The World's First Customer Search Engine - Interview with Mintigo CEO, Jacob Shama
The proliferation of social media and content marketing strategy has introduced a wealth of valuable data that has immense potential to improve sales campaigns. But marketers have a hard time getting to, and using this information. A whole lot of time is wasted by marketers who have to sift through data and research prospects all day. One company, Mintigo, set out to give marketers an easy way to get insights from all the data across the web. And according to the company's CEO, Jacob Shama, those insights lead directly to higher conversion rates and increased pipeline.
Technorati got a preview at Mintigo's soon-to-release product, best described as a Customer Search Engine. Just as Google searches the Web and social to find interesting pages, Mintigo searches the Web and social data to find interesting prospects. The engine is constantly scanning all publicly-available data, about millions of companies, to find "triggers" indicating that a particular person is ready for a particular product.
The ability to buy customer data itself is certainly not new. Firmographic data (data, pertaining to characteristics of an organization, such as employee size, revenue size, industry, number of locations and location of headquarters) can be bought from a variety of data vendors, but that approach assumes that every product seeks the same 100 fields in a database. The beauty of Mintogo's Customer Search Engine is that it can make sense of virtually any unstructured content on the Web--the Big Data we've all been hearing about.
Shama explains, "We knew we were onto something when we started analyzing what we call 'CustomerDNA,' and kept finding things that surprised our customers." One of Mintigo's clients found that companies active
on Twitter were 7X more likely to buy. Another customer found that companies with employees citing "SaaS" or "cloud" experience was 12X more likely to buy its products. Shama continues, "Just like DNA, it's unique for everyone. But even our most sophisticated clients were learning new, powerful things about who was actually buying their products."
This isn't just "nice to have" data either. Companies can gain more insights about customer purchase dynamics and the social network drive behind them with the type of data Mintigo is generating. We're seeing this social data being used to recommended optimal marketing promotion strategies, impacting customer metrics such as conversion, retention, and loyalty. In a new report by Bazaarvoice and The CMO Club, a survey of brands with more than $1 billion in annual revenue (56%) as well as smaller business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) brands, finds that almost half of CMOs have used social data to make predictions or forecasts, and nearly nine in 10 say this data has influenced their decisions. CMOs also drive this data beyond marketing, sharing data with other C-level executives (97.3%) and with functions, including sales (36.8%) and product management and development (35.1%).
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