BrightTalk Offers Machine Learning To Help B2B Marketers Pick The Most Relevant Topics To Present

BrightTalk on Monday said it would help B2B marketers develop more relevant webinars to host on its platform by opening up a tool that uses machine learning to identify the most popular topics among its more than eight million professional users.

The San Francisco-based firm has already been arming B2B marketers with Intent Leads, which includes technographic, firmographic and other data about activity on its platform, since February. The new tool, which it simply calls Insights, uses an artificial intelligent algorithm BrightTalk named “Ada” to sift through the best-performing talks out of 100,000 that are already available.

A technology company that was considering a BrightTalk webinar on “digital transformation,” for example, would be able to use Insights to see how many companies and professionals have viewed content related to this topic in the last four months, as well as how many presentations based on DX have already been created.

“It allows the customer to interrogate the data themselves,” BrightTalk CEO Paul Heald told B2B News Network. “Right now, marketers will often talk to their (sales team) and say, ‘Tell me what’s going on to make the best use of my time.’ We’ve taken way the need to have that conversation.”

Heald said Insights will let B2B marketers get as granular as possible, drilling down into the seniority level of their potential audience, the geography in which they work and the size of their employer. Besides IT, some of the other popular verticals on BrightTalk where Insights could be applied include sales and marketing professionals and HR leaders, he said. The tool may also be a way to assess the share of voice competitors have in a popular topic of conversation.

“If you look at something like, ‘AWS’ you’ll see recommendations for things like ‘Azure’ pop up,” he said, referring to cloud computing platforms of Amazon and Microsoft, respectively.

Beyond topic selection, tying Insights to Intent Leads will provide BrightTalk customers with additional data that may indicate a readiness to purchase, Heald said. The company can provide a score based on the volume of content consumed around a certain subject, the duration and recency of their engagement. BrightTalk can even see notes within the platform when a webinar is forwarded on to a colleague suggesting they look at the presentation and discuss it in more detail.

Ada is already providing information on more than 20,000 topics to Insights, a number Heald said will only grow over time. One of the trends that already seems certain, he added, is the increased technological aspects on business subjects.

“You see something like fintech, and now that’s spreading out into ‘wealthtech,’ or ‘insuretech,’” he said. “When they find exactly the right topic to talk about and it meets the exact personas they’re trying to reach, that’s when they have the greatest success.”