In our recent webinar, Marketers as Publishers, there were a number of questions we didn’t have time to answer in the Q&A session. The specifics of the questions differed, but three prevailing themes emerged. Attendees wanted more information on how to create targeted content for different audiences, how to deliver that content by using website personalization, and how to distribute it across multiple platforms easily. In response, here are a few concrete tips to consider. For more information, check out our white paper, How to Master the Art of Content Marketing, and learn online about the Limelight Dynamic Site Platform.

How to Create Targeted Content

Content targeting is both an art and a science, but the better you know your audience, the better chance you have of providing contextually relevant material. On the art side, spend time in external dialog with the types of people you want to reach. See what they’re reading and saying online, and engage in active conversation to understand what they want that you can offer. On the science side of the equation, divide your audience into different target groups based on the information you can collect about them. Use IP addresses to help pinpoint geographic location, SEO to learn what keywords resonate best, anonymous tracking to categorize common behavioral patterns, and site registrations to understand personal preferences. Then develop content based on that data.

How to Deliver Targeted Content Using Site Personalization

The Limelight Networks Dynamic Site Platform includes website marketing acceleration tools. Once you’ve created targeted content, our technology helps you deliver it to the right people, as they browse your website, using several different techniques. These include anonymous visitor identification, progressive profiling based on information captured over multiple visits, lead scoring with the use of behavioral data, automated pushing of content based on any data collected, ongoing reporting of content marketing results, and integration with major marketing automation software products including Salesforce, Eloqua and Marketo.

How to Distribute Content across Multiple Platforms Easily

Content distribution has gotten a lot trickier with the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, but luckily there are tools to simplify the process. The easiest way to manage delivery to multiple platforms is work from a single content repository and then feed that content to different templates based on the platforms you need to reach. Once again, the Limelight Dynamic Site Platform can enable this workflow for you. Our template-based web content management system is easy to use and comes with multi-lingual and multi-site management, advanced publisher tools, social media integration and more.

Content marketing has been on the rise for several years, yet many companies still struggle with implementing their own programs, and – even more commonly – with sustaining those programs in the face of ongoing content development and distribution challenges. Join us for a webinar today with AdAge to discuss the underlying platforms that make content marketing successful. Topics to be covered include:

• Keys to successful content marketing, including content development, reuse, and targeting models.
• How to develop an efficient and effective website engagement model.
• Technologies ensuring a high quality experience on the web with every content type – including video – even under high-traffic conditions.

The webinar runs today at 2:00 PM Eastern. Register here for “Marketers as Publishers – Content Marketing Strategies from Development through Distribution.”

Limelight today announced the new Limelight Dynamic Site Platform for Mobile, an extension of our web content management platform focused on mobile site publishing. Coming on the heels of our August software update, the mobile offering marks a significant step forward for the Dynamic Site Platform.  It lets users create mobile-specific sites, and provides tools for re-purposing content for multichannel delivery.

Features include:

• Device detection — Analyzes incoming browser requests and automatically displays desktop, mobile or tablet formatted content
• Shared content repository — Content is created once, and repurposed across multiple devices, regardless of format, design, look and feel
• Flexible templates — Template logic can be rendered in any text format, with full control over the presentation layer (HTML, CSS, Javascript)
• XML-based publishing — XML is the native content format of Dynamic Site Platform, allowing for fast and simple syndication of mobile content
• Device-specific image re-size — Device detection and template-based re-sizing ensure optimal image weights, regardless of device
• Single domain — Publish web and mobile sites at one URL that adapts to any device

Limelight announced a new partnership with Demandbase yesterday to help B2B marketers deliver targeted, personalized website experiences. The deal brings Demandbase’s Real-Time ID technology to the Limelight Dynamic Site Platform, and lets companies take advantage of real-time data to target customers and prospects.

According to a recent national study conducted by Demandbase, corporate websites are second only to personal connections and referrals in generating new sales leads. Given that reality, it’s critical for organizations to make the most of their websites in the sales process, and that means using available data to tailor the site experience for different audiences. A static website can present a company’s basic information, but a dynamic one delivers content in a context that makes it valuable.

