Tag: SaaS solutions

Australia – Eagle Eye, the SaaS business carrying out loyalty, personalised promotions, and omnichannel marketing solutions for retail, travel, and hospitality brands, has unveiled ‘EagleAI,’ a modular, customer-centric data science solution powered by AI built specifically for the grocery and retail sectors.

‘EagleAI’ is expected to usher in the next generation of personalisation at scale. By leveraging customer data and predictive machine learning algorithms, EagleAI will help retailers and grocers across the globe better meet their customers’ individual wants and needs, optimise promotional spending, increase ROI, and enable true one-to-one engagement that ultimately drives loyalty.

This new AI-powered data science solution can automate the process of connecting and structuring customer data across touchpoints, using cutting-edge machine learning and AI to create uniquely personalised offers for customers rather than curating the ‘best fit’ set of offers based on a finite number available. This approach sets a new global standard for retail personalisation.

‘EagleAI’ is a set of machine-learning algorithms that factor in product affinity, shopping predictions, promotional responsiveness, budgetary controls, and more. Working simultaneously, the algorithms create and target the right offers for the right individuals.

Therefore, in a retail setting, ‘EagleAI’ acts as the ‘brain’ of the Eagle Eye AIR platform’s nervous system, which is the transaction layer that executes an unlimited range of offers in real-time to every customer touchpoint.

With this, the AI-powered solution creates the ability to build personalisation at the individual level and execute it at scale. This combination and ability make it unique among other retail marketing platforms that, while capable of personalisation, lack the capacity to deliver individual offers to millions of customers. Similarly, while some traditional mass marketing may reach large groups of customers, it still does not come with individualised offers.

EagleAI is well positioned as a platform to strengthen retailer-supplier relationships as it enables retailers to offer their supplier partners a new and proven route to build customer loyalty, grow share of wallet, recruit new customers, drive cross- and upsell activity, and launch new innovations.

Eagle Eye developed EagleAI after acquiring a Paris-based SaaS company with extensive and proven AI capabilities, Untie Nots, in early 2023. Leveraging the expertise of the Untie Nots team, the power of the Eagle Eye AIR platform, and Google Cloud technology such as Vertex AI, EagleAI is a standalone solution under the umbrella of the Eagle Eye Group.

Moreover, while EagleAI is designed to create winning scenarios, the biggest winners are the consumers themselves, who receive compelling and entirely personalised promotions. The AI-powered data science solution is an answer to data from McKinsey showing that 71% of consumers expect personalisation, and 76% are frustrated when they don’t get it.

By optimising customer communications and putting customers at the centre of decision-making by understanding their needs and crafting relevant offers and marketing, EagleAI helps create more rewarding connections and deeper relationships between retailers and their customers.

Tim Mason, CEO of Eagle Eye, said, “At Eagle Eye, we’re on a mission to power the personalised marketing revolution, and launching EagleAI represents a significant step on that journey. We believe that personalisation is the retail version of the Golden Rule—treating people as they would like to be treated—and with EagleAI, retailers can put this into practice in a real, scalable, efficient way.”

Mason continued, “I am hugely excited by this opportunity and by the work that Zyed and his brilliant team will do to enable current and future clients to unlock the full potential of their customer data. Together, we can offer a bright AI-assisted future to forward-thinking retailers.”

Meanwhile, Zyed Jamoussi, co-founder of Untie Nots, shared, “Our vision for EagleAI is to empower businesses to personalise the end-to-end customer experience while maximising ROI. We’re giving retailers the capability to manage the full complement of promotional, loyalty, and media investments for every individual customer across every business unit.”

Singapore – Wootag, Singapore-based visual marketing SaaS company that offers visual interactive and insights to marketers, has recently launched ‘Wootag For Ads’. Simultaneously, Jeffrey Kwan has been appointed by the platform as its new managing director.

Wootag for Ads is an integrated solution that enables marketers to explore audience behavioural insights and target them with interactive video and display using Wootag Signal and OTT+ to deliver in-stream and CTV ads. This marketing solution is said to provide marketers with expanding offerings in interactive and intent-based audience engagement across various forms of advertising.

Meanwhile, Kwan’s appointment is seen to help the company expand its business in the Asia Pacific region. Kwan brings with him an outstanding track record in the field of adtech and marketing. He previously served as MD of Teads and business director of Greater China at Reuters. Prior to joining Reuters, he led the Financial Times’ Greater China & South East Asia sales team.

CEO & Founder of Wootag, Raj Sunder said, “The digital industry is growing exponentially. Leveraging the combined strengths of our expanded solutions and Jeffrey’s appointment, we are further capturing the opportunity and significantly boost Wootag’s growth across the region. With Jeffrey’s extensive experience in this industry across publishers and media agencies, we aspire to enhance our push to empower our clients on driving business outcomes with next-gen visual interactive and set new standards for integrated visual marketing solutions.”

