food service template, Salesforce also unveiled solutions for retailers who sell essential goods (toilet paper, sanitizer, masks, etc.), retailers who need a solution for buy online and pick up in store, and lastly one exclusively for B2B retailers.

Why we care. Obviously this kind of product evolution in the wake of such a disruptive event is interesting and carries a lot of impact for those retailers. And there’s no telling how things like curbside pickup are going to persist. But most of all, it’s interesting to see Salesforce evolve its commerce cloud as it is directly in competition with Shopify, which has a lot of momentum right now.

Adobe adds a new Predictive Audiences feature to Audience Manager

Adobe has launched a new Predictive Audiences solution as part of its Audience Manager platform. According to the company, Predictive Audiences give marketers personalization at scale while still keeping user choice and control in place. Powered by AI and machine learning, the new feature allows marketers to classify unknown groups of people who have visited a brand’s website but have yet to be categorized into a segment or distinct persona.

Why we care: Personalization is a difficult task to master at the moment. Marketers are dealing with a mess of ID resolution information combined with a loss of cookie data, in addition to the massive shifts in consumer behavior that has happened across industries during the last three months. Adobe says its new feature can match an unclassified user’s propensities against an existing segment in real-time and predict which persona the user would most likely belong to. The tool adds new opportunities for personalization — something a lot of marketers would welcome right about now.

Quora pulls back the veil on its data with Socialgist partnership

Quora is partnering with the integration platform Socialgist to deliver data products built on insights gleaned from millions of questions asked on Quora monthly. “The partnership ensures important insights are available to enterprise-level clients who seek to more thoroughly understand and engage with Quora’s highly active community,” according to the announcement. This is the first time Quora’s data is being made available via a third party platform through its API. The available data will include enterprise-level real-time insights across various verticals, including B2B, tech, SaaS, finance, education, job and careers.

Why we care: With so much uncertainty right now, most of us feel as if we are stumbling around in the dark, trying to determine what our strategy will look like in the coming months. Having access to Quora’s business insights — data pulled from the more than 300 million visitors that come to the site every month to ask questions — could be a flashlight for many marketers currently in the dark. 

When weather forecasts meet Marketo

If you haven’t thought about how (or why) you would want to use weather forecast data in your Marketo campaigns, here’s a compelling reason: 

“In today’s current events that are dominated by Stay at Home orders, one of the few areas of your in-person marketing program remains outdoor activities. Ask anyone in the restaurant industry these days how important drive-thru or takeout business is these days,” writes The Conversion Store Owner Michale Tucker. 

Tucker outlined all of the steps you can take from writing a webhook to pull in weather data to creating an operational program and leveraging in a campaign.

Why we care. While Ryan Phelan’s note above about adjusting your messaging is one component of being nimble marketers during this crisis, there is also the need to leverage our martech tools to make smart changes as well. Marketing automation platforms are the heart of a marketing org, so we love any insider tips that help us add new capabilities.

TikTok is gearing up to make its first big pitch to advertisers

On June 25, TikTok will be making its first-ever debut at the IAB NewFronts – an annual series of media and advertiser presentations driven by the likes of Twitter, YouTube, Hulu, Verizon Media, and others. At this year’s event (which will take place virtually), TikTok will showcase its mobile video platform and likely have a significant announcement or two about its ad business. 

Why we care: This is a big deal for a few reasons: presenting at NewFronts is another signal that TikTok is capable of playing in the big leagues with social giants like Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. And of course, there’s TikTok’s ad business, which advertisers have been watching quietly unfold as TikTok tests features and benefits to attract brands. It introduced a self-serve ad product in 2019, which garnered enthusiasm from the brands who were first to test it out. But despite growth in ad revenue, TikTok’s ad platform is still in beta testing and lacks some of the more robust targeting options and programmatic features for automatically buying and measuring ads. Here’s to hoping for a better solution soon.