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Launched in January 2020, Nowse is the brainchild of Dennis Publishing, the UK publisher established by Felix Dennis in 1974. With the help of AI, Nowse aims to take traditional lead generation a step further by focussing on all elements of the customer journey allied to a humanistic approach. Based in London, WNIP caught up with Nowse’s Managing Director, John Webb to find out more…
What business problem is Nowse addressing?
Lead generation is dead. There is too much focus on quantity of leads over quality. This has caused a race to the bottom and nurturing potential customers has become an afterthought at best.
Brands and publishers have been concentrating on driving high numbers of leads. This emphasis tends to ignore the customer experience. It drives customers into brand-specific relationship systems, which creates a disconnect and an often clunky process for the customer. The current approach also doesn’t give brands the opportunity to nurture and influence potential customers where they are already engaging and consuming information.
What is your core service addressing this problem?
Nowse brings together the editorial credibility of Dennis Publishing’s brands with rich customer data and leading technology, including AI. This combination offers a new approach to demand generation for both B2C and B2B.
Nowse focusses on the overall customer journey. Brands can speak to potential customers where they are already; consuming content and looking for information. This leads to more engaged, informed and predisposed customer prospects.
The Nowse offering also gives brands:
- A data platform built around a unified customer view
- An integrated suite of demand-marketing solutions
- Creative services delivering cut-through thinking, ideas and content
- Demand Marketing expertise via a team of experienced practitioners
Nowse covers all existing Dennis properties, including The Week, IT PRO, Auto Express and Money Week. It will initially have a focus on the automotive, IT and financial services sectors. This breadth of coverage gives an in-depth understanding of audiences: what they’re interested in; how they’re looking for information on the products and services that they’re intending to buy; and what, how and when they’ll actually purchase. Nowse uses these insights to stimulate and grow demand beyond merely capturing it.
Connecting with customers in the right context makes it easier for brands to identify and then convert potential buyers. We think it’s the future of demand generation.
Can you give some examples of brands or other publishers successfully using your solution?
Nowse has been built initially to leverage the Dennis Publishing platforms and portfolio. Future plans will look to broaden this to other publishing partners, creating a plug-in demand engine.
Pricing?
Pricing for Nowse services will be dependent on the sector.
What are other people doing in the space and why?
Traditional publishing has focussed on lead generation, which captures very late in the customer buying journey. Nowse focusses on stimulating and growing demand, generating more predisposed, informed and engaged prospects for clients.
Conventionally, publishing has used technology to drive scale and efficiency in lead generation, but this has come at the expense of effectiveness and quality. This sort of mass targeting also jams the brand’s sales funnel with poor quality leads that have to be sifted through and qualified. Often the vast majority are either rejected or never even worked, which results in significant wastage.
This outdated approach also affects the customer journey and results in a dispiriting experience for potential buyers, which begins to erode trust in the brand itself.
How do you view the future?
In the past the focus has been one-dimensional, offering an asset like a white paper and asking customers to sign-up in return for their permission to be contacted. We need to rethink capture and conversion. It needs to happen in a natural way, where the customer already is and with a more humanistic approach. We need to move away from funneling prospects off into the brands’ system at the first opportunity.
Rather than creating technology to deliver volume, we will focus on engagement in context and the types of pattern-spotting AI can offer. The industry needs to move to a system of identifying and tracking intent which can marry intent with context. We need to understand the markers and respond at the right moment. Traditional approaches to lead generation won’t do this.
Thank you.
