December, 2022
A communications cloud for events, public relations, and investor relations to drive meaningful insights and outcomes. With their suite of world-class, award-winning communications solutions, they provide businesses with insights to reach and engage their customers, investors, employees, and the media.
As a company dealing in communications solutions, the client wanted to build an AI-based solution through which they can scale their business and grow the revenue by generating more sales opportunities. To achieve this, they wanted to build an ecosystem around the millions of new articles published daily to increase the count of new leads, prospects, and vetted journalists. The solution had to be scalable enough to ingest large amounts of data in near real-time.
Below were a few pain points of finding new leads, prospects, and vetted journalists using the existing process:
- Manual process
- Time consuming
- Processed weekly (stale data)
- Low numbers of new leads & prospects
- Duplicate leads (with already existing leads)
The whole process was to be optimized and automated.
Creating a robust intelligence platform for multiple consumers
Along with the Client team, our team of experts decided that the best solution would be to automate the whole process on the cloud. We suggested the following solution to resolve the pain points mentioned above.
- Create a pipeline to optimize the data analysis process for prospects and lead generation
- Cost optimization
- Save time in process execution
- Faster processing (frequency of lead generation will change from weekly to daily)
- Generate more number of leads and prospects
- Additional filters can be applied, e.g. filtering out existing leads and prospects
This will help them save time and increase the efficiency of the overall process.
- Create a pipeline to increase the vetted journalist count
- Automated the manual process
- Brought about cost optimization
- Increased the number of vetted journalists
- Increased their reach to journalists to publish PRs
- Increased revenue, as the PR is distributed to more vetted journalists
To implement the solution, we leveraged Google Cloud and built three data products.
Three Data Products
Article Metadata: Fetches PR article data from different sources and stores it in a single data warehouse.
Sales Enablement: Helps the sales team to boost their sales target with the help of prospects and lead data, journalist data, and IR data.
Related Article: Provides PR data for historical press releases that can be used for further analysis.
Architecture (Article Metadata)
The article_metadata table acts as a warehouse for the data ingested from News Article API. This ingestion process is based on a pull mechanism. The third-party API continuously fetches data and stores it into GCS for backup. At the same time, we start processing the received data using Cloud Task and Cloud Run, which finally goes into article_metadata in Big Query.
Architecture (Sales Enablement)
Once we have data in article_metadata, the contact info is extracted for prospects and leads as well as journalists by applying business logics and NLP on the data processed on the app engine.
Architecture (Related Article)
In order to optimize data analysis processes by identifying matching phrases, we implemented fuzzy matching to enhance the data quality of the company. We revised the criteria of a vetted journalist (the journalist whose contact information, especially email, is extracted from third-party services and is verified) to increase the vetted journalist count.
As a result of both our efforts, the communications cloud became a robust intelligence platform for multiple consumers (for instance, the sales team, and other internal product teams).
The client experienced remarkable growth in total revenue with Persistent’s App Engine and Big Query solution
After the successful implementation of the solution, the Client team experienced high growth in revenue with most of it coming from press releases. They also generated some additional revenue in one month after the solution (Sales Panther) was implemented.
As the client’s business grows, the solution will enable them with rapid scaling and quick response to their customers’ needs, increasing overall business revenue.
Technology Used
- GCP
- Vertex AI
- BigQuery