Currently, Wootag has operations in 13 countries. 

Singapore – Wootag, a visual interactive and insights platform, has launched today Wootag Signals, a real-time event-driven video interactive solution to tap into the patterns of demand and consumer behaviors, to drive impactful brand experiences on videos.

Leveraging on real-time data and technology, Wootag Signals enables marketers to deliver product placements, promotions, and creatives focused on real-time conditions, including weather conditions and football matches. Through this, Wootag Signals aims to eliminate marketers’ time and budget constraints to customize its engagement with target audiences and impact purchase behavior.

The solution provides marketers with the ability from customizing viewers’ experience by weather to customizing videos or interactive based on weather conditions. They can simply select the location, trigger type from weather factors to temperature, and then assign the interactivity. Marketers can now run multiple patterns in one single campaign and make changes continuously to optimize the marketing efforts.

Furthermore, marketers can also reach target audiences with a trigger focus on sports events. By selecting the League or Cup, they can set up a customized viewers sports experience. In response to the growing marketing demand ahead of the Olympics Games Tokyo 2021, the function will subsequently be expanded to Cricket, NBA matches, and worldwide sports events. 

Raj Sunder, the founder and chief executive officer of Wootag, said that marketers have been struggling with creating impactful actions for any video and display marketing campaigns. He believes that Wootag Signals can provide an easier way to address the power of visual interactive engagements and help them to navigate through the increasing complexity of video interactive journeys. 

Sunder further said that Wootag is committed to strengthening the platform in supporting brands and marketers to effectively engage with the right audience through efficient visual interactive solutions.

“With no doubt that weather plays a key role in impacting the specific target audience’s purchase behavior. From Wootag’s engagement with several clients in the region, we see a significant improvement of conversion rate rise with nearly 3 times uplift and 130% of a boost in lead generation after implementing Wootag Signals. In the future, we look forward to expanding the event-driven patterns further to other conditions which could play a key role in audience emotions,” added Sunder.

Global – ECI Software Solutions, a cloud-based business management solutions company, has appointed former chief marketing officer and partner of fractional CMO firm Chief Outsiders, Adrian van Haaften, as its new chief marketing officer.

Van Haaften will be responsible for leading ECI’s global marketing and demand generation strategy, overseeing its execution across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC, as well as bringing ECI’s brand vision to life.

Prior to his new position, Van Haaften has led go-to-market and growth strategies for both high-velocity startups and market leaders. He brings with him 20 years of experience driving the growth and expansion of global software companies, to focus mainly on the customer journey to ECI. 

Commenting on his appointment, Van Haaften said that ECI has had tremendous success helping thousands of SMB customers get business done and that he is thrilled to be joining the company at a time when ECI is accelerating its industry leadership and product innovation. 

“I look forward to working with the global marketing team and the entire ECI organization to educate the many industries we serve about ECI’s broad range of market-leading products and our unwavering commitment to the success of our customers,” said van Haaften.

Meanwhile, Trevor Gruenewald, CEO of ECI Software Solutions, said, “Over its history, ECI has grown from a startup to a multinational company serving small and medium businesses around the world, and we’re only getting started. Adrian brings a wealth of strategic experience in driving global expansion and positioning companies for growth, with a broad understanding of what it takes to build successful, market-leading SaaS organizations at scale. We welcome Adrian to the team as we continue our growth journey.”

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – The Malaysian arm of consumer data and analytics company, Milieu, has announced a new executive joining its team – Aaron Low – to take charge of its commercial operations in the country.

Low is a seasoned martech expert, and consultant, coming from data technology company Zanroo, where he brings over eight years of experience working in martech and software-as-a-service (SaaS) industries. Through his new role, Low will be responsible for building up the sales pipeline and commercial operations for Malaysia, and forging strategic partnerships.

Low was regional strategic partnerships and business development head for APAC at Zanroo. He has also worked with the Malaysia arm of IT services company Meltwater, where he served as a senior business development consultant; and with corporate media marketing company, marcus evans Group, as a corporate sales executive.

Commenting on his appointment, Low Said, “After meeting Milieu for the first time, I got really excited about the product, company vision, and the team. A lot of businesses fail to make the right decisions simply because market research is too complex, too slow, or too expensive. Milieu’s approach really resonates with me in terms of how it can be used to help companies of all shapes and sizes make better decisions.”

Low will report to Marcus Lim, Milieu’s regional head of growth in APAC.

