A BrightEdger

M Posted 10 years 10 months ago

t 9 min read

We talk a lot about innovation at BrightEdge — it’s what we’re most passionate about, what gets us out of bed in the morning and keeps us working late into the night. We believe in building technology that fuels the success of our community and helps them achieve their goals. And, our community has embraced this passion for innovation. In the last year, we’ve delivered on over 300 ideas suggested through our Voice of the Customer Program. We’re fortunate to have been recognized for this innovation. The team at BrightEdge along with our community has driven ideas that have earned us awards, such as being ranked #770 on INC’s 5000 Fastest Growing Companies, receiving the BMA B2 Award - Service Provider of the Year: Marketing Technology, and being recognized with Adobe’s Customer Impact Award.

With all ten of the largest ecommerce companies, nine out of the top ten largest hospitality groups and eight of the top ten largest technology companies among our BrightEdge customers, we’re lucky to have built a community of marketers that drives our innovation. In particular we were inspired by the use case of our customer Microsoft. With over 30 business units and 650 users accessing the BrightEdge platform, we looked at how other leaders can win, scale, and achieve that type of success. That’s where Enterprise Edition comes in. We are excited to introduce this enhanced version of our platform designed to help marketers with larger, more complex businesses scale their programs and elevate their performance. Enterprise Edition empowers marketers to run their content programs with the communication, control, and impact they need. Enterprise Edition addresses the three main goals marketers at large companies have identified as key to their organizations:

Build Bridges

As organizations increasingly focus on content performance we want to make it easier for them to communicate results and share information across business units, geographies, and teams. A host of different Enterprise Edition capabilities empower teams with cross-organizational alignment and reporting. Hierarchical roll ups allow products to be organized and grouped by sub-categories to clearly communicate how individual business units are performing and how this impacts the overarching product line. So, for example, a company could look at how Star Wars toys contribute to the overall action figure category’s revenue. Multi-account reporting segments performance by unique web properties enabling marketers to report on things, like revenue growth for individual countries as well as aggregates performance to show how a regions such as EMEA is performing year over year.

Maintain Control

Sophisticated companies have many stakeholders with varying roles and responsibilities that contribute to content performance efforts. With custom profiles, organizations can ensure the right people have access to the right areas of the platform to retain control as they grow and scale. Administrators can create custom profiles to govern access levels that suit the roles and responsibilities of all types of team members. For example an administrator may setup a category manager’s access with permissions limited to view only their specific business category, whereas a Technical Analyst may have access to Site Audit.

In addition, Activity Stream shows administrators what changes have been made to the system and by whom in order to increase clarity and supervision.

Elevate Results

While organizations are made up of many different individuals, teams and departments, what matters at the end of the day is driving impact as a whole. Enterprise Edition allows administrators to customize fiscal calendars and goals in order to reflect their brand’s individual practices for the most relevant insight and recommendations. Metrics can be customized, and common KPIs can be established to shed light on performance across category and location in a uniform way, giving insight into market share and competition.  

With Enterprise Edition, we help marketers scale their programs, retain control, and elevate their performance. To us, that’s the ultimate sign of success — so to the BrightEdge community, I want to say thank you and congratulations. We couldn’t do it without you.  

Jim

M Posted 10 years 10 months ago

t 9 min read

When I think of where BrightEdge is today, it’s hard to believe that only eight years ago we were a bootstrapped startup operating out of my kitchen. Believe it or not, the picture above was taken right after my co-founder Lemuel moved into the 900-square-foot condo I shared with my wife and newborn daughter to found BrightEdge. At that time, the iPad was still two years away, the top social network was MySpace, and the prevailing marketing technology only involved ad optimization.

But Lem and I had a different idea about where the market was heading. We realized that in order to understand performance and create winning content, brands needed to understand the full context. This required a massive web-wide index, which is why with servers stacked under my kitchen table we built the early version of the Data Cube. From humble beginnings, to where we are today we’ve come a long way. Now spending millions of dollars on servers and technology, our vision for content performance has come to fruition.

As a community, leaders across every industry are investing in content performance. In fact, brands are increasingly investing in digital content to the tune of $135 billion. But, just because a company is acting on an opportunity doesn’t mean they’re taking full advantage of it — according to BrightEdge research, 59% of content marketers say that their budgets aren’t aligned with performance. To truly rise above the noise, content marketers must run their programs by the numbers. That’s why, at Share15 last month, we were excited to preview innovative new technology to take content performance marketing to the next level.

With Content Atlas and Intelligent Experiences you can run content marketing by the numbers. These new technologies work in tandem to create real-time visibility into your content marketing program, allowing you to easily communicate the impact on goals and build a data-driven playbook to optimize content performance and ensure maximum impact.

Content Atlas

Content Atlas enables you to run content marketing by the numbers and automatically map content performance across the four key phases of the customer journey – awareness, consideration, purchase and loyalty – and compare it against the competition. Content Atlas displays all of this rich information in a dashboard, allowing you to visualize the landscape surrounding your content strategy.

More importantly, it can tell you why any discrepancies between your content and that of your competitors might exist.  

These insights become all the more powerful when paired with recommendations. That’s why Content Playbook within Content Atlas assigns prescriptive steps to help close gaps and optimize existing content and further increase your lead in success areas, all while telling you exactly how much your opportunities are worth. This in turn helps you validate investment in content that generates the greatest return and scale back or improve those that yield lower returns. 

Intelligent Experiences

Intelligent Experiences works in conjunction with Content Atlas — it takes the analysis and recommendations of Content Atlas and builds out a guided workflow around that insight. In other words, if Content Atlas is the who, what, where, when, and why, Intelligent Experiences is the how.

Intelligent Experiences empowers you to create more engaging, curated experiences for your audiences. This begins by highlighting opportunity areas and referencing successful competitors’ content in order to automatically generate an optimized customer experience. What’s more, it allows marketers to publish directly from the platform.

And, since each channel is so unique, Intelligent Experiences optimizes content for each one, allowing existing, underperforming content to be automatically optimized for maximum performance. 

Flexible Integration

We know that many companies have invested in digital content systems, including CMS or an eCommerce platform. As such, our new technology is compatible with several existing systems, like Adobe Experience Manager and hybris, adding intelligence into content performance and customer experience.

Members of our community are having great success creating optimized content at scale. Felipe Carreras Director of E-Commerce at Best Western International joined me onstage to discuss the success he’s had leveraging the BrightEdge platform with Adobe Experience Manager. Best Western was able to create over 16,000 pages of unique content for 2,056 individual property websites in three months with a team of five individuals.

When Lem and I founded BrightEdge, we were excited about the future of marketing, and the opportunity to create technology to transform content performance. In partnership with the community we’re thrilled to see how far content performance marketing has come.

Customer success has been our top value and driver of innovation since the beginning days of BrightEdge, and we couldn’t have done it without you. We look forward to our ongoing partnership as we continue to innovate, lead, and elevate performance — together.