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Three growth marketing experts share their best tools and strategies for 2020
At last month’s Early Stage virtual event, channel growth experts joined TechCrunch reporters and editors for a series of conversations covering the best tools and strategies for building startups in 2020. For this post, I’ve recapped highlights of talks with:
- Ethan Smith, founder and CEO, Graphite
- Susan Su, startup growth advisor, executive-in-residence, Sound Ventures
- Asher King-Abramson, founder, Got Users
If you’d like to hear or watch these conversations in their entirety, we’ve embedded the videos below.
Ethan Smith: How to build a high-performance SEO engine
Relying on internet searches to learn about growth topics like search engine optimization leads to a rabbit hole of LinkedIn thinkfluencer musings and decade-old Quora posts. Insights are few and far between, because SEO has changed dramatically as Google has squashed spammy techniques “specialists” have pushed for years.
Ethan Smith, owner of growth agency Graphite, says Google didn’t kill SEO, but the channel has evolved. “SEO has built a negative reputation over time of being spammy,” Smith says. “The typical flow of an SEO historically has been: I need to find every single keyword I possibly can find and auto-generate a mediocre page for each of those keywords, the user experience doesn’t really matter, content can be automated and spun, the key is fooling the bot.”
Artificial intelligence has disrupted this flow as algorithms have abandoned hard-coded rules for more flexible designs that are less vulnerable to being gamed. What SEO looks like today, Smith says, is all about trying to “figure out what the algorithm is trying to accomplish and try to accomplish the same thing.” Google’s algorithms aren’t looking for buckets of keywords, they’re looking to distill a user’s intent.
The key to building a strategy around SEO as a company breaks down into six steps surrounding intent, says Smith:
- Target by intent
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Clean.io raises $5M to continue its battle against malicious adtech
Clean.io, a startup that helps digital publishers protect themselves from malicious ads, recently announced that it has raised $5 million in Series A funding.
The Baltimore-based company isn’t the only organization promising to fight malvertising (such as ads that force visitors to redirect to another website). But as co-founder Seth Demsey told me last year, Clean.io provides “granular control over who gets to load JavaScript.”
CEO Matt Gillis told me via email this week that the challenge will “always” be evolving.”
“Just like an antivirus company needs to constantly be updating their definitions and improving their protections, we always need to be alert to the fact that bad actors will constantly try to evade detection and get over and around the walls that you put in front of them,” Gillis wrote.
The company says its technology is now used on more than 7 million websites for customers including WarnerMedia’s Xandr (formerly AppNexus), The Boston Globe and Imgur.
Image Credits: Clean.io
Clean.io has now raised a total of $7.5 million. The Series A was led by Tribeca Venture Partners, with participation from Real Ventures, Inner Loop Capital and Grit Capital Partners.
Gillis said he’d initially planned to fundraise at the end of February, but he had to put those plans on hold due to COVID-19. He ended up doing all his pitching via Zoom (“I saw more than my fair share of small NY apartments”) and he praised Tribeca’s Chip Meakem (whose previous investments include AppNexus) as “a world-class partner.”
Of course, the pandemic’s impact on digital advertising goes far beyond pausing Gillis’ fundraising process. And when it comes to malicious ads, he said that with the cost of digital advertising declining precipitously in late March, “bad actors capitalized on this opportunity.”
“We saw a pretty constant surge in threat levels from mid-March until early May,” Gillis continued. “Demand for our solutions have remained strong due to the increased level of attacks brought on by the pandemic. Now more than ever, publishers need to protect their user experience and their revenue.”
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Yotpo raises $75M for its e-commerce marketing cloud
“Marketing cloud” has become an increasingly popular concept in the world of marketing technology — used by the likes of Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle and others to describe their digital tool sets for organizations to identify and connect with customers. Now, a startup that is building its own take on the idea aimed specifically at e-commerce companies is announcing some funding after seeing a surge of business in the last few months.
Yotpo, which provides a suite of tool to help direct-to-consumer and other e-commerce players build better relationships with customers, is today announcing that it has raised $75 million in funding, money it will use to continue growing its suite of products, as well as to acquire more customers and build out more integration partnerships.
The Series E included a number of Yotpo’s existing investors, namely Bessemer Venture Partners, Access industries (the owner of Warner Music Group, among a number of other holdings) and Vertex Ventures (a subsidiary of Temasek), new investor Hanaco (which focuses on Israeli startups — Yotpo is co-headquartered in Tel Aviv and New York) and other unnamed investors.
It brings the total raised by the startup to $176 million, and while it’s not disclosing valuation, its CEO Tomer Tagrin — who co-founded the company with COO Omri Cohen — describes it as “nearly a unicorn.”
“I like to call what we’re building a flamingo, which is also a rare and beautiful animal but also a real thing, and we are a proper business,” he said in an interview, adding that Yotpo is on target for ARR next year to be $100 million.