“2020 was a milestone year for us, and we’re proud of what we accomplished with a small team and in the face of the global pandemic. We saw incredibly strong demand for our product in the market as many businesses, both big and small, are now under immense pressure to make data-driven decisions in the face of tight budgets. We’re excited to welcome Aaron to the team and to start building up a base of clients in Malaysia,” Lim stated.

With marketing budgets being cut because of the coronavirus pandemic and an uptick in consumers shifting to online purchases, SEO – a cost-effective, long-term results method of getting your message, products, and services out there – matters more than ever.

But if you think traffic is all your SEO strategy should deliver, then you’re underutilizing it. Set up correctly, SEO can become your most efficient digital marketing channel in 2021. It can be leveraged to achieve your most important business goals, including increased revenue, improved brand sentiment, a bigger market share, and higher marketing ROI.

Working in healthcare? Financial services? Manufacturing? Don’t click away just yet. SEO is no longer just for big-name retailers. For organizations in digitally-immature sectors, SEO can help them stand out and move into the lead via a greater digital reach, improved brand perception, and more highly-qualified leads. Even if your organization is not investing in its discoverability online, you can bet your competitors will be. And with the average click rate for the top position on Google getting nearly 30% of all clicks, this is not a race you can afford to lose.

In short, 2021 is the year that SEO should be on everyone’s agenda. Read on to discover how to prepare for SEO success in 2021.

1. SEO requires a more holistic approach

Many organizations are waking up to the fact that when it comes to their SEO strategy, not everyone is on the same page. The key point of contention? Who in the organization actually owns this business-critical function. Some elements are managed by the IT department, some by web teams, while other parts fall under marketing’s remit.

Global enterprises with dispersed workforces are most at risk, but even smaller organizations can fall into this trap. For example, a member of the marketing team might identify a good SEO opportunity for their organization’s website but be unable to implement it because responsibility for SEO lies with the web development team. An analytics expert might spot some intriguing content gaps that your organization could plug and reap the traffic rewards from, but be unable to draft compelling, high-quality content for that purpose without help from the content team. Especially in larger organizations, it’s generally not as simple as shooting across a quick email to get an update made.  

It’s clear that coming out of 2020, many organizations are still struggling to unite key SEO stakeholders behind an organic search strategy that positively impacts wider business outcomes. With so many players – and siloes – involved, SEO strategies risk becoming confused, resource-intensive, and at worst, ineffective.

What you need to do ahead of 2021. This siloed approach to SEO will never deliver the results your organization needs. Rather than an unorganized mix of employees who occasionally optimize your site for certain SEO elements – perhaps on an ad hoc basis – a proactive, cross-functional SEO team with clear SEO roles, responsibilities, and processes must be carved out. The more closely key SEO stakeholders work together, the more likely it is they will have the information and resources they need to run a highly-effective SEO strategy.

Start by identifying who should be part of your cross-functional team. This list should include anyone who works with your website in a way that influences or impacts SEO. Though this list will look different for every organization it might include:

  • SEO specialists 
  • PPC specialists 
  • Content writers and strategists
  • Marketers
  • Web developers
  • Analytics specialists 
  • Sales
  • IT
  • PR

If your organization outsources its marketing or SEO efforts, you should also list any external vendors you’re using.

Tip: Transparency, clear task allocation, and status updates are essential for any SEO strategy to succeed. Invite all your key stakeholders to use real-time project management software or a specialized SEO dashboard to effortlessly stay on top of what’s completed, what still needs to be done, by who, and when.

Once you have defined your 2021 SEO taskforce, it’s time to get them all on the same page and working towards your broader business goals. Which brings us to trend number two.

2. SEO reporting needs to prove ROI

It’s not enough to claim that organic search ‘drives traffic’ to your website anymore – SEO cannot operate separately from your business goals. To prove that SEO positively impacts your bottom line and get C-level buy-in and funding for your organic search initiatives (especially in a time when marketing budgets are under scrutiny), you organization needs to definitively link SEO to producing a competitive advantage online.  

The best way to do this is with data. Organizations need access to robust SEO reporting to make their case, especially when it comes to presenting organic search performance to the C-suite. While they may not have time to dive into the minutiae of every SEO campaign, it’s vital that decision makers are able to quickly and easily understand how the company’s SEO strategy impacts top-line company targets: revenue, brand recognition, and share of voice. With organizations regularly relying on multiple tools, including web analytics platforms, content optimization tools, keyword finders, broken link crawlers, and so on – with diverging and complex data – to report on their SEO activity, it can be challenging for decision makers to get a clear, cohesive picture of how SEO delivers more than just extra clicks.  

