Today, Marketo announced the acquisition of Insightera, a dynamic-content-based personalization platform vendor based in San Mateo, CA. Insightera will bring the following features to Marketo’s platform:

  • B2B personalization: The platform allows for real-time segmentation and personalization not only for Web site visitors, but also for mobile users. Anonymous visitors can be identified through reverse IP lookup and dynamically served targeted content based on factors such as organization size, industry and location.
  • Predictive analytics: With the ability to do machine learning (auto discovery) across all Web site content (e.g. blogs, white papers), Insightera uses predictive analytics to make content recommendations. Anonymous visitors can be served content based not only on firmagraphics, but also on behavior. The next best offer for each visitor is automatically recommended, based on algorithms and various sets of business rules. It is likely that Marketo will augment the data that these recommendations are based on by using existing customer knowledge that Marketo has collected.

    • Marketo’s acquisition of Insightera continues to enhance the vendor’s value proposition. By 2015 we expect to see 71 percent of B2B organizations’ new inquiries coming via the corporate Web site. With the addition of Insightera, Marketo will now have the potential to extend conversations to the corporate Web site. A large majority of marketing automation vendors do not have this capability today.

    This acquisition also may have potential long-term industry impacts on other vendors. Many Marketo clients perform Web site personalization by partnering with companies such as Demandbase and Get Smart Content. The question is, will clients continue to employ them or discontinue their use and standardize on Marketo for this capability? Another consideration may affect vendors such as Lattice Engines and Infer. Both of these companies perform predictive lead scoring. Now that Marketo has acquired a predictive content engine, will it offer predictive lead scoring capabilities in the future?