Consulting Solutions

Consulting Solutions

Your data. Your challenges. Our expertise.

Sometimes your trapped value can only be set free with a custom solution. We’ve done that for others, we can do if for you. Our proven process of auditing, diagnosing, and correcting problems will make your business work for you.

Isn’t it time your professional life got just a bit easier?

Talk to an Expert

Why Partner with SoloSegment?

Market tested experience

We’ve successfully built and launched our own businesses and products. We know that it’s not the technology but results that matter. Our process focuses on value creation for you and your customers.

A need for speed

It’s easy to get wrapped up in the complexity of problems. We’ve seen projects get stalled by the quest for perfection. We’d rather get in the market quickly and let it be our guide. We bet that’s what you want too.

We bridge academia and business

We combine our market tested expertise with the latest thinking coming out of universities. That gives you not only the best of the tried and true technologies but also emerging solutions fresh from the leading minds.

Our Consulting Services

Machine Learning

You have unstructured data and unstructured problems. We have the data science expertise to help you find the intersection of insight and action. Let's get to work on the stuff that keeps you up at night.
More Machine Learning

Search

Your site search is failing your customers and it's failing your bottom line. We've been down in that hole. Let us help you get out. Measurements. Technology. Know how. No worries. We've got your back.
More on Search

Taxonomy

Figuring out what your content is about is one of the most confounding problems in content management. First, there's the hard work of identifying meaningful topic categories. Then you have to label that content. And then maintain it! Wow, that's a hard problem. Unless you have the right tools. We've got them.
More on Taxonomy

Content

Your B2B marketing relies on your content marketing, but are you reaching the right prospects with the right message? You can. SoloSegment consultants provide you a working content marketing plan designed to increase traffic and revenues in just six weeks.
More on Content

Machine Learning

Traditionally, machine learning projects are difficult to implement. One would never use the words “speed” or “cost effective” to describe them. We turn those expectations on their heads. Our goal is to apply a standard set of techniques and tools to get a fast start. Of course, that assumes you’ve got good data, a committed & engaged business team, and the willingness to work fast. If this sounds like you, then we can work together.

Our Expertise

There are many types of problems to which machine learning can be applied. We focus on those associated with text analytics and natural language processing. While that may sound like a fairly narrow set of problems, it covers a lot of landscape. Instead of telling you about the skills and techniques we possess, it’s far easier to give some examples of client challenges.

  • Predict the bounce rate of marketing landing pages by assessing the features in the content that are most likely to lead to bounce.
  • Correctly label tens of thousands of documents with the right industry taxonomy based upon the content of the documents.
  • Lattes are hard to make. We make it easier to caffeinate.
  • Predict conversion with machine learning.

Our Platform

The availability of “commodity” machine learning components on all the major cloud platforms has made the price of entry low. Of course the availability of the tools in only the start. Our SoloCore platform combines cloud capabilities with some special sauce. We’re using SoloCore in our upcoming product and we can use it accelerate your project. 

How we work

Assessment

Uncertainty. It’s everywhere.

Is your data good enough? Is your architecture scalable? Are you applying the right methods? How’s your code?

Whatever your concerns are we can rapidly assess your state and provide a readiness report that includes recommendations on how to proceed.

Mentoring

You have a machine learning project that’s heavy in text analytics and natural language processing and you need some help. Or you’re just getting started and want to make a good start.

Whether you’re struggling with a specific problem or you need to build general expertise, our consultants have experience building successful teams.

Custom Solutions

Your problem. Your data. Our expertise.

Yes data and techniques are important but the most important element is the business problem. What value are we trying to create? 

Once we have a handle on that, we can circle back to the data, techniques and expertise that we have to bring to the table to get you that value, fast.

 

Want to learn more? Talk to an Expert.

Back to Services

Search Consulting

Most B2B websites have that inviting little box in the upper right corner of the screen, offering potential customers the ability to search for the information they need to make a purchase decision. That box makes a promise. It says, “Ask me anything and I will answer.” It’s a promise many sites can’t keep.

If, instead of helpful answers, your website search engine look like a random web page generator, let us help to turn it around.

Our Approach

Measure
At the center of any improvement program is data. If you’re not using SearchBox it’s going to be near impossible to make progress improving your customer experience. So, the first thing we do is help you get the right data. Once that’s in place we help you establish a management system that tracks the data, analyzes the customer experience and plans actions. Search improvement is team sport. It’s usually marketing, product management and IT (as well as other content creators across the company) that need to be aligned. The metrics serve as a common language for all.
Iterate

Action is everything. The biggest challenge for most teams is figuring out where to start. This is where our experience is invaluable.