The company had its start as an app in Shopify’s App Store, providing tools to Shopify customers to help with customer engagement by way of user-generated content, and while it has outgrown that single relationship — it now has some 500 additional strategic partners, including Salesforce, Adobe, BigCommerce and others — Yotpo’s CEO still likes to describe his company in Shopify-ish terms.
“Just as Shopify manages your business, we manage your customers end to end,” Tagrin said. He said that while it’s great to see the bigger trend of consolidation around marketing clouds, it’s not a one-size-fits-all problem. He believes Yotpo’s e-commerce-specific approach to that stands apart from the pack because it addresses issues unique to D2C and other e-commerce companies.
Yotpo’s services today include SMS and visual marketing, loyalty and referral services and reviews and ratings, which are used by a range of e-commerce companies, spanning from newer direct-to-consumer brands like Third Love and Away, to more established names like Patagonia and 1-800-Flowers. Some of these have been built in-house, and some by way of acquisition — most recently, SMSBump, in January. The plan is to use some of the funding to continue that acquisition strategy.
“Since our first investment more than three years ago, Tomer and Omri have executed flawlessly, expanding the product suite, serving a wider range of customers, and continually hiring strong talent across the organization,” says Adam Fisher, a partner at BVP, in a statement. “Yotpo is singularly focused on helping direct-to-consumer eCommerce brands solve the dual challenge of engaging consumers and increasing revenue, and with their multi-product strategy and innovative edge, they are uniquely positioned to dominate the eCommerce industry for years to come.”
Yotpo is built as a freemium platform, with some 9,000 customers paying for services, and a further 280,000 customers on its free-usage tier. Customer count grew by 250% in the last year, Tagrin said.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a well-documented impact on internet use, and specifically e-commerce, as people turned to digital channels in record numbers to procure things while complying with shelter-in-place orders, or trying to increase social distancing to slow down the spread of the coronavirus.
E-commerce has been on the rise for years, but the acceleration of that trend has been drastic since February, with revenue and spend both regularly exceeding baseline figures over the last several months, according to research from digital marketing agency Common Thread Collective.
That, in turn, had a big impact on companies that help enable those e-commerce enterprises operate in more direct and personable ways. Yotpo was a direct beneficiary: It said it had a surge of sign-ups of new customers, many taking paid services, working out to a 170% year-on-year ARR and lower customer churn.
The bigger picture, of course, is not completely rosy, with thousands of layoffs across the whole tech service, and a huge number of brick-and-mortar business closures. Those economic indicators could ultimately also have a knock-on effect not just in more business moving online, but also a slowdown in spending overall.
That will inevitably have an impact on startups like Yotpo, too, which is definitely on a rise now but will continue to think longer term about the impact and how it can continue to diversify its products to meet a wider set of customer use cases.
For example, today, the company addresses customer care needs by way of integrations with companies like Zendesk, but longer term it might consider how it can bring in services like this to continue to build out the touchpoints between D2C brands and their customers, and specifically running those through a bigger picture of the customer as profiled on Yotpo’s platform.
This is a big part of our product in our meetings and debates,” Tagrin said about product expansions.
“I do think any celebration of growth and funding comes to me with something else: we need to be internalising more what is going on,” he said. “The world is not back to normal and we shouldn’t act like it is.”
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Pandora launches interactive voice ads into beta testing
Pandora is launching interactive voice ads into wider public testing, the company announced this morning. The music streaming service first introduced the new advertising format, where users verbally respond to advertiser prompts, back in December with help from a small set of early adopters, including Doritos, Ashley HomeStores, Unilever, Wendy’s, Turner Broadcasting, Comcast and Nestlé.
The ads begin by explaining to listeners what they are and how they work. They then play a short and simple message followed by a question that listeners can respond to. For example, a Wendy’s ad asked listeners if they were hungry, and if they say “yes,” the ad continued with a recommendation of what to eat. An Ashley HomeStores ads engaged listeners by offering tips on a better night’s sleep.
The format is meant in particular to aid advertisers in connecting with users who are not looking at their phone. For example, when people are listening to Pandora while driving, cooking, cleaning the house or doing some other hands-free activity.
Since their debut, Pandora’s own data indicated the ads have been fairly well-received, in terms of the voice format; 47% of users said they either liked or loved the concept of responding with their voice, and 30% felt neutral. The stats paint a picture of an overall more positive reception, given that users don’t typically like ads at all. In addition, 72% of users also said they found the ad format easy to engage with.
However, Pandora cautioned advertisers that more testing is needed to understand which ads get users to respond and which do not. Based on early alpha testing, ads with higher engagement seemed be those that were entertaining, humorous or used a recognizable brand voice, it says.
As the new ad format enters into beta testing, the company is expanding access to more advertisers. Advertisers including Acura, Anheuser-Busch, AT&T, Doritos, KFC, Lane Bryant, Purex Laundry Detergent, Purple, Unilever, T-Mobile, The Home Depot, Volvo and Xfinity, among others, are signed up to test the interactive ads.
