EverString now lets marketers create their own “lookalike” segments

A visualization in EverString of a lookalike predictive segment

EverString is becoming more self-service.

The San Mateo, California-based predictive marketing provider has announced the next generation of its Decision Platform, now called the Audience Platform. Its main new feature: the ability for users to upload, say, a list of 20 company accounts that have been good customers, in order to create a “lookalike” segment.

In other words, the platform automatically generates a new segment of accounts — with similar characteristics to the uploaded list — that it predicts will also become good customers.

Previously, Vice President of Marketing Jim Walker pointed out, the task of creating predictive segments with new accounts involved creating a model of the ideal customer, which required EverString’s assistance and took at least half a day.

Marketers can still do that, he told me, but can now also create a lookalike segment on the fly. The new capability is “much like Netflix,” Walker said, where you can ask for movies similar to the ones you’ve seen and liked, but without saying what you liked about them. Once a new segment of lookalike companies is created, EverString said it works with contact vendors to help the marketer find decision-makers at those companies.

The machine learning that previously drove the platform’s predictive analysis, he said, is now complemented with “an additional layer of machine learning” that determines the common factors in the seed group.

Here’s a screen from the updated platform:

EverString describes this new capability as “a comprehensive business graph … to map the connections and similarities between companies” and compared it to Google’s Knowledge Graph for connecting search information or Facebook’s people graph for connecting members’ interests or for finding lookalike possible customers from your known customer list.

“No one else is offering this level of self-service” among providers of predictive marketing, Walker claimed.

Automatic generation of actionable data is taking hold among predictive analytics firms. In March, for instance, startup YesPath announced an artificial intelligence-powered, B2B account-based platform that is designed to automatically create segments and find people within those segmented accounts, based on their website content and, eventually, other data.

Also in March, B2B lead gen platform Mariana announced the ability to automatically generate persona of decision-makers at specific companies.

The updated EverString platform is also expanding the kinds of insights that are available for analysis or segmentation, including such factors as growth, marketing sophistication and division strength. Additionally, marketers can now automatically generate segments that have differing nurture paths — in different industries, for instance — or they can create micro-segments designed for specific products or territories.

Last fall, EverString added the ability for marketers to use its predictive marketing for ad targeting.