White Paper

www.brightinfo.com

Real Time Engagement: Dynamic Content Recommendation Converts Visitors to Leads

It’s estimated that B2B marketers now spend 33%1 of their marketing budgets on content marketing, up from 26% in 2012. And more than half see higher expenditure ahead.

Not only are online B2B marketers investing money and resources in online content generation in an attempt to engage customers, they’re also spending large amounts on traffic generation. But those two investments aren’t connecting. Few marketers are

matching the right content to the right traffic at the right time in order to immediately spark engagement. As a result, content expenditures aren’t paying off – and costs per lead remain staggeringly high.

This paper discusses the challenges B2B marketers face in using content to convert traffic into leads, the types of solutions available, and one low-overhead, high-tech approach that utilizes existing investments to bring lead costs down.

Executive overview

Content, traffic, and the relevancy gap

1 Content Marketing Institute report: B2C Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarkes, Budgets, and Trends – North America

KICKRunning shop

KICKRunning shop

Kick is a trendy running shop that spends lots of money - getting runners into the store with the promise of huge brand selection

Dave, who saw the Kick booth at a fun run comes in looking for shoes

Dave is amazed - but overwhelmed. In seconds, Dave will decide that he doesn’t have time or energy to sift through all this content to find the exact shoes he wants

CONTENT TRAFFIC BOUNCE

2

Why aren’t online marketers getting more value from the content they create?Here’s a brick and mortar analogy.

Valerie, a shoe recommendation pro greets Dave and quickly learns enough about his needs to keep him in the store

Soon, she’s able to recommend a small sample of suitable shoes, making a sale and delivering a positive customer experience

ENGAGEMENT RELEVANCE, CONVERSION, RETENTION

KICKRunning shop

LEGEND

Website

Resources

Visitor

BrightInfo

Marketing

Like Kick running shop, online marketers are investing time and money – more than a third of their overall budgets - to develop a lot of content, and they’re spending even more money generating website traffic to consume that content. But with no online “Valerie” equivalent to match specific content to each visitor’s needs, potential leads are presented with unfocused and irrelevant information and leave the site.

“Content-rich” B2B websites are intended to provide a rich library of brochures, whitepapers, blog posts, webinars, online demos, case studies and benchmarks to convert anonymous visitors into leads, but that volume means visitors are faced with too many diverse messages and choices at once - and no way to discover easily the right content they need.

But isn’t there value in a customer browsing around my site for desired content? The data say no. So does the goldfish rule. According to statistics verified by the Associated Press, the typical online human has an attention span of eight seconds; shorter than that of a goldfish2. Putting all your content references, calls to action and offers in one place is just as off-putting to a visitor – creating noise and clutter that is neither useful nor appropriately curated to their interests. Too many irrelevant options will likely cause an immediate bounce or eventual exit when the user, guessing at which of many items will meet his needs,

downloads the wrong document or video or simply concludes you don’t really have the right offering for him.

Clearly, marketers have a brief window to make their online marketing budgets pay off, and they’re not succeeding. BrightInfo studies of B2B website landing pages show an average 90% bounce rate (exiting after viewing only one page), with just 10% retention and of that, only about 3% converting into leads.

That makes each lead very, very expensive for the marketer. And without addressing the underlying bounce issue, simply adding more content or more traffic volume only increases per-lead costs.

So, the question is how to get the right content in a digestible amount in front of each consumer in eight seconds or less. To do so, we need to understand each visitor.

Content overload and the goldfish rule

2 Source: http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/the-8-second-attention-span-dont-bother-0361613

At Kick, Valerie gathers intel the old fashioned way, and in real time. From the moment Dave walks in the door, she intuits some demographics (men’s shoes, size 11ish). She observes he’s wearing high-end,

late-model but worn shoes (serious runner, ready to buy). Then she builds on this initial profile based on his questions, his comments and the shoes he stops to examine.

More leads at lower cost

3

00100010011001001001000100010001011110010001001110100101001001100100101000100010001110101101011101010

00100010011001001001000100010001011110010001001110100101001001100100101000100010001110101101011101010

00100010011001001001000100010001011110010001001110100101001001100100101000100010001110101101011101010

00100010011001001001000100010001011110010001001110100101001001100100101000100010001110101101011101010

But what if our Dave is an anonymous online visitor without so much as a cookie to help us understand his needs? We don’t have Valerie’s eyes, ears, skill and experience to guide us.

