Privacy-first martech: Business woman with face obscured uses website

Why Privacy-First Martech Matters

Posted on by Tim Peter

Cloudflare announced this week that they were introducing a new, free privacy-first analytics tool, using data from their CDN, but eliminating any personally-identifiable information (PII) commonly collected in competing tools. SoloSegment CEO Steve Zakur talks about why privacy-first martech is the right way to go for your business:

Prefer to read? Here’s a transcript of SoloSegment CEO Steve Zakur’s comments on Cloudflare’s anonymous analytics tool and privacy-first martech for you: 

CloudFlare, a leading cybersecurity and content distribution network, announced yesterday they were launching a new free service called CloudFlare Web Analytics. And the most distinctive feature of this tool is that it doesn’t collect personal information. So this is not some secret play by CloudFlare to, you know, to hoover up all this personal information about your visitors. It truly is a privacy-first [marketing] technology.

My name is Steve Zakur CEO of SoloSegment. For many years, we have had this pact with Google in using their analytics tool. And that pact was they’ll give us an awesome, full featured analytics tool for free. And we have to then send them all the data about our visitors. And so, you know, that worked out pretty well for us but not so well for our visitors, our prospects, our customers who were getting their information sent over to Google. 

And increasingly we’ve seen moves by industry. Apple has been a real leader in this area with ITP and some other areas, other things, but also regulators, GDPR, CCPA, all those sorts of regulations in moving to protect the privacy of individuals. And I think we’re going to see more and more of these privacy first tools. In fact, SoloSegment has focused on this right from the beginning. We have a thesis that there is plenty of information out there about the behavior of website visitors, that you don’t need to know who they are in order to engage them. Whether they’re searching or whether they’re navigating on your website they give off a trail of behavioral information that allows you to help them achieve their objectives without needing to know who they are.

So, no matter what technology we’re talking about, whether it’s SoloSegment’s personalization technology, GuideBox, or web analytics by CloudFlare, look for those privacy first applications, because those are the technologies that not only allow you to achieve your goals, but to do it in a way that you can protect the personal information of your website visitors. Thanks very much. Hope you have a great week. Take care.

You can read more about how to personalize your content while protecting customer data in SoloSegment’s new ebook, The Six Personalization Truths Every B2B Marketer Needs to Know.

SearchBox

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Website Search with SearchBox

Search is a key aspect of your web experience, and searchers are the people who are the most desperate to buy from you. Unfortunately, most companies aren’t taking advantage the important data… their website search results. SearchBox allows you to improve not only the onsite search, but your customer’s entire journey and business results.

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Website search is the FIrst Personalized Experience

Personalization represents a hot topic for many businesses… and with good reason. Customers expect experiences tailored to their needs. However, many companies struggle with this. That’s often true even when customers tell you what they want using your search engine. 

The good news is… it doesn’t have to be this way. With the right tools, you can deliver personalized experiences your customers demand. You can do it at scale, and you can do it with less investment than you might think. In a recent e-book, we outline 6 truths about personalization that you must know. We show you how utilizing website search data creates a positive impact on your business.  Learn about the solutions that can help you improve the personalization of your customer experience today. 

 
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SearchBox Benefits

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Anonymous Data

Use behavioral data to recommend the right results—and right content—to help your visitors achieve their goals... and you achieve yours.


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Quality Search Results

Uncover customer insights in a way that “clicks” cannot by leading customers not just to a good answer, but to one that converts for your business.

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Data-driven Automation

Integrates with your existing search engine to automatically drive improvements from your website search results

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Clear Connection to Value

Measure your results and show improved conversions, lowered site exits and a better experience for you and your customers.

Up to 600% more likely to buy

Onsite search users are your best prospects. They know you have what they’re looking for… you just need to connect them with it. SearchBox can ensure that your website search experience is both easy and effective and delivers on the search promise: “Ask me a question and I’ll give you the right answer.”

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Works Automatically

Automatically analyzes your data and updates website search results without manual effort

Collects Unique Data

Collect key data and reacts to measurements that can improve your business

Creates Conversions

Helps customers find the content they need... leading to greater engagement and conversion rates

Implements Easily

Get started with a single piece of JavaScript in your tag manager or HTML

Optimizes Website

Delivers what your customers – and your business – wants through automated search improvements

Assists Valuable Customers

Maximize revenue by efficiently helping your customers find what they need.

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HOW IT WORKS

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Deploys Easily and Cleanly

Like most analytics systems, SearchBox gathers its data using a JavaScript tag. You can either add the tag directly to your page template or use your tag manager to activate SearchBox’s data collection. We do some configuration and quality assurance on our side and you are ready to go.

