Benchmarks report offers free access to wealth of competitive intelligence

In a time of economic and budgetary turmoil, digital marketers can take advantage of a free resource to understand the competitive landscape and how they can compete better.

“This is the kind of comparative data companies often spend a lot of money having consultants compile as they seek to optimize and improve their own performance,” Similarweb CEO Or Offer said. “We’re sharing it for free to give businesses who operate online a taste of what our platform offers in terms of competitive intelligence. And of course, we stand ready to assist clients with deeper and richer investigations of the online landscape across the web, mobile apps, and ecommerce platforms.”

The 2024 Marketing Benchmark Report, created in partnership with influencer marketing specialist HypeAuditor, presents detailed digital marketing benchmarks for seven industries in the US: Hotels & Accommodation, Beauty & Cosmetics, Consumer Electronics, Home and Garden, Jewelry & Luxury, Pet Food & Supplies, and Fashion & Apparel.

"It’s safe to say that influencer marketing has come a long way since its inception; no longer on the sidelines of the digital marketing landscape, it now stands as one of its pivotal forces,” HypeAuditor CEO Alex Frolov said. “This report underscores the most essential influencer marketing metrics, and in doing so, makes a startling revelation – not only has influencer marketing become integral to shaping brand narratives and connecting with audiences, but it has also reached a point where its impact is nearly equivalent to that of other marketing channels."

For each of the seven categories, Similarweb and Hype Auditor studied 1,000 of the most visited web domains to determine what separates the “giants” (the top 10) from the challengers (ranked 11 to 100), and the “up-and-comers” (101-1,000).

Key metrics covered include:

• Website traffic: overall and by specific marketing channel (including direct, organic, paid, and referral)
• Website engagement metrics: bounce rate, pages per visit, time spent on site
• Instagram followers
• Influencer marketing reach

With Google algorithm changes, AI disruptions, and the growing importance of TikTok and Instagram influencers, keeping track of the competitive environment is more important than ever. Getting ahead requires knowing where your organization leads and where it is lagging.

Unfortunately, benchmarking is a complex task that’s often forgotten, deferred, or squeezed out of budgets. “With this report, we can help digital marketers contextualize their performance, set goals and find opportunities in 2024,” Offer said.

6sense Study Shows Marketing is a Key Differentiator in the Pre-Decision Gap, AI Solutions Can Help Reach Buyers Sooner in the Purchasing Journey to Drive B2B Revenue Production

B2B selling teams are at a disadvantage, according to the 2023 B2B Buyer Experience Report released from 6sense today. The report indicates that marketing efforts play a critical role in the B2B buying journey with 84% of deals decided upon first contact – made by buyers. These insights come at a time when sales and marketing executives agree that revenue generation has become increasingly difficult.

While B2B sales and marketing teams now have access to more insights and data than ever to enable smarter sales strategies, the study also emphasized that buyers initiate contact with sellers directly – when they are already 70% through the buying process – which translates to eight months in an average deal cycle.

The research makes it clear that B2B organizations should exert considerable marketing effort to create awareness and develop a relationship with members of the buying committee early in the buying process to create a competitive advantage. In doing so, buyers are influenced towards their solutions sooner, simplifying the buying process and contributing to a better long-term customer experience.

Solutions utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) will be key in bridging the gap between B2B buyers and revenue teams to enable stronger strategy alignment. With technology solutions powered by AI, companies can more accurately pinpoint best-fit opportunities while they are early in their buying journeys. This allows B2B sellers to fully focus on enabling buyers to choose them outside of the selling process through opportunities like industry events or via online communities.

“AI has been a great enabler for sales and marketing teams. We’re in an age where immense amounts of data is at our fingertips,” said Kerry Cunningham, Head of Research & Thought Leadership at 6sense, former Forrester Analyst. “Armed with that data, go-to-market organizations can cover prospects in the pre-decision phase of their journeys and direct their very best efforts where those efforts are likely to produce the best result.”

Underpinning the need for effective sales and marketing solutions, the survey found:

• Buyers engage with sellers when they are ready — not before — about 70% through their buying journeys
• By the time of this first contact, 78% of buyers have mostly or completely established their business requirements
• Thus, 84% of buyers said the first vendor they contacted ultimately won the business
• This means, if vendors haven’t won buyers over during the first two-thirds of the buying process, based on the results of this study, they have a mere 16% chance of winning a deal
• By influencing buyers early in their journeys through effective marketing strategies, selling organizations can eliminate competitors and shorten buying cycles substantially

The study was conducted between June and July 2023 which evaluated feedback from more than 900 B2B buyers with respondents representing the technology, accounting, legal, and purchasing departments. Each participant had engaged in a B2B purchase of greater than $10,000 in annual value within the last 24 months.

