How to use intelligent content

I bet when you think about "intelligent content," blogs, videos, and social media come to mind. The truth is, intelligent content is NOT content marketing; it's your website continuously optimizing.

Intelligent content is content that's structurally rich and semantically categorized and therefore automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable, and adaptable".

Anne Rockley – Intelligent Content a Primer 

Episerver has made it incredibly easy for businesses to implement intelligent content in their digital commerce ecosystem.  Episerver Intelligence Cloud uses data to categorize content using AI and machine learning to present, educate, and inform customers of your products and services in the most advantageous way. At Luminos Labs, we have guided our customers to utilize many of Episerver's intelligent features with much success and believe this guide can help you to do the same.

Know Your Current Content

The first thing you want to know is how valuable your current content is. Performing a free content diagnostic on your existing website will provide insights on your current content assets. The intelligence cloud adds additional automated auditing features; its language processing capabilities offer up-to-date insights to precisely understand how many pieces of content you have by topic without expensive and time-consuming manual content audits.

What are your visitors' interests?

The ultimate goal is to link content topics to high-value actions from your customers. Intelligent content will allow you to go beyond engagement metrics to prove the ROI of your content by knowing exactly which topics drive actions, conversions and revenue for the business. Prescriptive guidance can provide content strategy, adjust to customer interests that change over time, visualize content gaps, prioritize investments clearly and reduce focus. The privately held retailer, Burkes Outlet, utilized these Episerver features to implement content personalization using GEO-IP and user-experience notifications to increase conversions.

How do I present content the best way?

The best way is to test. Create a testing culture for continuous improvement [Article is not published yet] by implementing different strategies for different page types, (e.g., homepage, product page, and checkout pages), and seeing what has the best results from analytics rather than from assumptions. The Episerver Intelligence Cloud allows you to A/B test within the CMS and scale personalization without manual effort, and a machine learning algorithm chooses who gets what content without disrupting your teams. Each new interaction within a browsing session is another signal to the algorithms and helps pinpoint the products of interest with increasing accuracy. Product rankings will optimize to the user with machine-learning algorithms, adapting to your business over time.

What do I present to visitors?

Analytics from actual users is what should drive what you present to your customers. If a product is selling hotter than the others, wouldn't you want to feature it? In a way, intelligent content can do the dirty work by providing automated 1:1 personalization. The Intelligence cloud's AI-powered interest profiling technology can generate first-party intent data profiles for visitors, even if they are anonymous. Each new interaction can update a visitor's interest profile in real-time, with most recent interactions carrying more weight than older ones. And the recommendations can also update in real-time as the interest profile driving the recommendation algorithm changes. Coastal Farm and Ranch, an outdoor supply retailer, implemented these intelligent features, building a faceted search that pre-populates with product and content recommendations.

How do I tie value to intelligent content?

It's easy to see the impact of recommendations with measurement analytics dashboards by comparing personalized vs. unpersonalized click-through-rates. These insights will help to increase revenue by boosting conversions, cross-sells, upsells, and order value by leveraging personalized product recommendations based on each visitor's current journey and similar visitors' actions. Comprehensive user session data, micro-factors like time of day or channel, and other successful purchase journeys to generate hyper-relevant recommendations for cross-sells or alternative items of interest. One of the largest furniture retailers in the USA, Living Spaces, used the Episerver Cloud for product recommendations and personalization to increase AOV by 22% in less than a year.

There are many ways to showcase your site's content, but intelligent content does much of the work for you. It doesn't take a considerable time investment; instead, it saves time and makes employees better at their jobs by predicting the best content to use. Make the smart choice to automate testing, improve product findability, reduce content production expenses and give yourself a competitive market advantage by connecting your assets with customers intelligently.