About Endeavor Business Media
Founded with entrepreneurial spirit in 2017, Endeavor Business Media is one of the largest B2B media companies in North America. Through a series of strategic acquisitions, Endeavor has grown to amass more than 125 media & event brands and a database of > 12.4 million business decision-makers across industries. Endeavor Business Media serves business professionals and marketers across sectors, including aviation, buildings, construction, dental, electronics, energy, healthcare, manufacturing, networking systems, public safety, transportation, and water.
Challenges
100,000+ unidentifiable readers visit Endeavor Business Media’s 80+ online websites every single day. Determining both who these unidentifiable readers are and how to deepen their engagement with a brand’s content is a critical aspect of Endeavor’s ability to drive digital revenue.
Ultimately, as a B2B publisher and marketer, Endeavor aims to create meaningful experiences for readers, support its digital business, and increase revenue for both its customers and Endeavor Business Media itself.
“We had a portion of website traffic that was ‘unknown’ first-party data and knew there was an opportunity to make use of it by leveraging the rich behavioral data we were collecting in BlueConic,” said Lindsey Griffith, Manager of Data Technology at Endeavor Business Media.
Solutions
Unify Data to Influence Visitor Engagement
After using onsite BlueConic Listeners to gather behavioral and interest data on once unidentifiable readers, Endeavor sought to capitalize on its now actionable audience data. Leveraging the audience data that BlueConic sorted into unified profiles, Endeavor built a Buyer’s Journey Program that would guide readers through pre-determined content funnels.
The initial iteration of the Buyers’ Journey Program relied on manual data manipulation to tailor visitors’ journeys and deliver personalized recommendations via BlueConic Dialogues that encouraged reader movement through engagement funnels with BlueConic Dialogues and Connections, in addition to other martech software.
“The Buyer’s Journey Program immediately increased reader engagement, but we still weren't able to get a broad view of how readers completed the engineering design cycle or consumed content in aggregate,” Griffith said. “It also remained challenging to determine whether readers were completing our advertising partners’ goals — e.g., making a purchase, reaching out to a sales rep, or converting on a call to action.”
Ultimately, the Program was successful in curating the right content for readers, based on their up-to-the-minute behaviors, but the next step was to find ways to automate the journeys, making this success scalable.
Orchestrate Visitor-Led Journeys that Drive Conversions
To gain an aerial view of visitor behavior and lessen the team’s long-term workload, Endeavor turned to BlueConic Lifecycles. Lifecycles allows Endeavor to scale personalized reader journeys and replicate the performance of their early efforts across all their 80 brands, but with enough flexibility to suit the needs of a wide-ranging clientele.
To begin testing, Endeavor pulled benchmark data from manually curated reader journeys. Next, the team orchestrated experimental Lifecycle journeys that allowed them to track three types of automated lifecycle journeys — one editorial journey, one lead funnel journey, and one path-to-purchase journey — against benchmark data. At this point, the team switched on the three lifecycles and began the waiting game, evaluating engagement data at 30-day intervals.
“We used the first 30 days for tracking and learning time, then we looked at click-through rates (CTRs) at 60 days, and again at 90 days. We found that in the 60-day period, CTRs rose exponentially, but by 90 days, it had stabilized,” recalled Griffith.
By the 90-day mark, Endeavor could confidently say that advertising partners would see a sustainable increase in engagement by using BlueConic Lifecycles.
Results
Massive Gains for Bottom-of-Funnel CTRs
By the conclusion of the 90-day trial period, Endeavor Business Media saw a 35% increase in overall CTR performance, against benchmark data, using Lifecycles. “Initially, our baseline CTR was hovering around 10%, but we now average anywhere from a 25–40% CTR on our content, depending on the publication.”
The impact on lower-funnel content was even more staggering: “Our bottom-of-funnel content for purchases and leads wasn’t getting any interaction before we turned on Lifecycles,” Griffith reported. “Now, we have a 50% CTR on most of those assets. It was a huge increase, and I don’t think we would have ever solved the problem without Lifecycles.”
With Lifecycles, Endeavor now provides their advertising partners with more conversions and qualified leads, all thanks to a personalized content strategy.
Blockbuster New Product
Success with BlueConic’s Lifecycles prompted Endeavor to develop a new client-facing product called Personif.AI, which allows advertisers to create meaningful interactions with users across Endeavor’s media ecosystem through acting on insights from BlueConic Lifecycles.
In just four months, Personif.AI not only delivered significant value to customers and users who received a better onsite experience – but the product also grew into a million-dollar-plus revenue stream for Endeavor Business Media, resulting in a 6.7X increase in revenue.
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