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Uniquely Measures Data

The hard reality is that you measure search wrong. Just about everyone who pays attention to search metrics looks at two measures: No Search Results and Clicks. Both are necessary to understand search success. Neither is sufficient. You need to know what happens after the click. Did the searcher find what they were looking for? SearchBox measures the experience in a way that is not only accurate but provides data for automation.

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Provides Expert-Level Guidance

Now that you have the right data you can take advantage of our automation to improve your search experience. However, some of the improvement requires people to act. It could be any number of things including technical tuning or content changes. Regardless, the SearchBox Knowledgebase provides you with insight into what you can do to react to what the data is telling you. If that’s not sufficient, you can engage our expert consultants to help guide your improvement program.

Next Steps

Contact us for a demo.

Explore our other products to help grow your business.

Sit back, relax, and watch SearchBox work for you.

Schedule an appointment now!

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.

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Rapid Growth Roadmap

Develop Digital Strategy

Develop a Plan with Rapid Growth Roadmap

Find your North Star with SoloSegment’s Rapid Growth Roadmap. This process provides near instant insights and a plan you can use. Fast track your company’s growth with a rapid industry assessment, market analysis, and a strategic roadmap. Increase revenues. Reduce costs. Improve your effectiveness using digital.

Rapid Growth Roadmap Benefits

Speed to Delivery

Plan, analyze, and understand your digital roadmap within weeks, not months.​

Data-driven Results

Proactively measure, prioritize, and take actions based on business findings​.

Clear Concise Direction​​

Find your North Star by understanding your business and digital needs.

Learn how we can help!

Hear from our customers

“I feel like you understand our company even more than we do.”
—Senior Marketing Leader

“Thank you again for a great meeting yesterday and for the exhaustive analysis. I mentioned to [a colleague] that bringing SoloSegment in was a fantastic decision.”
—Head of Marketing, Healthcare Company

 

HOW IT WORKS

With Rapid Growth Roadmap, our goal is to understand your business, industry and overall goals and provide you with a digital strategy focused on data-driven marketing and your digital journey. We take information gathered during a one-day session and turn it into a customized digital strategy for your business.

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We hold an intense one-day comprehensive session with your team to learn about your company, customers and goals. During this session, we will: Discover your strengths, area of opportunities, current digital position, and more. Learn about your company’s structure, its strategic direction and where you want to take it.

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A few weeks after the session, we provide an in-depth digital marketing analysis and plan. This includes: Company and competitor analysis Review of strategic keywords and customer search behavior Customized strategic keywords Long-term marketing strategy Digital roadmap including content marketing, martech stack, CRM, and personalization strategy

Click below to download a sample of the Rapid Growth Roadmap

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Take the first step towards creating your digital future

Schedule today

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.

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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.

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WHAT IT DOES

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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software features

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Marketing and MarTech: What’s your approach?

Posted on by Steve Zakur

A few years ago, Scott Brinker and the Third Door Media team declared that MarTech is marketing. There is no difference between marketing technology like personalization and just plain marketing. It used to be you’d ask the question “Tell me about your martech stack.” That’s no longer the case today–it would even be perhaps a weird question. 

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Forget AI expertise. You need domain expertise to succeed.

Posted on by Steve Zakur

At the heart of all great businesses are domain experts who are excellent at execution. Regardless of whether the business remains highly analog (increasingly rare in today’s marketplace) or is the latest emerging digital start-up domain expertise and execution wins over technology disruption alone.

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Is AI All Hype Right Now?

Posted on by Steve Zakur

Recently on our podcast we talked about a conversation Tim Peter had with a colleague.  The discussion revolved around AI. Tim was asked an intriguing question.

“Come on. All this AI stuff, when we talk about marketing and all that, that’s all just hype, right?” 

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SearchChat Podcast: Key Marketing Lessons from MarTech East

Posted on by Tim Peter

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Steve and I spent time together recently at both a Red Sox game but more importantly, at MarTech East in Boston. The shift in conversation was wildly fascinating: the focus seemed to be personalization, privacy, and security.

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MartTech East 2019 Wrap-up

Posted on by Steve Zakur

I thought I’d just capture a few thoughts on MarTech East 2019. This summary isn’t representative of the conference, it’s representative of my experience at the conference.

This was my first MarTech East. It was an excellent conference for practitioners of marketing technology arts. Kudos to Scott Brinker and the Third Door Media team. The following are my key takeaways from the conversations that I had with presenters, attendees, and vendors.

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