Opening of a Mumbai location enhances support for publishers and buyers in market

Magnite, the largest independent sell-side advertising company, has announced the opening of a new office in Mumbai, which will serve as the company’s base across India. The move indicates the company's commitment to providing support for publishers and buyers in one of the fastest-growing digital advertising markets in the world.

“Programmatic adoption in India is forecasted to increase at a CAGR of 32% until 2027, according to Magna Global,” said Gavin Buxton, Managing Director of Asia at Magnite.” Establishing a Magnite hub in Mumbai allows us to provide more hands-on support and help our clients navigate the changing market landscape. As advertisers continue to seek out the most comprehensive omnichannel ecosystem to reach their audiences, we’ll be able to more seamlessly connect them with the premium publishers we work with.”

This year, Magnite introduced new advanced tools for streaming TV media owners in India, including Magnite Streaming and the SpringServe ad server, to help them better manage high-quality ad experiences across the video landscape. These developments have been met with strong marketplace demand and fuelled 185% year over year growth in CTV ad spend in India.

Magnite continues to build out its team in India and most recently appointed Chandrahas Shetty as Demand Facilitation Lead. Other team members include Karnika Maroo, Senior Account Manager, Supply, Jerit Kunjumon, Account Manager, Supply, and Rohit Prasad Yeggina, Senior Account Manager. Together, they are focused on delivering great results for clients by ensuring they can leverage Magnite’s unique omnichannel capabilities.

Direct Integration between Syft AI and Outreach.io allows sellers to revolutionize their personalized sales messaging efforts at scale.

Syft AI, the SaaS platform for value-selling and sales intelligence, announced its partnership with Outreach.io, a pioneer in Sales Execution Platforms. This collaboration promises to redefine how companies approach value-selling, offering unparalleled personalization at scale with value-matched accounts, which translates to higher open and reply rates for their sales and marketing campaigns.

Syft AI + Outreach.io: Unleashing the Combined Power

By pairing Syft's AI-driven value-selling automation with Outreach.io's comprehensive sales execution platform, companies can now experience a seamless integration that allows them to prioritize accounts with a value match and intelligently group those accounts by similarity. They can also automate sequence creation and add contacts directly from Syft into Outreach.io. This combined power allows for efficiently scaled value-selling strategies, exponentially boosting engagement and conversion rates.

Syft AI is driving the evolution from value-selling to Value Matching

• Overcoming Technological Silos: With Syft, gone are the days of disjointed sales technology. Consolidating essential tools and data streamlines the value-selling process, making every step more efficient and effective.
• Automating Personalized Value-based Messaging: Even in a world with advanced AI tools, truly personalized value messaging remains elusive and sounds robotic. Syft's generative AI understands the intricate nuances of problem events, enabling it to automate value messaging tailored to every prospect's unique situation.

A Future Defined by Efficiency and Scalability

This partnership presents an exciting opportunity for companies worldwide, providing them with the tools and technologies they've always wanted but never had. It's about efficiency. It's about scalability. But most importantly, it's about delivering tangible results through Syft's ability to ensure accurate and timely interactions.

"We're excited to partner with Syft AI, a pioneer in value-selling automation. Syft's AI-driven value-selling automation combined with Outreach's Sales Execution Platform empowers our customers to intelligently prioritize and engage accounts, resulting in a more personalized, effective, and efficient sales process," said Phillip Friedman, Global Head of Partner & Ecosystem at Outreach. "This integration exemplifies our commitment to working closely with strategic ecosystem partners to deliver the most comprehensive, seamless sales workflows for our customers."

Bright Mountain Media, Inc., a global holding company with current investments in digital publishing, advertising technology, consumer insights, and creative media services, today announced that their subsidiary Big Village, a leading innovator in the consumer insights industry, has launched its Audience Intelligence platform, a game-changer in the realm of audience profiling, targeting, and strategy. The launch represents a major advancement in technology dedicated to supporting brands, agencies, publishers, and other stakeholders across the digital marketing landscape to understand, target, and evaluate both consumer and business segments more effectively. 