“It’s very common that the CMOs we speak to get SEO reports that have traffic increases, position increases, and that have click-through rate improvement, which are all great metrics for marketers, but it doesn’t speak to the bottom line or how it’s impacting goals for their business,” says Diane Kulseth, Senior SEO Consultant at Siteimprove.

What you need to do ahead of 2021. SEO stakeholders across an organization should prioritize working with a ‘single source of truth’ to move their SEO campaigns forward with confidence. That typically means working from a single, comprehensive SEO platform. Platforms built around the specific needs of enterprise organizations, like Siteimprove SEO, are useful for keeping track of all the moving parts of your SEO strategy across disparate teams – but that’s not all. Their intuitive dashboard overviews and metrics also help decision makers to effortlessly connect the SEO dots between content, traffic, and ROI.

3. The user experience is about to matter a lot more

Anyone who works with websites know that Google and other search engines constantly review and revise the algorithms that determine search engine result pages rankings. In 2021, this will reach a whole new level with the rolling out of Google’s new user-centric Core Web Vitals.

This algorithm change will officially make the user experience a major ranking signal for websites. Normally, it only provides limited transparency into how its algorithms operate, but in this case, Google has published extensive new guidance on how to measure page experience from the user’s perspective, including a supporting set of metrics that can be used to benchmark websites.

What you need to do ahead of 2021. Organizations need to prepare for this change now by evaluating their existing page performance and making the adjustments required for their content to rank according to the new algorithm. Luckily, good SEO and a positive user experience tend to go hand-in-hand. Examples of the intersectionality between SEO and the user experience include:

  • Fast page-loading times
  • Mobile-friendly content
  • Providing a secure visitor page experience
  • Improving web page usability

4. PPC and SEO must work together

While marketing and advertising spend is shrinking in the current environment – a trend that is likely to continue into 2021, organic search remains a cost-effective way to fill the gap. After all, you don’t need to pay every time someone clicks on your organic content, but you do pay for clicks with PPC – and depending on your chosen keywords, that can be costly. The moment you stop paying for ads, your traffic will dry up, whereas the benefits of well-ranking organic search results can last for years. Even more persuasively, good SEO can actually improve your PPC results – helping you get more value out of your paid search campaigns by identifying and eliminating inefficiencies and wasted spend. Let’s find out how.

Tip: SEO results can be harder to quantify than those from PPC and undoubtedly take longer to show ROI. So, it’s important that your SEO and paid search teams work together closely to produce a mix of quick search wins and long-term results. This should be straightforward if you’ve assigned roles and responsibilities across a cross-functional SEO team as described in step one.

What you need to do ahead of 2021. Repurpose the data from your existing PPC and SEO campaigns to plug the budget gaps in your paid search strategy. If you have a keyphrase that’s performing particularly well in a PPC campaign, you should consider using that same keyphrase in your SEO campaign to try to dominate the organic search results as well. This is a good way of growing brand awareness and trust, since users will see your brand twice in their search results. If they don’t click on your ads, the presence of your brand name at the top of the search results page will help position your organization top-of-mind.

When your search strategy is suffering from keyword overlaps, for instance, when you’ve allocated PPC spend to phrases where you’re already ranking well organically, it makes sense to lessen your spend in that area and redistribute your budget, ideally to areas where your organic search campaigns are performing poorly. This approach is even more compelling when you know that organic desktop listings still produce 20 x more clicks than PPC ads.  

Enterprise SEO tools help you organize for success   

As much as SEO is increasingly indispensable, it’s set to become even more challenging for organizations to execute successfully. In 2021, SEO teams will be expected to create larger numbers of high-quality content, keep up with search engine algorithm changes, conduct keyword research, perform technical site audits, and present clear evidence of ROI for their SEO campaigns – not to mention managing day-to-day SEO tasks – all on an even tighter budget with fewer resources, to socially-distanced, dispersed stakeholders. It’s going to be a really tough job.

Fortunately, there’s a simpler way to automate workflows, unite stakeholders, and prepare your organization for SEO success in 2021: investing in an enterprise SEO tool. Whether your organization manages its SEO in-house or partners with an agency, using an enterprise SEO solution will help you get more from your SEO campaigns by adding helpful automation, insights, and reporting capabilities into the mix. Remember, whatever initial investment an SEO tool requires in terms of budget and onboarding, it will swiftly make up for in productivity gains. According to Forrester’s ROI of SEO report, marketers that adopt an SEO platform report an average reduction of 28 hours per month spent on key SEO tasks. That’s 28 hours that can be better spent on formulating more successful SEO plans! Yet further research reveals that just one in three organizations are currently using one.

The author is Georgia James, content writer for Siteimprove. Siteimprove is a SaaS solution that helps organizations achieve their digital potential by empowering teams with actionable insights to deliver a superior website experience and drive growth.

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