Yesterday’s announcement coincided with the start of the Eloqua Experience event in San Francisco, where Limelight and Demandbase showed off data-driven targeting with a product demo. Here’s a look at how a website might appear to four different visitors. In the fictitious example above, the four personalities are as follows: Minnie has provided some generic information about herself, Anon’s presumed location is known because of his IP address, Bill is self-identified as a CEO and fits one of the company’s target audiences, and Pierre is an existing buyer, and a repeat site visitor.

Two of our executives hosted a webinar last week with Information Week on Solving Web and App Management Issues through Infrastructure Outsourcing. The premise of the presentation (now archived for on-demand viewing) is that the benefits of cloud-based infrastructure extend beyond reducing hardware costs. There are also scale, software and security advantages to consider.

The beginning of the presentation centers on how website and application management have evolved significantly in recent years. For example, the number of servers required to run a single website or application has grown substantially. This is partly because web content has grown more dynamic, but also partly because developers often operate under the assumption that computing and storage resources are virtually free. Resource optimization isn’t a priority when there’s no quantifiable cost. That has a big impact on the scale of infrastructure required to support online assets.

On the software side of the equation, there are new complications in web and app management because of online performance expectations, and also the need to manage distribution across multiple platforms. These are critical concerns for IT, but they’re also not core competencies for most organizations. By outsourcing infrastructure components, companies can also address these issues through services like website and application acceleration, and mobile delivery optimization.

The discussion becomes more complicated when you add in security concerns, but here again, there can be advantages to infrastructure outsourcing. For example, supporting premium content and commercial transactions introduces issues of controlling rights-based access and managing requirements like PCI compliance. For some organizations, these issues are best managed in house. For others, it makes sense to offload non-core functions and focus on other business priorities.

The Information Week webinar goes into far more detail on these topics and related issues. Take a listen and view the slide deck at your leisure for further insights from David Reisfeld, GM of Limelight Content Delivery Solutions, and Jason Thibeault, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing.

Starting on October 1st, Facebook will require all Facebook pages be secured through HTTPS. This means little for most Facebook users, who host their pages directly with the social networking site. However, if you have a Facebook page hosted on an external server, you are responsible for obtaining an SSL certificate by the end of this month.

There are several implications stemming from the Facebook deadline. First, and most importantly, it raises the issue of how connected many websites are today. It used to be that websites existed as individual, contained entities, but more and more they now rely on heavy links to third-party content, whether through integration with social networks, ad networks, microsites, shopping carts, games, or other applications. In this case, the fact that many websites integrate directly with Facebook means site managers have to be aware of how the new HTTPS requirement may affect their site performance. If managers don’t address this issue, it could result in site errors come October 1st.

Second, from specifically a security perspective, the Facebook move highlights how certain elements of website publishing are changing. It’s common practice for websites with members-only content, and websites supporting paid transactions to use SSL delivery. However, Facebook may be part of a trend toward greater security across a wider range of domains. And that has an impact on web acceleration and site optimization services. Not all vendors support SSL delivery, and that may become an increasingly important requirement going forward.

Don’t use web acceleration services? Keep in mind that encrypted pages also take longer to load, making site acceleration services even more important with HTTPS content.

Integration work continues across the different business groups within Limelight, particularly where some of our latest acquisitions are concerned. Two weeks ago we introduced a new family of products for web acceleration incorporating technology from the Acceloweb acquisition, and last week we announced new features from a series of release updates for the Limelight Dynamic Site Platform, which is the new home for Clickability, acquired back in May.

The new features in the Dynamic Site Platform are numerous, but a few are worth touching on in detail. Among them is the new Website View we’ve added for in-context site editing. For those familiar with basic website editing programs, there is usually a view for editing in HTML, and a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) mode. The latter lets you type in text and add multimedia without any coding knowledge, but it still usually requires a preview function to get a true look at page layout. With our new Website View, that requirement goes away, letting you see changes immediately, exactly as they will appear in a user’s browser.

We’ve also added a new ability for website editors to schedule a group of content assets to go live at the same time. Think about the use cases. You’ve got news to announce and want to coordinate publishing a press release, white paper, images, and more. Or, you have an update to file to meet regulatory requirements and need multiple assets to go live at once.

Finally, it’s worth highlighting the multilingual capabilities we’ve added to our Express solution. Even at our lowest tier of service, users can target global audiences with a publishing workflow that supports multiple languages.