Built entirely from the voice of the customer, Audience Intelligence offers an unparalleled and comprehensive taxonomy of thousands of segments that capture the unique intentions, sentiments, interests, values, and behaviors coveted by brands and their agencies. Deep media, behavioral, and attitudinal insights on each combined with the option to incorporate custom segments into the platform differentiate it from other audience services available in the market. 

Brands, agencies, and other industry players can leverage Audience Intelligence to enrich their first-party data assets, including survey data and customer data, plan media and communications strategies, and activate campaigns for pre-built or custom segments across a range of media platforms. 

"What makes Audience Intelligence different is the seamless integration it provides between the voice of the consumer and the campaigns that are ultimately delivered to them,” shares Chief Data Officer, Andy Davidson. “We have intentionally built our platform to enable brands and agencies to avoid the hops across various stages of strategy, planning, activation, and measurement that typically dilute campaigns. At the same time, we've purpose-built our solution to help publishers improve monetization with details on their first-party audiences that other solutions can't provide." 

With the launch of Audience Intelligence, Big Village is reshaping the way the digital marketing industry approaches strategy and execution. By offering a platform that connects the dots between consumer insights and campaign execution, Big Village empowers brands, agencies, and publishers to reach their target audience with precision and effectiveness, ultimately maximizing their return on investment. 

Bloomreach, the platform fueling limitless e-commerce experiences, today announced their partnership with Spryker, the leading composable commerce platform for sophisticated use cases in B2B Commerce, Enterprise Marketplaces, and Thing Commerce. With the partnership, Bloomreach users will be able to leverage Spryker’s composable, API based functionalities to constantly improve their digital and marketplace experience. From content management and product discovery to customer engagement, Spryker's deep market knowledge will provide Bloomreach business users with the tools and support they need to achieve true personalization and capture revenue.

“Spryker and Bloomreach are joining forces to redefine the future of commerce. Our shared vision of empowering businesses with innovative, composable, and customer-centric solutions forms the backbone of this partnership,” said Manishi Singh, SVP App Composition Platform & Technology Partnerships, Spryker. “By combining Spryker's composable commerce platform for sophisticated enterprise solutions with Bloomreach's advanced AI-driven personalization and search capabilities, we are poised to enable new levels of efficiency. Enterprise customers can anticipate more seamless and highly personalized shopping experiences that drive both growth and customer loyalty.”

Bloomreach has always prioritized composable commerce and its impact in the e-commerce space. The partnership with Spryker is a testament to that and will deliver value to Bloomreach customers by providing access to Spryker’s diverse community of technical and solution partners, as well as a strong team of experts. Through Spryker’s composable API based functionalities, customers will be able to constantly improve their digital and marketplace experiences while creating flexible tech stacks that will drive revenue and growth across the e-commerce ecosystem.

“Bloomreach is really excited to announce a strategic partnership with Spryker which allows customers to quickly and easily create end-to-end, seamless commerce experiences,” said Anand Subbiah, VP Technical Alliances & Ecosystem Platform, Bloomreach. “Spryker is a Modular Composable Commerce Platform that enables B2B and B2C across any customer interface, touchpoint, and device. Boasting extensibility, best-in-class performance, and fast time-to-market we know Spryker is the partner to perform with.”

Advertisers Using Creator Content to Accelerate the Purchase Funnel;  Nearly Half Expect Ad Budgets For Creator Content to Increase in 2024

Today IAB released its first-ever research report on the creator economy advertising opportunity. The report titled, The Creator Economy Opportunity: Where Authenticity Meets Impact, and conducted in partnership with Talk Shoppe, offers a deep examination of the evolving consumer purchase journey, how buyers can leverage the creator economy in their media budgets, and where creator content fits in the media mix alongside studio-produced content.

"Creator content marketing is a powerful vehicle for driving full-funnel impact, and advertisers are finding tremendous success adding it to their marketing mix alongside studio content advertising," said Jack Koch, SVP, Research & Insights, IAB. "This report helps marketers more deeply understand the opportunity and how best to activate campaigns leveraging creator content. As more advertisers see real success with creator marketing, those who haven't invested yet risk falling behind."

Creator Content Inspires Action

• After tracking over 1,000 consumer purchase journeys, the report found that advertising alongside creator content can accelerate the purchase funnel - collapsing the awareness, interest, and consideration stages.
• 39% of consumers are watching more creator content than a year ago vs. just 22% watching more studio content.
• Creator content sparks action: compared to studio-produced content, after watching, consumers were significantly more likely to search for additional content about the topic and interact with the content by liking, commenting, or subscribing.

