Nick Bhavsar
SVP Marketing, Bound

In 2017, companies are focusing on right data, and not just more data. With the coming-of-age of website marketing and audience optimization analytics, marketers are empowered to solve complex business challenges using disparate data sources and meaningful insights. Personalization, hyper-engagement and customer experience have become the key dimensions to boost website traffic and content performance, engage visitors at scale and meet conversion goals. To understand how marketers can connect customer data with smart personalization engines, we spoke to Nick Bhavsar, SVP at Bound.

MTS: What are the key components of the 360 Persona Technology™?
Nick Bhavsar: Bound’s 360 Personas provide an innovative approach to identifying and engaging known and unknown website visitors with personalized experiences. The personas are built by connecting multiple data sources from industry-leading data providers and marketing platforms in five key categories:

• Firmographic data – company attributes such as company name, location, revenue and industry.
• Demographic data – individual-level role-based data such as job function, seniority, occupation, and education.
• Offsite Intent data – understanding the purpose of a visit based on the visitor’s browsing patterns before visiting your site.
• Onsite Behavioral data – attributes such as entry path, page visits, time on site, clicks, device type and repeat visits.
• Marketing Automation data – prospect and customer attributes such as pipeline stage, custom marketing automation fields, customer status, etc.

MTS: How does Bound connect customer intent data with smart personalization engines?
Nick: Bound combines intent data from unique 3rd party data sources such as Bombora along with information such as job role, behavioral and account data — providing marketers with an unprecedented level of insight on web audiences for focused segmentation and targeting.

Intent data sheds light on two primary aspects for personalization:

Identifying key topics
Content topics website visitors have shown interest in, based on their browsing behavior prior to visiting a company’s website.
Predicting product interest
Product categories website visitors are likely to engage with on a company’s website, based on their demonstrated interest.

MTS: How have website personalization standards evolved in the past 18 months?
Nick: In the past 18 months, 3rd party data sources such as Kickfire, Bombora, Linkedin, ClearBit and others have significantly improved their API access to allow real-time personalization to tap into their underlying insights. Marketers can now tailor the web experience to align to the needs of each of their personas.

MTS: Do you feel that modern Tech stacks are yet to fully leverage website optimization for audience experience and data-based content personalization?
Nick: Modern marketers are always looking for new technologies that can help them grow business profitably. However, many overlook an ability to connect their existing data and get more out of their current investments in technology.

As data vendors continue to evolve their APIs, marketers will be able to leverage their existing technology stack to tap into the intelligence required for personalization. Bound has taken an open API approach to leverage the best in breed data required to truly make personalization effective.

MTS: What’s the next frontier for MarTech integrations based on personalization technology?
Nick: As more data feeds personalization, marketers will continue to face challenges in deciding what message should be delivered to whom and when. While artificial intelligence can help automate the decision making, there is simply no substitute for human intuition. At Bound, we believe the future of personalization is a hybrid of using advanced analytics to empower a human to best architect the definitive digital experience.

MTS: Would you take us through Bound’s roadmap in building technologies for integrating conversion optimization, offsite intent data, and ABM?
Nick: Our roadmap breaks down into two key components:

• Advance our analytics suite to help marketers better understand their audiences, how those audiences engage on and off their website, what content drives conversions and how to increase the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.
• Enhance our personalization engine to allow marketers to create engaging web experiences for their key targets at scale.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Nick.
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