There’s always low hanging fruit. We go after this first. Then begins the hard work of tuning, indexing and improving content. We operate using the principles of agile development. Short cycles. Actions. Assess results. Rinse. Repeat. 

When are we done? When you’re happy with the experience. The data will help guide you.

How we work

In order to ensure you’re making the best use of our analyst’s expertise, we have a structured methodology for working with your business and technical teams that aligns the search improvement efforts across your organization.

Weekly Reporting

The weekly report, distributed via email, summarizes the most critical information for your team:

  • Performance trends over the past four weeks
  • Commentary and recommendations for improvement efforts.
  • Action Item Tracking to ensure nothing is lost and attention is focused. 
Weekly Work Sessions

The reason we have the weekly reports is so that we don’t spend valuable work session time covering the basics. When our search experts meet with you, we want the time to be action oriented. 

These are working meetings between our search analyst and the client search team to review actions, advise the team on opportunities, and problem solve search success challenges.

Executive Updates
One of the biggest challenges in larger organizations is getting inter-department priorities aligned. We can help the working teams with this through a monthly executive council meeting. 
The goal of that meeting would be to: 
  • Review high level performance
  • Review high level actions and outcomes
  • Get Critical Issues on the table for resolution

Don’t settle for losing your hard-won website visitors when your search engine misfires. Remember, if your customers can’t find it, they can’t buy it.

Talk to an Expert and learn more about how we can transform your website search into a marketing machine.

Back to Services

Taxonomy

Originally our interest in taxonomy was sparked by our work in site search. We quickly discovered something you probably already know if you’re reading this: taxonomies are a huge headache.  Why?
  • First, you have to have a taxonomy that actually captures what your content is about. Getting that right involves taking a deep look at your content, and that's incredibly labor intensive.
  • Next, you have to evaluate ALL your content against the taxonomy and apply the taxonomic category labels to that content.
  • Finally, you have to maintain those labels. You thought it was tough getting budget for the initial project. Try getting funding for the maintenance of something that no one but experts really understands. Expect executive eye rolling.
  • None of this scales. It requires too many fingers on keyboards. And it's outdated as soon as you're done. Sometimes before then.

Let’s talk about how to do this without the headaches.  To avoid large quantities of aspirin, you basically need two things. First, you need the ability to evaluate a large volume of content, with automation in the workflow, to build meaningful taxonomic categories efficiently. Second, you need the ability to take those categories and apply them at scale to all your content. Both have to be repeatable processes that don’t require a huge maintenance investment.

We have two technologies that help you find your taxonomy value quickly and economically.

Topic Discovery

We’ve partnered with an emerging technology company, founded by leading researchers, to offer a groundbreaking topic discovery technology. This technology can evaluate content at scale, provides a workflow tool to help visualize topical categories driven by your content, and lets you provide feedback to the machine learning model so that it gets better at identifying the right topics across the content sample.

Content Labeler

Once you’ve got a taxonomy that is meaningful for your needs, our Content Labeler uses text analytics to evaluate and label existing content at scale and new content as it is added. Content Labeler solves the economics of taxonomy labeling at both the initial stages and when you have to maintain previously labeled content.

Talk to an Expert and learn more about how we can transform your taxonomy efforts.

Back to Services

Content

Content marketing is all the rage, but most B2B marketers say they would like to improve their content marketing program. Why? You might as well ask why you want to make more money. For B2B marketers, there’s no more important program than content marketing. B2B marketers have been doing content marketing since before the term was invented. The question is how effective your content marketing efforts are.

Have you been doing case studies? That’s content marketing. White papers? Content marketing. Webinars? Content marketing. In fact, most of the marketing activities that B2B companies do are content marketing. And why? Because clients respond. But are yours responding enough?

You can’t take a scattershot approach, throwing content against the wall to see what sticks. And you can’t win on volume—even if you keep creating more and more content, your client can’t create any more time to read it.

There has to be a better way. And there is. In most cases, our process can turn around your content marketing plan in just six weeks.

If you’re skeptical, that’s OK. Most consultants try to make content marketing look complicated, adding layers of needless complexity designed to keep you in the dark—and increase their billings. We simplify your content marketing program down to essential marketing practices designed to attract, retain, and persuade the clients most likely to buy from you.

