Business challenge
To help digital marketers better engage audiences amid floods of online data, Opentopic Inc. sought a cognitive way to optimize unstructured data and engage and convert online audiences.
Transformation
Opentopic built a digital marketing platform that uses IBM® Watson™ APIs to help marketers understand and engage consumers, optimize stories and drive online transactions.
Results
400% increase in average selling price
of services by demonstrating quantifiable marketing results80% shorter sales cycle
through better definition of audience profiles and optimization of stories300% boost in sales pipeline
by taking advantage of IBM industry connectionsBusiness challenge story
Vying for consumer attention
As consumers grow numb to traditional marketing techniques such as broadcast advertising, companies are increasingly turning to stories and user engagement to capture attention. However, digital marketing, which emphasizes creating and distributing relevant stories to engage distinct audiences, has its own challenge: the volume of online data is growing so quickly that most market analysis and segmentation methodologies can’t keep pace. Consequently, the marketing is ineffective and businesses don’t see quantifiable results.
André König, cofounder of Opentopic, elaborates: “It’s difficult for all but the largest brands to really understand who their digital audience is, how they behave and what they respond to. Then, how do you engage those audiences and move them forward? Nobody had figured out a scientific and predictable way to measure, engage and convert a targeted audience online.”
“Watson cognitive technology provides a level of insight and understanding into target audiences that’s never been available before to marketers.”
—André König,Cofounder,Opentopic Inc.
Transformation story
Marketing the cognitive way
Seeking a more insightful approach to marketing, Opentopic built an innovative digital marketing platform powered by the natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning capabilities of IBM Watson APIs on the IBM Bluemix® platform. The cognitive solution uses the AlchemyData News service to query and analyze unstructured data, such as text, social posts, images from news sources, social channels and blogs, and the organizational muscle of the Taxonomy Classification service, a function of the AlchemyLanguage API, to parse, score and categorize that content for specific target audiences. It then applies the Sentiment Analysis service of the AlchemyLanguage API to tie audiences and stories together.
To add even more depth and insight to its analysis, the startup is also implementing the IBM Insights for Twitter service on the Bluemix platform and incorporates the Watson Personality Insights, Concept Tagging,Tone Analyzer and Entity Extraction services of the AlchemyLanguage API. The SoftLayer® platform provides the underlying infrastructure.
Results story
Achieving tangible results
Opentopic uses its Cognitive Digital Marketing™ platform to not only help customers but also hone its own marketing efforts. Since launching the solution, the startup boosted the average selling price of its services by 400 percent by demonstrating quantifiable marketing results, reduced the length of its sales cycle by 80 percent by better defining audience profiles and optimizing engagement, and increased its pipeline by 300 percent by taking advantage of IBM industry connections.
“Analyzing unstructured data is what makes Watson so powerful for digital marketers who deal with social media posts, tweets, blogs and videos,” concludes König. “To date, this kind of data has been almost impossible to comprehend and analyze by any kind of conventional technology, but cognitive technology and Watson have changed that.”
About Opentopic Inc.
Founded in 2013 in New York, New York, in the US, Opentopic Inc. offers a software as a service (SaaS) digital marketing platform that helps organizations maximize their digital marketing investments by understanding their audiences, optimizing content, driving transactions and delivering results through machine learning algorithms. A digital marketing firm, Opentopic serves small and Fortune 500 companies alike, including business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), financial services, manufacturing, and media and entertainment companies, and others.
Solution components
- M&E: Connected Customer
Take the next step
To learn more about Watson APIs and the IBM Bluemix platform, please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following websites: ibm.com/watsondevelopercloud, ibm.com/cloud