Lytics, the Portland, OR personalization technology startup announces today the public launch of their new Content Affinity Engine. Content Affinity Engine is a fancy way of saying a web-based product that helps companies determine which content, blog posts, videos, topics, images and emails are performing well and to which customers the content appeals.
What’s interesting to me is that by “which customers”, Lytics doesn’t necessarily mean which group of customers or customer segment (although they can tell that too). Lytics means which single, specific, individual customer.
So in a nutshell, this Content Affinity Engine, can reveal to brands and companies which content on their site or app is performing best with which specific customers—a level of resolution Lytics claims was previously only available for brands that built out their own extensive data science teams. Lytics offers this one-to-one marketing ability as a service to companies so companies don’t have to build out their own teams.
An impressive claim. How do they do it?
According to CEO James McDermott with whom I spoke on the phone, Lytics has three main differentiators from other content marketing platforms that enable their one-to-one marketing approach:
- Machine intelligence that can build and store a persistent user profile across devices and touchpoints.
- Content analytics that automatically builds a content graph for brands by analyzing text and photos on their existing digital properties (e.g. website, mobile app, emails) and then assigns affinities to each user based on their interactions.
- The ability to execute, or do something with the learning, by automatically creating unified audience segments of customers and fans based on their stage and content preferences. These segments and individuals can be used with marketing automation tools (e.g. ExactTarget, Adroll, CMS) or through Lytics’s own real-time profile API for personalization.
So in other words, Lytics’s engine can create precise segment or individual profiles for website or app visitors. It can also analyze all the content of entire websites or apps and map what kind of content it is and what it would mean to individuals. It can then combine the two, keep track of this info and send alerts to individuals that new content they will like is available. This knowledge can also be used by brands to make sure the content stays interesting and appropriate for those individual profiles.
Furthermore, Lytics VP of Marketing, Jeff Hardison, notes that this knowledge of high performing content can be reviewed in the new Lytics Reporting Dashboard and can enable better resource planning for content creation, maintenance and delivery automation to specific consumers.
Access Intelligence, a provider of business information with magazines ranging from PRNews to Aviation Today, beta-tested Lytics Content Affinity Engine and Lytics Reporting Dashboard prior to launch today.
Lytics has 35 employees and has raised $9.2MM from Comcast Ventures, Rembrandt Venture Partners and Voyager Capital.