In this installment of the Martech Minute, we speak with Ronni Gothard Christiansen, founder and CEO of Aesir Context Marketing. Ronni joins us from the land of the Vikings to talk about how to get the right content, to the right people, at the right time on your website.

Hello everybody, this is Colin White from Martekrs with another installment of the Martech Minute! Today I’m pleased to be joined by Ronni Gothard Christiansen, he is the CEO and founder of Aesir Context Marketing.  Thanks for joining me today Ronni.

Ronni Gothard Christiansen: Thank you very much Colin, it’s a pleasure to be on your show.

Q: Now Ronni I first met with representatives of your company Aesir Context Marketing at the Martech Conference here in Boston recently. I found the concept very intriguing so I’m glad you agreed to do the interview here.

To set the stage a little bit let’s talk about context marketing how do you guys define that term?

Ronni Gothard Christiansen: Actually I’d like to look away from technology a little. Say you walk into any physical store in the US. When you get in the door, then there will be someone working in the store. When they see you go into the store, then based on the impression, their perception, they get a view based on the background knowledge information they have, and based on their experience working in that organization, they will try to be as meaningful as humanly possible to you, and they will try to increase the revenue relevancy of the interaction and of the communication they have with you. And that is fundamental to be contextually aware of your marketing. So whether it’s an employee talking to a potential client, or whether it’s a segmented newsletter where we try to shoot the right email to the right people, well then on the websites it’s pretty much the same. Instead of having websites with many different tunnels and followings where we try to put people into some areas where it’s more relevant for them, with a contextual marketing platform you’re able to personalize, to differentiate the same web pages so they’re more meaningful and more relevant for people.

At the end of the day we’re facilitating technology that with a lot of common sense enables websites to be applied on the exact same level as you would in a physical store.

Q: So personalization seems to be a key part of it, but I know from my experience as a marketer, there have been marketing automation platforms around for a while now, they all talk about personalization, having dynamic content and dynamic email. That is sort of the first generation of context marketing in your opinion?

Ronni Gothard Christiansen: Yeah, I think it is, but it’s also highly focused on social media, it’s highly focused on email. So if you look at a lot of the products on the market, Infusionsoft, HubSpot, Marketo, or even ClickDimensions Campaign Monitor, even MailChimp and other pure email solutions, from earlier years are now diverging into the same market area actually. And all of them are very much focused on being able to send out relevant email to relevant people. They are collecting leads from social media and then following up on emails or if you implement a small form to collect people in your newsletter or when people sign up for a white paper download, etc., then you will get some people you know.

So once you go to a point where you’re actually converting maybe four or five percent of your visitors into someone you know, because you have them in your marketing automation platform, then you can be able to do what is called account based marketing, right? An account based marketing is contextual marketing.

So versus your generation 1.0 of context marketing, what we do is very different, because from the first time anyone visits our website without any prior knowledge at all, we take their geographical information. If it’s a business we take the company enrichment based on the IP addresses. We take their language, the device they are using, we take their actual behavioral patterns across the website. So as they move around on the website their behavior will clearly and significantly show specific patterns. What they’re interested in and how we can better accommodate them. We can be meaningful and highly relevant in the way we communicate with people.

Since I can do this from the first visit, then my target range when I talk about conversion metrics is 100% of the visitors. I don’t have to ignore the first 96% to get down to 4% like end user account based marketing. I can be contextually aware of all the visitors, so it means that if you integrate our context marketing platform into one of the marketing automation platforms, we actually use the CM to present the right message to the right people at the right point. We can actually increase their 4%.

You’re able to work with account based marketing to maybe 8 percent, 10 percent, 12 percent or even 15 or 20 percent because it’s more likely we get people to sign up to a state where we will actually identify the individual person and be able to attract them. And another interesting point is if you send out an email in one of the marketing automation platforms then the individual email is of course at the user level. So then when you click something and go to the website then we actually create a small plugin in the Aesir Context Marketing platform so you can read exactly who this user and put it into the individual visitor flow, so all the visitors you didn’t get back from your marketing automation flow you will actually be able to do even more on the website. And you can aim for a completely personalized and experience both for known and unknown entities on your website.

