“Master the topic, the message, and the delivery.” — Steve Jobs, Co-founder – Apple
This is pretty much the gold standard of marketing, isn’t it? And it goes without saying that turning it into an operational strategy is quite a task for marketers. Why? Let me explain.
Consumers use a myriad of channels to engage, interact, and purchase from a brand. This makes it increasingly difficult to listen, learn, and respond to every individual. To achieve this feat, it is paramount for businesses to marry strategy with technology.
Yet, according to Marketo’s The State of Engagement report, almost half of the marketers said that finding the right tools to help them drive customer engagement is the biggest challenge they face. Well, that changes with the addition of cognitive search to their arsenal.
Nailing Conversions with Cognitive Search
1. Making Content Easily Accessible
These days, almost every company has multiple information-laden channels for prospects. But more often than not, they act as solitary silos. This severely mars the CX as potential buyers don’t get the full picture without checking other repositories. And most of them don’t do that.
Enter cognitive search. It creates a unified index of all the silos and makes the entire knowledge pool accessible from the point of search. No longer do your visitors have to switch to different channels to learn more about the products or services.
2. Mapping Journey Across Platforms
Around 41 to 65 percent of all online purchases involve multiple devices. However, brands are only able to identify 15 percent of purchase sessions on multiple devices.
Customers take a number of steps before making a decision. They might see an ad on their tablet & follow the brand on social media, then move to a laptop & check the website before engaging via email. All these journeys translate into a treasure trove of trends & patterns.
But in order to open it, marketers need to track such journeys. Solutions like AEM provide great reports, but with a unified system and its search analytics, you can expand the scope of this reporting. Cognitive engines can be implemented at all your interaction points, which in turn enables tracking of cross-platform journeys.
This helps you better understand your target audience and also get a holistic view of how well is your marketing strategy working.
3. Using Personalization to Drive Engagement
Every visitor is interested in a product or service. But all of them are not out there for the same thing. Doesn’t it make sense to understand where the interest lies and personalizing the experience accordingly? If it does, how do we go about it?
With the cross-channel behavioral data, cognitive search leverages ML to zero-down on interest & tailor the search results accordingly. Some engines also offer features like dynamic navigation to create a custom navigation interface based on every user’s browsing behavior. This helps marketers keep their best foot forward and drive engagement.
4. Identifying Best Sources of Quality Leads
Organizations often leverage a variety of marketing forms like videos, emails, ads, etc. But when it comes to drawing a fair comparison to determine numero uno, marketers feel stuck. That’s because it’s painstakingly hard to find the best tactic across the multiverse of platforms.
Cognitive search comes with deep analytics that provides real-time reports on views, engagement, CTR, etc. They help your marketing champions easily quantify how successful each campaign has been and which channel proved to be more fruitful. This also enables your team to undertake effective RCA for lackluster performance and help with better retargeting.
5. Generating Leads with Virtual Assistant
Leads are something that a marketer can never get enough of. The more, the merrier. Well, with a cognitive engine by your side, you can continuously create leads without breaking a sweat. Interesting, isn’t it? Here’s how.
Some solutions are bundled with a search-fueled virtual assistant. Unlike their script-based counterparts, these advanced assistants have access to all existing user data, courtesy the engine. This enables them to decipher the browser’s intent and suggest relevant collateral. Additionally, they can quickly evaluate how hot lead the lead is and understand the use case. This, in turn, leads to better nurturing and accelerated conversions.
6. Ensuring Brand Consistency
Brands can have as many touch points as long as they provide a similar experience on every platform or device. And that can be tricky, keeping in mind organizations use a litany of enterprise platforms. Any disarray can negatively impact marketing efforts.
Here again, cognitive search steps right up. It seamlessly integrates with your digital properties (websites and cloud solutions) to ensure a uniform experience for every interaction.
The Bottom Line
Cognitive search is a powerful solution to overcome some of the biggest hurdles modern-day marketers come across. It not only steps up your lead gen game but also enables you to harness a lot more data and convert it into gleaning insights into your strategy.
The key is to understand your audience as they move through various channels towards the end of the line, or leave at a point before that. From brainstorming content ideas to measuring ROI, cognitive search does a lot of heavy-lifting for marketers.
Want to see how cognitive search helps you nurture your leads better?
If you’d like to know more about cognitive engines, then subscribe to our blog. To know how they can help you at each stage of the funnel and to see the cognitive magic unfold, request a live demo!