Automatically Generate and Qualify B2B Leads with AI

CliClap is a marketing solution that uses artificial intelligence to help B2B brands generate leads by delivering content recommendations personalized for each website visitor.

The result? More pageviews, time on page and, most importantly, leads.

Consider us intrigued. We spoke to CliClap CEO Yonatan Snir about how the tool creates value for marketers and sales professionals.

In a single sentence or statement, describe your company.

CliClap is a website experience (#webXperience) platform that delivers content recommendations personalized for each website visitor, resulting in higher engagement, better quality leads, and more conversions.

How does your company use artificial intelligence in its products?

We developed machine learning algorithms that analyze and categorize how users consume content and which content journeys drive the highest engagement and conversion rates.

The platform then uses this data to build personalized content recommendations that help visitors get the information they need while moving them seamlessly through the funnel. The platform works on any CMS and supports all languages as we aren’t dependent on NLP.

What are the primary marketing use cases for your AI-powered solutions?

The main use case is lead generation for B2B organizations. CMOs spend a huge chunk of their budget and resources on attracting visitors to their website. Every month, thousands of people visit their site, yet many leave without exploring farther than the first page and only a small fraction end up becoming leads. The problem isn’t with their team or content quality, it’s in their website experience. There is a discrepancy between the business goals the site needs to deliver (converting visitors to leads) and visitors’ intent (educating themselves before getting in touch).

Our platform is built to learn and “understand” the visitors’ intent and turn this data into content recommendations that meet their needs while also optimizing to achieve the website’s business goals (subscriptions, demos, etc.). The outcome is a better experience for visitors and more engaged leads for our customers.

What makes your AI-powered solution smarter than traditional approaches and products?

Without revealing our secret sauce, I can share a few core concepts that have guided the design and development of our platform.

We start by looking at the right data. A typical B2B website has thousands of visitors every months but at least half of them aren’t relevant (job seekers, students, employees, analysts etc.) and will never become customers. Most platforms don’t distinguish between relevant and irrelevant traffic and therefore their learning isn’t as efficient and may provide misleading insights and outcomes. Our machine learning weeds out the irrelevant traffic and only learns from the visitors who are relevant for your business.

We analyze user behavior rather than language. The majority of AI platforms that deal with content use natural language processing (NLP). This concept limits them to support only specific languages. CliClap uses behavior data to track engagement with content across the entire journey. Therefore, we can learn about the correlation between articles and the value they provide the visitor, without needing to scan and analyze the text.

We make it ridiculously simple to get started. This isn’t directly related to our AI engine, but it is an important part of saving our customers’ time and money. The platform doesn’t require any changes to your website or resource center. Simply add a script, define your content goals within the tool and you are ready to go live. The platform doesn’t drain your team with maintenance either, it doesn’t require more than two to three hours per week.

We offer visibility on assets that were previously black boxes. CliClap also has unique capabilities that enable B2B marketers to measure and optimize typically un-measurable content, such as PDF files. We are able to measure how much time people spend inside a PDF and how many pages they viewed. We are also able to continue the content journey inside the PDF. We also measure engagement on curated content (third party sites) enabling the content to drive traffic back to your site.

Are there any minimum requirements for marketers to get value out of your AI-powered technology? (e.g. data, list size, etc.)

The customers who get the most value out of our platform have at least 10,000 monthly visitors to their website and already have at least 20 content assets (blog posts, videos, PDFs, product pages).

Who are your ideal customers in terms of company size and industries?

Most of our customers are B2B companies anywhere from 100 employees to enterprise. What’s important is that they will have decent traffic to their website (starting at 10,000 visitors/month) and content marketing is a core tenet of their marketing strategy. Most use marketing automation tools (such as Marketo, HubSpot, and Pardot), are active on social media, and are actively creating content.

What do you see as the limitations of AI as it exists today?

Machines are better than humans at data analysis and pattern recognition, and needless to say they’re exponentially faster. In these areas, machines are replacing and will continue to replace humans.

Machines, however, are limited to patterns. At this stage, I don’t see machines developing capabilities to think outside of the box — outside the patterns.

“Outside of the box” thinking is critical when it comes to successful marketing. Creating a sense of wonder, amazement, or amusement is only possible when we’re presented with the creative and the unexpected. This requires humans.

With the rise of digital marketing, marketers have had to focus on churning out content to keep up with the competition. There is less time to focus on creating truly great, thrilling content and creative ideas.

What do you see as the future potential of AI in marketing?

With artificial intelligence taking a bigger role in optimization and analysis, marketers will be able to put all their time back into what drove most of them to this profession in the first place — the creative.

In addition, I see AI as a tool that will give companies the ability to control which content they show their audience.

We already see search moving from text to voice with embedded personal assistants in our smartphones. We see how every app is getting smarter, and learning to predict what we need and when we need it.

The direction we are going in is towards a world with less distraction. Our inbox, a virtual combination of multiple communication channels, will ensure we only see and hear what we need. When we search for something, we will get the exact answer for what we are looking for.

Content consumed anywhere, not just on social channels, will be adjusted to our interests.

So when it comes to the content on sites you control, you’re going to need to use AI to give visitors the customized, personalized experience they expect.

And when it comes to getting your content in front of consumers, you are going to need to work harder and smarter to convince the AI engines used by consumers that your content is what they are looking for.

Any other thoughts on AI in marketing, or advice for marketers who are just starting with AI?

Ironically, since marketing technology was born, marketers have had to work harder to maintain all the tools in their stack.

For example, when I implemented Marketo at a large publicly-traded software company, we had to allocate four people to maintain the system for all the regions and divisions in addition to the agency that helped us with execution. While we were able to do things we weren’t able to do beforehand, we also had to invest more resources.

We call it “marketing automation” but that’s really a misnomer. It’s half automated, but half manual, and the manual part can take up as much manpower (or more!) than the pre-automation.

AI is going to bring us into the world of true marketing automation or, as I like to call it, “autonomous marketing.” We will begin to see marketing tools that maintain themselves, analyze themselves, and optimize themselves.

In this paradigm, we will be able to take human resources out of marketing maintenance and put them towards creative tasks and thinking outside the box. That is, after all, what humans do best.