Q: So the tie-in to account based marketing is pretty obvious and that was one of the questions I had for you and you explained that very well. A lot of the account based marketing platforms that have been emerging the last few years are very focused on advertising, personalized advertising to deliver that right content outside of your website. It sounds like you’re more focused on personalized content on the website, is that accurate?

Ronni Gothard Christiansen: Yes and I think we are probably the only ones that are focused entirely on the website right now. There is an ocean of platforms and solutions in the market that cover everything but the website, and then there are a few players who try, with very complex JavaScript image overlays and stuff like that. So we give you some possibilities of trying to personalize some landing pages on your website.

But let me tell you this, if it’s not native in the web platform, if your web platform does not have the ability to work natively with contextual aware it’s worth it’s of leave with contextual awareness, so it goes deep into the business intelligence and actually responds in real-time, then it’s not going to fly. You’re not going to get the success you can with this sort of technology. So I believe that our role as the very web-centric platform that brings in generation 2 contextual awareness is to integrate to the full, wide scale value chain for the individual customer. That also means if it’s e-commerce, well then we integrate into the ERP system, we integrate into the CRM system.

But let’s consider a model where every time a client from a specific industry visits your website, even if you don’t know who they are, and they go above a 70% engagement level because their actions are so interesting, then we actually send them over to the CRM system as a new account with a new opportunity on it and then we assign them out throughout different key account managers. So depending on where they come in from, what their behavior is, etc., we can actually type them direct into your Salesforce or Dynamics CRM. And so the people in your sales organization, your marketing organization, will be able to work with pure gold. And that’s just the accidental outcome of being web-centric, it’s a side effect, it’s not even where the real magic is happening.

Q: What’s the best way for people who are interested in learning more about Aesir to get in touch with you? Do you have a trial or a proof of concept you can set up? Tell me a little bit more about how the how to best engage with you guys.

Ronni Gothard Christiansen: Well what we do is at AesirContextMarketing.com we write a lot of content marketing about what we do and how to work with things and how to improve the way we work with things. And we have a very partner-based organization. In a few weeks we’re going to open up our partner index on our website which means that we will have a wide range of partners around the world. We are launching the first partners in Canada and the US as well both solution partners and consulting partners. So we have more and more and we have quite a big queue of partners lining up right now, so we’re processing them in batches. But we’ll have more and more local partners you can reach out to. But beyond that we’re happy to do GoToMeetings, we will be happy to demonstrate what it can do.

At the end of the day when we work with contextual marketing it is very, very important to remember that to really create our contextual marketing platform where you create effects of conversion increases of three, four, five, six hundred percent, we need to start at the point where we do persona segments and analysis, and we utilize models, etc., to get so close into the mental decision process of your potential customers. Because if we understand your potential customers and where they are in their decision journeys, then we can create user experience journeys that are matching a resolution of the pain points they will have in their in their psychological buying processes. And if we do that and build an Aesir Context Marketing platform around that, then to be honest all the customers we’ve launched so far we have not created a single customer that did not have at least a 300 percent conversion increase.

Q: That’s impressive!

Ronni Gothard Christiansen: But it’s also very natural. I mean when you go from a one-size-fits-all monologue-based website to a contextual aware web platform, to be quite honest, you could be sleeping with one I’m arm tied behind your back and you will still be three hundred percent better, because the difference is so big it’s a completely new way of building websites. In two to three years, this will be the standard.

But the interesting part about being an early adopter and doing it now is that when you transform your company into being focused on demand changes or changes in behavior and the demand end of the market, and you then respond to that by changing, personalizing, and differentiating your website, that also affects the way you do business in general. Because you really get an outside-in perspective. And then you start launching new products or services based on changes in actual demand because you get that much insight out of it. Then your entire company will be a lot more successful and do a lot more business, basically because you leave some of your old known truths, your story you should tell yourself about the usual suspects. And you start trying to listen to changes in demand. And it’s an epiphany when you see customers looking at their own visitor flows and getting insights. I mean maybe they were used to converting 1 percent, so the 99% of all the businesses they never knew anything about, and now they’re looking, wow this segment which is 9 times bigger than those we converted we can actually get them to be customers. We will facilitate the right information, at the right level to get them through the door.