Advertisers: Quality Is in the Eye of the Beholder

• 89% of advertisers feel positive about creator content advertising, and 92% consider it a high quality channel.
• 86% of advertisers say it's easy to move ad budgets to creator content, and this trend is on the rise. 44% of advertisers plan to increase their investment in creator content in 2024, with an average increase of 25%.
• Nearly 90% of advertisers use the same KPI metrics across both creator content and studio content, and 86% of advertisers have confidence in the ability to measure the effectiveness of creator content campaigns.

"The creator economy, valued at $250B this year by Goldman Sachs, is expected to nearly double to $480B by 2027. Savvy marketers know that they need to reach their customers in content that resonates with them," said David Cohen, CEO, IAB. "There is no doubt - creator content is now a vital part of the mix."

Leader in Image and Video Innovation Also Unveils Results of Global Web Developer Survey, Revealing Strong Demand for GenAI Tools

Cloudinary, the image and video technology platform that powers many of the world’s top brands, today announced generative AI enhancements to its Programmable Media API and enterprise digital asset management (DAM) solution, Cloudinary Assets. Cloudinary’s generative AI capabilities offer the easiest and most powerful way to edit images at scale, enabling technical and non-technical users to accelerate time to market for their most valuable assets while improving employee autonomy and productivity. The company also revealed the results of its first independent web developer survey on the demand for and practical application of evolving AI capabilities.

Study: Developers trust AI to improve productivity

Advanced image editing and optimizing assets for accessibility and SEO often leads to resource bottlenecks, costly reshoots, and time-intensive manual editing processes. Generative AI can alleviate these barriers. In a recent independent survey*, 58% of web developers said they viewed AI tools as “very” or “extremely” trustworthy, citing improved efficiency and productivity (68%) as a top benefit. The survey also found that 64% use generative AI tools to streamline the development process, 54% for workflow automation, and 99% believe these tools have the potential to improve the developer experience overall.

Generative AI Upscale for Faces boosts impact of user images

Cloudinary’s new Generative AI Upscale for Faces capability offers a clear example of generative AI’s impact. Images with faces have been found to attract attention and build trust at higher rates, and are the most important element of any image in which they appear. Similarly, user generated content (UGC) is particularly valuable for increasing conversions, but ensuring necessary quality of human subjects when using those assets can be a challenging and time-intensive proposition.

Generative AI Upscale for Faces solves this by leveraging advanced facial recognition technology to detect faces and automatically optimize the image to ensure the faces remain visible and in focus, even when the original photo needs to be cropped and/or enlarged. This vital feature reduces the risks associated with UGC or other assets when the brand has no control over the original quality, improving usability, and accelerating time to market.

Generative Restore now available for non-technical users

Cloudinary is also making more generative AI features available to marketers and creatives with the next update to the Studio feature of its enterprise digital asset management (DAM) platform, Cloudinary Assets. Studio users, who already enjoy no-code access to Generative Fill, Replace, and Recolor capabilities will be able to use Generative Restore to automatically improve and optimize many low-quality images at once. Studio users also gain the ability to build repeatable, automated workflows to apply these transformations and deploy the upgraded assets across channels with confidence.

Cloudinary’s proven generative AI features become even more effective

Cloudinary continues to enhance its existing set of generative AI tools, including Generative Fill, Replace, Restore, Remove, and Recolor. Since launching earlier in 2023, these tools have already proven instrumental in simplifying complex image editing tasks for hundreds of customers, delivering substantial time savings while ensuring high-quality outputs. The latest feature enhancements include:

• Improved overall performance for generative features;
• New input parameters for fine-tuning requests; and
• Feature-specific enhancements, such as better shadow removal for Generative Replace and Remove.

“We have curated the best of generative AI to bring practical and powerful solutions to our customers to automate and streamline image editing at scale,” said Nadav Soferman, co-founder and chief product officer at Cloudinary. “We have been incorporating AI into our solutions since our inception and we are now enhancing our solutions further with generative AI and LLM to further help customers unleash the potential of their images and reduce repetitive and manual creative tasks.”

Explore Cloudinary’s full range of generative AI capabilities in the hands-on demo environment of the Generative AI Playground, or visit Cloudinary’s website to learn more about Cloudinary AI and the opportunity presented by generative AI specifically.