During your engagement with SoloSegment, our consultants:

  • Audit your search and social presence
  • Focus on the content you need to reach your audience
  • Identify any gaps in the content your prospects need
  • Formulate your strategy for turbocharging your content marketing—and develop the measures that prove your content marketing works

Want to learn more? Talk to an Expert.

Back to Services

MatchBox

PAINLESS AND ACCURATE TAXONOMIES

Automated taxonomies and tagging with MatchBox

Categorizing your content allows you to get the right content in front of prospects and customers. More engagement. More leads.

Talk to an expert

Accurate Taxonomies, Easier

Building and maintaining content categories is costly and time consuming. MatchBox uses the power of AI to eliminate expensive human coding while providing higher accuracy and quicker time to value.

WHY MATCHBOX?

Most large websites have the same problem. You want to tag your pages with topics and industries, but your authors don’t do it. Or they don’t do it well. It’s not the authors’ fault. Tagging content accurately is not easy and humans aren’t particularly good at it.

Machines, on the other hand, can be tweaked, tuned, and adjusted so they become more and more accurate over time.

With MatchBox, you can finally identify the industry audience your content is targeted at, as well as the topic of your content. Accurately tagging your web content with industry and topic labels can unlock the value that you always hoped your taxonomy and your manual tagging would provide, but never did.

Talk to an Expert

WHAT IT DOES

www-search-glass

Driven by Your Own Content

MatchBox helps you identify your taxonomy categories for topics and industries by examining your own website and grouping similar pages. No more guessing at what the right categories are—let the content tell you what it’s about.

screen-with-search

Eliminate Costly and Ineffective Human Tagging

Most B2B companies are paying their human authors to tag content--or they are foregoing the benefits of tagging content at all. The problem is that human tagging isn't just time-consuming and expensive--often it's flat-out wrong. For complex tasks, with more than a few categories, different humans often disagree with each other on what the right category is for a web page or other document. One study shows that, not only do different authors diverge on the right tag, but 35% of the time the same authors disagree with themselves when given the same document to tag within a few days. MatchBox keeps improving so that your tags are both consistent and accurate.

cloud-computing

Update Your Taxonomy When You Need To

If you are like most B2B companies, your taxonomy hasn’t been updated in a while. That’s because updating it kicks off the wrenching process of humans having to re-tag all of your documents by hand. Most companies can’t afford it, so they plod on year after year with the same outdated taxonomy, even as the world that it describes changes. MatchBox allows you to re-run your analysis at any time, so whenever you think that the subjects you discuss have significantly changed, you can run the process all over again.

dashboard

Use Your Taxonomy to Drive Real Value

Yes, you can import your automated tags into your Content Management System (CMS), but you can also see what kind of coverage you have on each topic so that you identify content gaps. You can also use your taxonomy categories as facets to drill down in site search results and as added information to drive personalized content recommendations. Because your content has been tagged consistently and accurately, using an up-to-date taxonomy, you’ll finally drive the value that taxonomies should have been driving all along.

HOW IT WORKS

javascript-tag

Develop Your Taxonomy in One Day

It sounds impossible, but MatchBox allows you to create an up-to-date taxonomy in a single day in most cases. Our consultants work with you to show you what MatchBox has discovered on your site, and you give feedback to eliminate, combine, or change the categories into something that makes sense to you and to your customers. Your subject matter experts can interpret what MatchBox found to make it understandable to humans. By the end of the day, you’ve got an up-to-date taxonomy.

data-waves

Topics Based on Your Content

MatchBox examines a sizable and representative sample of your content, using AI techniques such as Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to create clusters of documents that seem to be about the same subject. You won’t spend time arguing about what themes you cover on your website because MatchBox shows them to you. Your subject matter experts decide which clusters to combine, eliminate, or alter—MatchBox takes this feedback and re-runs its analysis to show you the next attempt, which gets more of your feedback. Usually it takes just two or three tries before you have a taxonomy you are pleased with. Your experts can name the topics anything they want, so you can use the names that your customers expect. Once you’ve decided your taxonomy, MatchBox automatically labels your content with the right topics, and it can re-label any new or changed content going forward.

knowledge

Industries Based On Standards

Topics by necessity must be customized for each website, but industries can be more standardized. Standards exist, such as the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) that defines just about every industry that your content could be talking to. Our consultants work with you to identify the NAICS industries for your audiences, and to rename them so the industry labels make sense to your audience. Once you’ve settled on your industry taxonomy, MatchBox can label all your content with industries and can keep those labels up to date as the content changes over time.

