The Content Personalisation Snap

Last week, Uberflip announced the acquisition of SnapApp. One of the Industry's hottest content marketing platforms brought in a well-known tool to create interactive content experiences. The deal may be a small one but is an interesting indicator of the direction that content marketing is heading. Buyers are suffering from content overload and are looking for better quality information and engaging marketing experiences rather than just any old white paper. In the world of content marketing, less has finally become more.

SnapApp is a cool product, but as with many other point solutions, it has suffered from the 'Any good developer could do this themselves' syndrome. The app is used to create interactive reports and infographics, adding animations and quizzes to otherwise static PDFs and web pages. The benefit is that it saves on the otherwise very expensive cost of employing a Web developer to write the very complex code to do the same thing manually. In recent years though the focus of the app has shifted towards embedded surveys and quizzes, enabling a low friction method of data collection that integrates directly into marketing automation and CRM. The goal of the app is to collect the interest and need data required to drive web personalisation through interactive content experiences that even the most jaded of buyers might be willing to engage with.

At first glance, it is not immediately obvious how the app fits into Uberflip. SnapApp is about content creation, whereas Uberflip is about content publishing. After starting out as a tool to embed PDFs in Web pages, they have become a platform for creating content hubs quickly and easily. Uberflip is a lot more customisable than its competitors but suffers from limitations in relation to the kind of content that can be included on a Uberflip Hub. Much like their competitors, ease of use, built-in personalisation and full-stack integration are the primary advantages of a content hub platform compared to a traditional website resource centre. Lack of flexibility is the disadvantage, although this applies in different ways to Uberflip compared to its competitors.

For their new owners, SnapApp is a personalisation play. Uberflip has an AI based recommendation engine backed by Intent data from Bombora to provide an Account level overview. This is not as prominent or configurable as competing platforms. This deal goes some way to addressing this. Survey responses from SnapApp add an additional contact-centric layer to this personalisation engine to complement the existing Uberflip forms capabilities. Traditional forms have low completion rates and a high barrier to conversion simply due to length and the requirement to provide personal details. A survey question embedded as a tile in a content hub or website is much less likely to encounter such resistance, particularly if users aren't asked to hand over contact details for the privilege. Such polls always have a high response rate.

Ad-hoc surveys have a further marketing benefit, in that they can be treated in the same way as any web poll. They're not scientific and can't be considered as market research, but do have some benefit to both marketing and sales. Factoids are always a great attention grabber as a headline for marketing collateral, as well as a teaser in Sales conversations. Past experiences and campaign results show how valuable such numbers can be.

The most significant benefit for marketers of SnapApp style surveys is not just in this old fashioned content. It's in personalising other content, including which content is presented to contacts when browsing a campaign page or content hub. This fits the trend towards recommended content and bespoke experiences, but the danger is that this goes too far. Recommendation engines are typically developed based off popular content and user journey modelling. This is fine if the recommendation engine has an initial interest upon which to recommend further content. If there isn't, then all new prospects see is a list of the most popular content which may not be in way relevant to the visitor. There have been stories of inaccurate web personalisation technologies killing potential deals in the past. Asking user's their preferences directly avoids this problem. Topic and interest based content navigation still have their place, and this deal helps with that.