How to Use Site Search to Power Your Context Marketing

It’s all about context.

Contextually aware and personalized digital experiences are the future of websites – and search is at their core, or more specifically, cognitive search. Forrester Research defines cognitive search as “emerging to deliver the immediate, contextual value to users that has long been promised. New technology developments allow users to have the right data driven to them at the right moment to inform actions.”¹

Forrester recently named Coveo as a Leader in Cognitive Search, and top-ranked for Strategy. Our AI-powered search solution for websites provides the relevant experiences your customers expect by using machine learning to continually refine and automatically personalize the experience for every visitor.

Coveo CEO Louis Tetu shared his thoughts in an earlier post. “Coveo was humbled and honored to be named a leader,” he wrote.

He also emphasized the focus of the R&D team. “Each time Coveo’s R&D team make a decision that moves our product forward, it’s with relevance in mind. The result is a search technology that goes far beyond keyword identification.”

Why Context Matters

Consider how the consumer experience is defined by context. Elle Magazine used contextually intelligent marketing to influence its readers to make 500,000 more in-store visits. Retargeting ads from Amazon and other publishers follow you as you browse on the web. Snapchat provides filters for “micro-neighborhoods.”

“Where” has become a very important question for marketers to answer in creating these experiences. Customers are, to a degree, comfortable with a company using their physical location and online behavior to provide personalized experiences. In fact, 75 percent of customers are more likely to buy from a brand that provides a degree of personalization, according to Accenture.

The problem for most marketers is that using context and creating these experiences is expensive. It’s hard enough today convincing your CEO to add marketing head count, let alone to explain that you want to hire an army of people to create personalized user journeys on your website.

But what if there was a tool that could do this for you, harnessing the power of AI to learn from user interactions and automatically deliver relevance to each visitor to your site? All without hiring a huge new team? That’s where cognitive search comes in.

The Power of Site Search in Context Marketing

“We don’t have the resources.”

“We’re not Google or Amazon – why bother?”

“Can’t this wait until the next website relaunch?”

These are the objections marketing leaders hear when pursuing context-driven marketing. The initiatives feel massive and complicated, without a clear path to ROI and revenue in sight. Yes, for some, especially in retail, there are some pretty huge success stories – but the mediocre implementations aren’t exactly getting press.

The biggest obstacle with context marketing is having the data on what your customers need in each of their micro-moments of interaction to create authentic personalized experiences. AI-powered or cognitive search provides a two-part solution to these obstacles. First, it provides the data in search usage analytics on what your customers are seeking when they come to your site, what content meets their needs and what content does not.

Second, with AI, your solution can scale. Many marketers view context marketing as a massive project involving data analysis, marketing automation, website design and so much more. Synthesizing all of these to create completely personalized customer journeys is a tall order requiring a lot of resources.

The main benefit of using an AI-powered search solution for the core of your personalization efforts is that it automates the analysis and tuning of the search experiences. With content recommendations and proactive suggestions, you can create completely tailored search-driven content. Once AI-powered search is enabled on your site, after a few weeks of learning from your customers, the analysis is automated and relevant content is provided to your visitors automatically.

Understand how AI-powered site search can make your context marketing possible by downloading our latest ebook “Intelligent Site Search for CMOs.”

^{1. “Cognitive Search is Ready to Rev Up Your Enterprise’s IQ.” Forrester Research, Inc. May 2, 2016.
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