Talk to an Expert

software features

magic-wand-solid-180

Works Automatically

MatchBox automatically labels new and changed content with accurate topics and industries. MatchBox can crawl your website automatically to discover updates to your web pages, or it can be integrated with your CMS to be alerted for changes.

line-chart-regular-180

Integrated with Your MarTech Stack

MatchBox can update topic and industry labels in your CMS for every document. It can also update your site search engine so that these labels can be employed as facts in search drilldowns. Other integrations can also be explored if necessary.

badge-dollar-solid-180

Works with Any Content

MatchBox not only handles HTML pages, but can process PDF files, Microsoft Office formats, and many other file formats that might be embedded on your website. If it has enough text, MatchBox can label it.

Simple Implementation

Our consultants use MatchBox to help you decide your taxonomy in a single day, and then MatchBox goes to work labeling your web pages every time they change.

Get the Right Content in Front of Customers

Start accurately tagging your web content with MatchBox today.

Talk to an Expert

The anonymous web is coming

The anonymous web is coming.
Are you ready?

B2B Marketers can no longer rely on using personal data.

Every day leads to another privacy regulation. GDPR and CCPA are just the start. Now third-party cookies are gone as well. 

Face it. No one wants to be tracked, so regulators and browsers are removing the ability to track people. People are sick of having their data misused and mishandled. This is not a trend that’s going away.  There is a relentless movement to an anonymous web that is only accelerating.

Stop only reacting.

You can’t just respond to each event that takes us closer to an anonymous web, as though it is the last change there will ever be.

If all you do is take another half step back from the new line, you are waiting to be knocked off balance from the next announcement.

Get ahead of the curve and check out our anonymous personalization.

Focus on what is staying the same.

Jeff Bezos once said that a lot of people ask him about how he responds to all the constant changes.  He said that he instead focuses on what stays the same. For Amazon, customers will always want more selection, lower prices, and faster delivery. Bezos constantly keeps his eyes on those targets, and uses whatever new technologies and other changes show up in the service of those goals.

Once they come to your site, you need to hold onto them. That means providing such a good experience that they will come directly back to your site next time without needing to visit Google first.

Customer privacy doesn't have to sacrifice leads.

B2B marketers must focus on protecting customers’ personal data and increasing sales without an exploding marketing budget.

Anonymous information can provide marketers with the behavior and intent of customers, without needing a name and face. Use your own content and analytics on behavior to guide customers to the content they need.

It’s easy to get started.

The anonymous web is coming. Are you ready?

Anonymous data together with AI creates a powerful tool to increase leads and improve your marketing yield.

Find out how anonymous data can drive leads for you.

Contact Us

GuideBox

PERSONALIZE BETTER

Anonymous, behavior-based personalization with GuideBox

Use easy-to-deploy behavior-based personalization to guide your customers to conversion. No cookies. No problem.

Talk to an Expert

Customers demand better website personalization

Customers expect a personalized experience. But they are tired of bad personalization and personal data misuse. GuideBox provides anonymous, behavior-based website personalization to drive leads for your business.

Lead identification and qualification happens online, and quality content is vital for journey progression. Your visitors are already telling you about the connection between their intent and the content that helps them achieve their goals.

We collect that data and use it to power a personalized experience. This enables you to use totally anonymous data to provide your customers with the content they need, before they know they need it.

WHY GUIDEBOX?

B2B buying processes are complex. You have multiple personas doing research across multiple visits. It’s hard to build and maintain an effective content strategy. But it’s not just the content that’s hard, it’s the behavior. 

Bounce rates are higher than you’d like. Conversion rates are stubbornly low. You need a way to connect visitors with the right content that you already have. Anonymous behavior-based personalization makes that possible.

With GuideBox you can provide a personalized and relevant experience that leads to more conversions. Connect with an expert.

Increase Your Conversions

WHAT IT DOES

Better Marketing Outcomes

GuideBox helps your customers find what they’re looking for, automatically, with quantifiable results. GuideBox provides website users with content recommendations based on aggregated historical behavioral data. GuideBox’s fast and measurable results allow your visitors to achieve their goals while you grow your business.

Anonymous Data

Every day it seems like there is a new privacy regulation restricting marketing use of personal data. Instead of adjusting your approach with each new law, use anonymous data that will never be regulated. GuideBox analyzes previous patterns of visitor success to recommend the right content to the next visitor.

