One of the first questions we get asked when talking to clients about Semantic Marketing - in particular our technology, Semanticator™ - is how much work is required to maintain content for each market segment?

There are a couple of ways to look at this question. If we step back and observe the way the Web has mostly been viewed - as another piece of marketing collateral - it makes sense to ask this question. In our experience, most companies aren't getting what they could out of their websites - increased sales leads and/or brand affinity. It has become a self-fulfilling prophesy! 'We haven't seen the ROI we were expecting from the Web, so we haven't invested.' Another way to look at this is if delivering a more relevant message to each visitor results in a significant increase in conversion, would the work be worth it?

What we are finding is that you can have a lift in conversion or an increase in brand affinity using Semantic Marketing without a huge increase in workload. In fact, with our oldest implementation, launched in August 2007, two market segments account for 62% of the interactions. Now, there is work involved in extending market segments into what we call "Semantic Personas". In fact, it is probably 80 to 120 hours worth for each Semantic Persona. That work, however, has resulted in a 41% increase in time on site, a 30% decrease in bounce rate (people entering and exiting from the same page) and a 26% increase in conversion! Being more relevant improves website performance.

So, is there an impact on content? ABSOLUTELY! Is it worth the effort? ABSOLUTELY!

For the first time we have an intelligent sales medium that is capable of adjusting its message to each prospect. Up until recently, the initial experiences on most websites have been one-size-fits-all. Some websites, like Amazon.com, monitor visitor behavior and make suggestions on subsequent visits, but have little impact on the first visit. The power of Semantic Marketing is making incredible first impressions!