Predictive Content: The Key to Automating Engagement

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Executive Summary

Content marketing is a tactic that has been used for centuries to help brands reach and engage customers. Early examples include The Furrow, first published by John Deere in 1895, and the Michelin Guide, published in 1900. But Google changed the game for content marketers as brands had to publish keyword-rich and relevant articles in order to boost SEO and page rank.

Marketers responded by creating content – a lot of content. In the last two years, 90% of the data in the world has been created, totaling 2.5 quintillion bytes per day. How much data is that? Every minute, 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube, 1,440 new WordPress blogs are published, and 3.3 million Facebook updates are posted. If you’d like to see exactly what that looks like, Smart Insights has a real-time social media counter that is both fascinating and overwhelming.

Although this amount of content is being curated every minute of every day, few brands are experiencing any real benefits from it. A study by Moz and Buzzsumo found that over half of all articles get eight shares or less and 75% of posts achieve zero referring domain links. This means that the SEO initiatives aren’t working as well as they could or should.

But all is not lost. Marketers are combating this content shock by shifting their focus away from just content curation to developing a more strategic approach that allows them to engage site visitors and consumers through relevant content - answering questions and creating value.

Forrester and Gartner define content marketing as “a strategy where brands create interest, relevance, and relationships with customers by producing, curating, and sharing content in the form of text, video, images, eBooks, white papers and other content assets, that addresses specific customer needs and delivers visible value.”

The Content Marketing Institute found that 89% of organizations currently use content marketing tactics to reach and engage their audiences. However, only 6% assess their efforts as being sophisticated – meaning they provide accurate measurement to their businesses and scale across their entire organizations.

CONTENT MARKETING - Content Marketing is a strategy where brands create interest, relevance, and relationships with customers by producing, curating, and sharing content in the form of text, video, images, eBooks, whitepapers and other content assets, that addresses specific customer needs and delivers visible value.

Many businesses are creating a large amount of content in the forms of videos, articles, blog posts, guides, and eBooks, to name a few, but are struggling to create a cohesive cross-department strategy and accurately measure results beyond clicks.

One of the reasons for this is that they aren’t targeting the right audience. A B2B content marketing strategy is going to look much different than a B2C strategy. However, that only scratches the surface as to why businesses struggle.

In order to achieve a sophisticated content strategy that engages consumers, marketers have to think beyond the publish button. That’s where Predictive Content comes into play. But here it is important to make sure that our content is not copied. And to check it we have to use an online plagiarism checker tool. This online tool will make sure that the content is not copied.

What Is Predictive Content?

To understand what predictive content is, we must begin by defining several terms that have made their way into marketing jargon:

  1. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - Any device that perceives its environment, takes actions to reason through data and carries out tasks on its own to succeed at some goal. Generative AI technology can analyze human speech to create true-to-life text and images.
  2. MACHINE LEARNING - The ability for a computer program to learn from past experiences without being explicitly programmed.
  3. PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS - Advanced analytics which are used to make predictions about unknown future events. It uses many techniques from data mining, statistics, modeling, machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze current data to make predictions about the future.
  4. PREDICTIVE CONTENT - Powered by machine learning and predictive analytics, timely and relevant content recommendations are automatically delivered to your target audience, boosting engagement and aiding in the purchase decision.

An easy way to understand this is to think of Siri:

Siri senses you made a request, reasons through what you are asking for – recipes, takeout, reservations, etc., and takes action by serving up content that matches your request.

Predictive Content works in a similar way – but better! Consumers don’t have to make a request to kick off a conversation. Instead, emails are automatically populated with the content that has the highest possibility of being relevant, timely and useful for each subscriber based on their behavior and purchase history.

Benefits Of Predictive Content Campaigns

  • Messages that include Predictive Content average 3x higher engagement rates than typical broadcast campaigns that are product heavy
  • Shoppers view the brand as a subject matter expert, giving it an edge over competitors and Amazon
  • Ability to stay top-of-mind during buying cycle
  • Maximization of the brand’s content creation investment
  • Improvement in the customer’s experience after the purchase
  • Higher growth potential as customer retention leads to more revenue than new customer acquisition

Listrak’s Predictive Content Solution

The recommendation engine powering our Predictive Content solution knows exactly how to keep personalized conversations going with everyone on your list. It keeps track of recent browse and purchase activity, then leverages AI to predict which content will engage and nurture the consumer to keep them active with your brand.

Our crawler automatically discovers new content and goes to work saving images, titles and a short description. It runs on autopilot – all it takes is a quick copy/paste of a simple tracking script.

No need to manually tag content unless you want to customize the level of control as rapid natural language keyword extraction identifies the keywords and phrases important to each page. Our content crawler is even smart enough to pick up on signals pages are sending to other networks, such as Facebook.

The crawler sits on your site silently observing thousands of micro interactions daily as visitors browse pages and complete purchases. And, instead of requiring your marketing team to understand how clients are interacting and create personalized messages that align with their needs, our solution automatically populates messages with the content that is most useful, interesting, timely and relevant to each person on your list.

Best of all, it works with Listrak Composer, our drag-and-drop editor, so creating the messages is a breeze. Just click on the “Predictive Content” icon and drag it to the correct location on the template. The right content is automatically added to each message. You can measure the time it takes to build these emails in seconds – not minutes or hours or even days, depending on the length of the message. Content can also be matched with products and dynamic content blocks for the highest level of personalization available.

This works with all types of content – from blog posts and articles, to videos, to guides and tutorials and any other proprietary content you host on your site.

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Listrak’s digital marketing solutions help you create personalized, seamless experiences across all customer touch points and channels.

Predictive Content In Action

A recent study by Ascend2 found that digital marketers have six main goals in mind while planning their strategies: increase revenue from sales, generate more leads, increase site traffic, improve lead quality, improve brand awareness and automate more processes.

Predictive Content helps you achieve all these goals.

That same study found that website, email, social media and organic search are the top channels that help digital marketers achieve these goals.

Predictive Content works in all these channels, ensuring you’re reaching your audience with timely and relevant messages.

It might seem counterintuitive to send emails that don’t promote products or services and don’t ask recipients to purchase. However, the end result with Predictive Content messages is a better experience that feels more natural than forced or salesy. A study from TheMcCarthy Group revealed that 84% of millennials do not like or trust anything that feels too salesy. A quick way to fall into a consumer’s bad graces is to deliver messages that feel invasive.

This email is a perfect example of howPredictive Content can transform a weekly email campaign. Every Monday morning, subscribers receive a message that engages them in new content that is relevant to them. At the bottom of the message are product recommendations based on their browse and purchase histories. This message stands out as it isn’t just asking them to make a purchase. Instead, it shares news that is relevant to their interests – which in this case is cheese making.

Recap

Predictive Content will not only streamline design time as email creation is automated, but will also ensure you reach every subscriber with vital and interesting messages aligned to their exact needs. These messages set you apart from competitors and will really help you stand out this holiday season as you are creating value and building relationships with consumers – you aren’t just asking them to buy from you.

Today’s consumers strive to be well-informed and knowledgeable. Price is no longer the only factor shoppers use when making purchase decisions; they rely on both user generated content in the form of product reviews as well as thoughtfully-curated content generated by subject matter experts in order to educate them. Listrak’s Predictive Content solution will deliver the most timely and relevant content to your customer base, increasing engagement and nurturing customers through the sales journey.