Introducing Recommend: Self-Learning, Dynamically Generated Content Experiences

Today it’s our enormous pleasure to announce the launch of PathFactory Recommend, a new self-learning content experience solution for B2B marketers. Our mission is to help marketers create more value from the clicks they generate across all their channels and to help our customers cultivate the world’s most educated buyers faster.

Recommend extends the power of PathFactory Target, the proven content experience solution that enables B2B marketers to curate and deliver personalized content experiences for known audiences. The PathFactory platform has always been about accommodating the behaviour of fast moving buyers, by making it easy for them to binge on related content. PathFactory Recommend extends that ability to anonymous visitors by engaging and converting traffic on your website and from other channels, such as display and social media, with dynamically generated content experiences.

LookBookHQ Recommend maximizes your prospect’s attention by promoting the next best content assets to encourage content bingeing.

What Problem Does Recommend Address?
We developed Recommend to help our customers ensure that their prospects always see the next best content asset, whenever and wherever they engage. Existing LookBookHQ customers have seen enormous success with our Target product by delivering pre-determined content sequences to known audiences. But what if you don’t know what the correct sequence of content is? Perhaps because you haven’t tested it yet or because the visitor is anonymous and you don’t know enough about them? That’s where Recommend comes in.

Based on proprietary Content Science™, Recommend’s self-learning algorithm automatically selects the content that gets presented to the visitor in the LookBookHQ Content Experience. Recommend optimizes the chances of engaging and converting visitors with your content – and also tells you what Content Experiences and content assets are working for you (e.g. resonating with your audiences).

To use a music analogy, if Target is like a curated playlist within iTunes – the playlist you’ve created to set the right mood for guests at your dinner party – then Recommend is a Genius mix – you’re not exactly sure what you want to listen to but you’re definitely feeling more like indie rock than jazz. Take it away iTunes Genius – delight me with some indie rock! With Recommend, it’s just that simple to deliver the right mix of B2B content to delight your prospects.

How Does Recommend Work?
There are three key components to Recommend:

1. Content Library – Marketers can now pull together all of the content they want to use (owned, earned and third party content of all types and formats) into the Content Library and tag it across [6] different dimensions (Topic, Funnel Stage, Purpose, Asset Type, Audience and Language). Our Content Science™ algorithm uses this rich content metadata in its calculations to serve up the next most relevant asset.

The Content Library consolidates all your content in one place and allows you to tag assets by Topic, Funnel Stage, Purpose, Asset Type, Audience and Language.

2. Content Experiences – Content assets in the Content Library can then be dragged and dropped into Content Experiences to create a pool of content. You can then configure exactly how you want your prospects to experience your content – choose from a range of configurable Promoters (Sidebar, Bottom Bar, Card, Exit, Share, Inactivity) and Conversion options (for example, you can serve a form after 45 seconds within a Content Experience or with a particular content asset).

Then when you share the link to a specific content asset within a Content Experience via any channel, our Content Science™ algorithm takes over and automatically selects the best content to be promoted to the visitor alongside the primary content asset. And our analytics and reporting show how your content is performing and which content journeys are being selected by your prospects.

With Recommend, it’s as easy as drag and drop to configure effective Content Experiences for your audiences.

3. Website Experiences – Adding our simple but powerful Jukebox.js code to your website now allows you to configure and serve a range of Promoters (In-Page, Bottom Bar, Card, Exit, and Inactivity) over the top of and natively within your webpages. These Promoters can be linked to specific Content Experiences and controlled by Content Science™ or pinned to particular content assets within them (if you really want to promote a specific content asset, for example). Website Experiences can be configured specifically to different parts of your website so that visitors get different content offers on your homepage than on your blog, for example.

Website Experiences allow marketers to better promote key content assets or events and really put their content to work via new real estate that didn’t exist previously, and which the marketer (not IT) can easily self-administer and control. For example, you can configure a Website Experience to promote a flagship piece of content – e.g. your awesome new thought leadership eBook – if a visitor has been on your website for 10 seconds but looks as though they’re going to close the tab and disappear on you – just like a B2C e-commerce site would serve you a “10% off to buy now” coupon if you begin to close your browser tab, but have left stuff in your shopping basket.

Recommend exit promoters give marketers another chance to hold on to their visitor’s attention before they close the tab and disappear.

Underpinning PathFactory Recommend is Content Science™ – our use of self-learning, data-driven algorithms within our platform. Both PathFactory’s Target and Recommend products generate unique proprietary data (e.g. real content engagement data); Content Science™ is how we put this and other data to work.

Summing Up
With the launch of PathFactory Recommend, whatever your content challenges – acquiring net new leads or nurturing existing/known prospects to become high quality MQLs – we’ve got you covered. Target has been helping our customers deliver stellar results and we’re equally confident Recommend will do the same; we can’t wait to deliver on that promise!

Read our official press release here.