Lytics Releases Content Affinity Engine for Content Marketers

Lytics, a provider of personalized marketing technologies, today bolstered its Customer Data Platform (CDP) with the Content Affinity Engine. The Web-based solution leverages machine learning capabilities to help marketers determine what content their individual customers are best responding to and shape their future efforts to align with customer tendencies.

According to Lytics, the new release was inspired by the fact that over the past several years, companies have used content marketing as a way to better connect with their customers. Rather than relying on conventional sales pitches, for instance, firms often prefer to distribute additional educational materials in the form of blog posts, videos, case studies, or other knowledge pieces. But the problem has been to figure out the best method for reaching each individual customer, as well as what content to use.

According to James McDermott, CEO of Lytics, one of the barriers for marketers has been how to unite CRM data—data which includes a customer's address or purchase history—with the "unstructured, behavioral data" that tracks their browsing proclivities. "[Lytics] puts those two data sets in one place, and organizes it around customers, fans, and prospects," McDermott says. "[Users] can personalize every experience based on where each user is in a journey, based on the content that they prefer, and the interest that they have."

The Content Affinity Engine seeks to help businesses focus their resources and produce the type of content that is in highest demand, while allowing them to automatically distribute that content to their individual customers. The technology tracks customers' interactions across channels to better understand and classify them. According to McDermott, Lytics's solution integrates with marketing automation technologies such as Marketo and ExactTarget and enables a company to apply content distribution via email marketing, content management systems, mobile app push notifications, online advertising, and more.

Also released today is Journey Reporting, a dashboard that enables end users to visualize how customers are interacting throughout their relationships with a brand. Before this release, users could integrate all of the customer data they had collected from purchase history, Web and app usage, and customer service tickets to segment audiences in their marketing tools. But the dashboard allows companies to  further mark customers according to their behavior as, for instance, a binge user, or a user who is unlikely to re-engage.

According to McDermott, the technology can applied across industries, including retail, e-commerce, and publishing. A retailer of athletic apparel, for instance, can dig in to the tendencies of customers to better understand which of the educational topics on its blog is received and segment them accordingly. For instance, it will divide and classify them as "People Who Like Yoga Content," "Prefer Mobile-App Interactions," or seem "Ready to Buy."

McDermott compares the tool to predictive ones from the likes of Infer and Lattice Engines, which enable sales professionals to determine which of their leads are most likely to close. "Lytics can help you predict which one of your users will become a power user, and conversely which of them is going to slip away…based on behaviors that they're exhibiting through all the different channels," McDermott says.

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