There’s a lot more in the Dynamic Site Platform. You can find info on the newest features in last week’s press release, or for the full experience, check out our online resources, or request product demo.

Today we announced a new family of website, application and mobile acceleration services that combines network-layer optimization and browser-level acceleration for a more enjoyable and more productive web experience. The Limelight Accelerate suite of services includes solutions for consumer content sites, e-commerce destinations, and enterprise portals,and has been shown in comprehensive testing to boost performance on most websites between 200 and 500 percent.

While the CDN market as a whole has been improving on network-based delivery for years, browser-level acceleration has taken a back seat. It’s in the browser, however, that a delivery service can affect some of the most important changes. At this presentation layer, our new Accelerate service optimizes how web pages load, decreasing the number of required network requests and speeding up the time it takes for the most important information to appear on screen. We call it improving Time to Action. The faster users get the information they want, the faster they can act on it, and the better results publishers can count on with respect to site stickiness and online conversion rates.

There are a few critical points to emphasize with Limelight Accelerate.

• First, it is the only service that addresses content delivery comprehensively at both the browser level and the network level. It combines both our proven, traditional CDN service with new capabilities for on-the-fly page optimization.
• Second, Limelight Accelerate services are fully supported, with a team of experts dedicated to driving the highest performance levels, and a robust and growing set of features including HTTPs support.
• Third and finally, the new Limelight Accelerate services are immensely flexible. It doesn’t matter whether your content is dynamic or static, what kind of servers you’re using, or if you’re publishing large objects or small. We can handle it all.

Take a look at a demo we’re running comparing how web pages load with Limelight Accelerate technology and without. We’ve also published information from one customer in today’s press release referencing performance results in a real-world situation. After just one month of using Accelerate, Allbarstools.com saw a 17 percent jump in page views per visitor. Page load statistics are nice to have, but engagement statistics like this one are even better.

Click the image above for an interactive version of the graph

The FCC put out the results of a monumental study today detailing how US Internet service providers perform based on the speeds they advertise. While there is a large amount of information to parse, one data set deserves highlighting because it is likely to get overlooked in much of the media coverage. Among other figures, the FCC calculated page load times as related to advertised ISP speeds. The finding? While there’s a big jump in download times between advertised speeds of under 1 Mbps and speeds of 2 Mbps or more, the difference between speed tiers tapers off significantly once you hit rates of roughly 6 Mbps, and even more so at rates of 10 Mbps and higher.

So what does this mean? It means for web browsing, Internet speed isn’t everything. Once you hit a minimum speed tier, other factors create a much bigger impact on performance – factors like latency and page optimization. As consumer broadband speeds continue to increase, publishers will have to focus more heavily on these factors in order to create the most effective websites. Overall speeds will always be important, but the better measurement of success for consumers going forward will be how long it takes to view and interact with a site. That, far more than broadband speed tier, will determine the quality of the browsing experience.

Limelight Networks announced today that the Middle East Broadcasting Company is using our integrated solutions for online video publishing, site acceleration and online media delivery. MBC is the largest broadcasting group in the Middle East, and its two websites, Shahid.net and AlArabiya.net, provide on-demand content and live streaming video from the network’s satellite TV station to online viewers around the world.

While it’s always good to announce a new customer, we’re also showcasing MBC because of the returns the media conglomerate is seeing from the integrated use of our video services. Specifically, by deploying the Limelight Video Platform combined with our media delivery technology, MBC is benefiting from faster video ingest and large file transfers. More importantly, MBC is able to deliver a better viewing experience to its online customers through our ability to make near-real-time adjustments during the video delivery process. Even as network conditions change from moment to moment, we are helping MBC navigate the web so users get the best possible video playback from the company’s live and on-demand streams.

From the press release, here is MBC’s list of requirements that Limelight Networks had to meet for video publishing and content delivery:

• Guaranteed high quality video
• Video Storage and content delivery facilities for various websites
• Scalability for future requirements, including specific demands such as SmartPhones, STB or Connected TV sets support
• Pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll advertising
• Syndication to YouTube
• Video Analytics
• Ease of video publishing workflow
• Extensive APIs for content management