So it’s an eye-opener of epic dimensions for the actual companies when they sit and look at their own data. It is so interesting and I’m so thrilled to get the opportunity to sit out there and put my fingers into organizations’ data and be a part of their transformation and to work their way into this.

Q: How quickly you can get these kinds of insights once you get your platform up and running? Is it a weeks-long process, months-long, years-long?

Ronni Gothard Christiansen: What we usually say is that the entire process on to launch is a story- driven approach, we will facilitate, we will talk to you, we’ll try and pull out all the company’s information, historical data on best customers, best-selling products, etc. Then when we apply all of that and we launch the first website, then we say, well we do a second meeting eight weeks in. So after eight weeks we have so much data, and so we’re able to say something quite meaningful about where should we start. And then we continue going back and sitting together with the customer and we get wiser together. I mean we don’t know people’s organizations and companies or products, we understand that that’s a learning process, but at the same time it’s also a process where their organizations learn about the new possibilities. And over time, over the first three to six months we see customers since us email or calls filled up with more and more with new ideas. How they could be more meaningful in the contextual aware concept or scenario, and that is a really important aspect for us is, as a platform supplier or as a supplier in general we’re digital birth helpers, in many ways our platform is being the ideal facilitator of a digital rebirth where we also give their organizations tools that they can work themselves they can actually learn to work it.

A really funny example is Google Analytics. We did a survey in Denmark showing that hundred percent of all companies use Google Analytics. 99% of these, they’d only log in at a maximum one time a month and they look at whether the curve went up or down the hill. So if that’s one of your systems in your value chain and you’re actually not using the data for anything then you have dead data, you have dead systems. So we pull all these data into the platform so you can utilize it. And when you write the next content marketing article or do the next landing page you can see all the statistical data, all the conversion data. You can see which people have looked at your old, let’s say I did an article two years ago that has generated a revenue of 1 million dollars. Well if I’m writing a new article tomorrow, I surely will be learning from my own experience from the article one year ago, so the ability to actually touch and measure and make it tangible, what sort of value you’re creating and how you’re doing it is a really important factor in terms of helping organizations and people to create more value and consistently learn from their own experiences.

Q: Well marketing as we all know is has been transitioning to a more data-driven exercise for years now and you know you can look at the average tenure of CMOs being I think a year and a half or something like that right now, if they’re not able to provide results and show data on how their programs are affecting pipeline and revenues, they’re going to be out the door.

Ronni Gothard Christiansen: But there is also a really interesting risk here Colin, because if you hire a digital marketing specialist and they create content elements on your web platform that generate a revenue of 10 million dollars a year, they might be little troublesome to negotiate salary with the year after, right? So measuring and showing the value you create I mean that’s actually one of the gray areas through many years in our line of business is that sometimes we’ve been doing amazing work, but it’s been so non-tangible to see the results. So now we can actually show them on the screen and then go back to our partners, our customers, our employers and say listen, we did this and this and this, it created this value, we’re actually doing a really good job.

And I think for many CEOs for instance, they’ve been seeing the websites and e-commerce as a cost, where you need to be there, but it’s a cost so they’re really not dedicated. Once you actually get the numbers into their board meetings that show how much income it generates, it’s a completely different scenario.

Q: Well Ronni we’ve run out of time so I’d like to close here. Your website is AesirContextMarketing.com, and I would encourage anybody who’s interested to visit your site and I’m sure they can get in touch with you there. Thanks very much for joining us here on the Martech Minute and we wish you luck in the future!

Ronni Gothard Christiansen: Thank you very much for having me Colin and all the best.

If you’d like to learn more about the Aesir Context Marketing platform, visit their website at www.aesircontextmarketing.com.

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