"Smart" Content is King: Why Chicago Ventures Invested in Get Smart Content

by Jason Duboe
February 10, 2014

“Smart” content is the new king of the digital jungle. For the B2B marketer, delivering relevant content to the right audience at the right time has become critical. As IT budget shifts away from the CIO, the CMO is stockpiling A/B testing, website optimization, and marketing automation tools into their newfound marketing war chest. However, marketers fail to capitalize on their most effective customer touch point; the website.

Imagine if a B2B marketer could understand deeply granular detail on a customer in real-time:

·         Product Manager at a healthcare organization with 500 employees

·         Current Eloqua customer

·         Interested in visualization tools

·         Downloaded a whitepaper on “healthcare business intelligence tools” 

·         “Mobile visualization products” in search history

The team at Get Smart Content (“GSC”) enables that marketer to serve up their healthcare-specific product content and a case study on mobile visualization tools and dashboards immediately when that prospect visits the website. GSC is taking advantage of data that is already being collected on B2B customers through web analytics and marketing automation tools to deliver highly relevant and personalized content.

Our team often frames an investment decision around the size the addressable market pain point and whether or not a team has the ability to quickly and effectively remove that pain. 74% of website visitors are frustrated when websites serve content that is not relevant to their interests. CEO Jim Eustace and the team at GSC have already delivered tremendous value to customers by showing 30% decreases in bounce rates, 40%+ increase in click through rates for people who are served targeted content, and average website duration increases by 21%. The B2B segment is particularly appealing because conversions represent very high dollar value transactions where both timing and product differentiation are very important in the sales process.

GSC is well positioned to help monetize the greatest asset that marketers have: data tracking a customer’s online research and purchase behavior. Marketing automation software penetration in the B2B segment is significant as several CRM players have recently acquired marketing automation vendors to unify customer engagement. Get Smart Content uses this marketing automation and CRM data to close the loop on customer conversations by contextualizing previously siloed information, serving up the most relevant content to each individual customer based on their unique profile.

Beyond exceptional market dynamics, it is rare to see a seed-stage company that operates like a growth-stage business. Jim Eustace has been helping organizations optimize their digital media strategy for over a decade through website and social media analytics/testing.  Tory Upchurch, VP of sales and customer operations, previously helped to ramp sales at Spredfast and has instituted a buttoned-up sales organization for GSC. Chicago Ventures is honored to partner with the team at Get Smart Content and we look forward to assisting in the next phase of the Company’s growth.  If you’re interested in what GSC can do for your business, drop me a line – Jason [at] Chicago Ventures [dot] com – and we’ll see if there’s a great use case for your enterprise.

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