1470399594_Web_Design.png

Integrated Systems

Many "Best of Breed" MarTech solutions struggle to work with the rest of your MarTech stack. GuideBox's API allows you to easily share data with other MarTech components. Want to use GuideBox's content recommendation in your CMS? No problem. Share Guidebox data with some other component? That works too. Unlike many SaaS solutions your data isn't trapped in a silo.

HOW IT WORKS

GuideBox gathers, evaluates, and models visitor behavior data to automatically improve your website customer experience. GuideBox also gathers information about intent, context, and content to better hone recommendations. All this data is taken into account to create the best experience for that individual.

JS-based Data

You may already have a personalization technology. Are you using it? The complexity of creating content, engaging IT, and maintaining your MarTech stack is often overwhelming. GuideBox works by simply adding a JavaScript tag to your website. The JavaScript collects data and presents recommendations to your visitors, automatically improving the customer experience. No more struggling to use the product you’re paying for, simply plug it in and you’re done.

Machine Learning

Discerning what visitors need in a given moment requires a complex analysis of behavior and content data. GuideBox utilizes a variety of technologies -- including machine learning and text analytics -- to model behavior and predict what content is needed in a given moment to progress a journey. Over time, it will do a better and better job of improving the customer experience as it gains feedback from your visitors.

1470399614_Social_Media.png

Recommendations that Convert

With better content recommendation, users are more likely to find high quality information and are more inclined to convert. We'll show you the data. More importantly, we'll put the data to work.

Contact Us

software features

Easy to Deploy

Simply plug GuideBox into your JavaScript and let it work.

Automatic

You don’t have to lift a finger.

Integration Friendly

GuideBox is compatible with your entire content and Martech stack, so that you don’t have to worry about changing anything.

Rapid Time to Value

GuideBox works quickly so that you can see the value of what you’re paying for.

Practical AI

Easy to use machine learning that shows real results.

Configurable

GuideBox works how you want it to.

6 Truths About Personalization

Research shows that two-thirds of B2B buyers will switch brands if a business doesn’t personalize the content and experience they receive. When done right, personalization drives a 6x increase in purchase intent. But doing it right isn’t easy. Too many B2B marketers try to scale their personalization efforts manually or haven’t bothered to personalize at all, resulting in frustrated prospects – and lost sales. That doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t have to be this way. You can deliver the personalized experiences your customers demand. You can do it at scale. And you can do it with less investment than you might think.

This new report from SoloSegment shows you how.

Facebook-f
Twitter
Linkedin-in

Get the Report Now

Guide Your Customers to Conversions

Start personalizing your website with GuideBox today.

Talk to an Expert

Why Customer Experience Matters Most For B2B Marketers

Posted on by Madeline Moran

The biggest mistake that many companies make in their B2B sales and marketing activities is the way they fragment or silo different touchpoints in the customer journey among disparate functional teams. And, worse, the way they make it difficult for those teams to work together. Customer experience matters for B2B marketers. You’d think you would make that easier to bring to life.

Read More

SearchChat Podcast: Customer Intent is New Again

Posted on by Tim Peter

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Alternatively: Chicken Soup for the Customer’s Soul

It’s time to start thinking about the value of intent based marketing differently. The idea itself isn’t new, but now the data is finally there for people to solve their business problems.

What is your customer experience like if you could walk into a diner feeling under the weather, and are immediately offered chicken soup? Online companies don’t have to lose that personal touch. 

Read More

SearchChat Podcast: AI Goes Back to the Basics

Posted on by Tim Peter

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

We at SeachChat frequently talk about how AI and site search produce value for your site. But let’s break that down for a minute. What this is all about at the end of the day is customer experience.

Read More

How does your search customer experience treat your visitors?

Posted on by Steve Zakur1 Comment

This morning I had to log on to United Airlines’ website to request a refund for accommodations from a recent overnight flight delay. Surprisingly there is no form specifically for this type of request on the site. I struggled with a bit of cognitive dissonance on how to fit my request in the standard fields where one might complain about rude service or a poorly maintained restroom.

Needless to say, I didn’t come away from the experience with a favorable opinion of United or its process. This at a time when they should be trying to take a bad situation (my original overnight delay) and turn it into something awesome. It didn’t help that there were errors in their login process as well as an inexplicable refusal to load a 900KB JPG file that was both less than 1MB size limit and one of the approved file types.

Am I less likely to return to united.com because of this bad experience? No, I’ll be back. Fortunately for United, oligopolists can get away with poor service. Can you?

Read More