Except that we do. We have a souped-up algorithmic version of Valerie. It’s called machine learning, and it can identify behavioral characteristics Valerie can’t, at speeds no human can match.

Online, we can use machine learning, automated user profiling and dynamic content recommendations to understand and meet individual visitor needs at a very high level of detail, accuracy and repeatability – in real time.

Machine learning solutions are rapidly replacing time-intensive manual profiling techniques that once matched content to a fixed set of pre-assigned personas.

Added to the mix, automated profiling can conduct content match-making on a virtually infinite scale with no human intervention. An algorithmic approach can

be designed to enable any number of anonymous visitors to be targeted at a high-resolution with the ideal subsets of content from even the most enormous libraries. With this model, we can objectively quantify patterns and behaviors to learn and recommend the topics and type of content a given user may find relevant. The key is to develop this profile dynamically, in real time, just as Valerie evolved her understanding of Dave’s needs as he toured the store. Automated profiling technology does this by capturing the preferences and motivations of online visitors in an ongoing, fluid way.

Automating the recommendation process

BrightInfo data show that dynamic content recommendation can increase average page views by

200% and generate a stunning 19% uplift in leads.

1 MachineLearning

2Automated profiling

3 Dynamic content recommendation

4

The data confirm that dynamic content recommendation significantly increases engagement, which is the key to converting visitors to quality leads and reducing cost-per-lead. In fact, BrightInfo data show that dynamic content recommendation can

increase average page views by 200% and generate a remarkable 19% uplift in leads.

While there are multiple solutions available for dynamic content recommendation, some are embedded on web pages where they impact site design and require page-by-page implementation. Some systems also require the development of new content vs. leveraging existing materials.

BrightInfo has resolved many of the barriers to effective dynamic content recommendation by approaching it from an overall cost-per-lead perspective, which means optimal performance and minimal intervention with the objective of lowering costs per lead.

Our dynamic and automated B2B content recommendation model focuses on using improved engagement to generate more and higher-quality leads at a lower cost per lead. This strategy gives the BrightInfo dynamic content recommendation engine a number of advantages over alternative solutions:

The BrightInfo recommendation engine is drop-in simple, making it practical for businesses of all sizes to utilize it with virtually no IT intervention or additional marketing man-hours.

The BrightInfo engine recommends existing content, so marketers can lower costs per lead by extracting value from current assets.

Our algorithm is unique – capturing data in a way that delivers relevancy on multiple levels, from type of content to subject matter to position in the buyer’s journey.

Getting more from current investments

Nolio boosts leads and lowers costs with BrightInfoNolio, now part of CA Technologies*, deployed the BrightInfo content recommendation engine to improve content consumption and lead volumes (registrations) on its content-rich, IT-focused website. The company’s solution generated an average 1.7% CTR. Comparisons of users exposed to the BrightInfo tool to unexposed visitors showed the following gains:

*Data as of March 15, 2013

1.

2.

3.

5

• 19% lift in lead forms submitted• 200% lift in average page views per session• 16% lower costs per lead

Content is King (served in the right context) White Paper

Relevant content boosts inbound marketing performance Case Study

Cut your cost-per-lead (the easy way) Webinar

RECOMMENDED CONTENT

Boosting leads & engagement by over 50% Case Study

B2B content consumption benchmark Infographics

Cut your cost-per-lead (the easy way) Webinar

RECOMMENDED CONTENT

Custom widget for your landing pages Online Demo

Targeted content recommendations for your blog visitors Webinar

Using BrightInfo's analytics for better more targeted content Best Practices

RECOMMENDED CONTENT

For most B2B websites, spending more on content and/or traffic generation is a wasted effort without a way to efficiently match the two. Dynamic content recommendation allows that matching to be automated, accurate, objective and fluid – delivering real time engagement from existing content resources.

With dynamic, automated content recommendation, visitors to your site can quickly engage with content they care about. Making that connection will significantly improve the volume and quality of leads while reducing per-lead costs.

As with every relationship, when traffic and content have a meaningful connection, the results are far richer and longer lasting.

Conclusion

Next Steps box

Link A - click here

Link B - click here

Link C - click here

Standard static “next steps” box - displaying the same content to everyone all the time

BrightInfo: Same page shows different links, based on who and how someone got to the site

6 support@brightinfo.com | +1-917-310-1302 | www.brightinfo.com