This broader test aims to determine what the benchmarks should be for voice ads, whether the ads need tweaking to optimize for better engagement, and whether ads are better for driving conversions at the upper funnel or if consumers are ready to take action based on the ads’ content.
Related to the rollout of interactive voice ads, Pandora is also upgrading its “Voice Mode” feature, launched last year and made available to all users last July. The feature will now offer listeners on-demand access to specific tracks and albums in exchange for watching a brand video via Pandora’s existing Video Plus ad format, the same as for text-based searches.
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YC-backed Glimpse helps Airbnb hosts make money through product placement
Glimpse is giving Airbnb hosts a way to make extra money while also supplying their accommodations with new products.
The startup was founded by CEO Akash Raju, COO Anuj Mehta and CPO Kushal Negi, who all attended Purdue University together. It’s part of the current batch of startups at accelerator Y Combinator — where, coincidentally or not, Airbnb is the most famous alum.
Raju said that he and his co-founders came up with the idea while they were still in school and working with brands to create pop-up shops on campus. They realized that many new, direct-to-consumer brands are looking to increase awareness, and they decided that Airbnbs were the perfect place to convince someone to try (for example) a new mattress or a new kind of coffee. After all, hotels are already in the product placement business.
If you’re an Airbnb host, you can sign up and then browse offers for free product samples. (If you really want to stock up, you can buy larger quantities at a discounted price.)
Glimpse works with you to showcase the products on your properties, and to email a digital “lookbook” highlighting the various products to guests at the beginning and end of their stay. You then earn a commission fee (Raju said $100 to $500 on average, though it can be even higher for big-ticket items) when these samples lead consumers to make a purchase.
Glimpse founders
Brands that have marketed themselves through the platform include the GhostBed mattress and Liquid Death water.
The startup first launched in March of this year — not exactly the best time for the travel business. Raju recalled, “We actually launched right before COVID started. After that, what we really spent a lot of time on was empathizing with hosts.”
In fact, some of Glimpse’s early partners stopped listing their properties for a while. But travel is on the rise again, including (or even especially) via Airbnb, and Raju said many of Glimpse’s 750 current properties are now fully booked through September. And given the lost income of the past few months, hosts might be even more interested than usual.
He added that the team will continue building out the platform with new features for product discovery and attribution, but he said, “The key thing that makes us unique is our emphasis on that in-home experience.”
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VidMob rethinks video production in the pandemic era
VidMob, which started out as a marketplace connecting marketers and video editors, now bills itself as a “creative technology platform.” Now there’s a “creator network” that’s part of a broader suite of tools for managing video production and turning those videos into online ads.
And the company has continued to evolve during the COVID-19 pandemic. Founder and CEO Alex Collmer told me that how customers use the platform has changed substantially in recent months. For example, he said that one of the platform’s “best skills” involved taking existing footage — including footage shot for TV commercials — and other creative assets and turning them into social media ads. But of course, “Over the last few months, all physical shoots were canceled.”
So Collmer said that rather than simply treating VidMob as a social media advertising tool, brands are increasingly turning to the startup for a way to manage remote video production. The result is that the company saw 100% year-over-year “logo growth” (a.k.a. new customers) in the first quarter, and then grew another 50% in Q2.
“What we have seen here is the acceleration of the digital transformation of the enterprise,” he said. “Pretty much every client we have, every marketer we talk to is looking very seriously at how to move all their creative operations onto some sort of unifying software platform, so that they feel safe in the event that they continue to have to work in a remote environment, and to be more efficient with existing media.”
One of those gin brand Monkey 47, whose brand lead Jennifer Schwartz said in a statement, “We have worked multiple times with VidMob as they quickly and efficiently help a lean and nimble brand like ours get out our message to millions of consumers.”
Another client is Citi, whose Chief Brand Officer Carla Hassan told me her team has been working with VidMob since last year. She said that as as a result of the pandemic, like many marketers, “We were required to really be flexible and adjust and scale programs quickly.”
For example, in response to the #InItTogether hashtag, Citi used VidMob to create a series of inspirational videos showcasing the work of its employees — such as Mihir in the video above, who was 3D printing protective equipment for his communities.
“As we thought about how we told the stories, we realized that your colleagues are some of the most important heroes that you have,” Hassan said.
According to Citi, the videos have been viewed nearly 250,000 times since the campaign launched in early May, with 80% of that viewing on LinkedIn.
And although dealing with the initial pandemic and shutdown was difficult enough, the news keeps coming, with protests for racial justice, a COVID-19 resurgence, resulting closures and more.
“We’re going to be in a period of uncertainty for a while, but to be honest, I see that as an opportunity,” Hassan said. “Brands who understand what their consumers want, brands who are tuned into the cultural zeitgeist, brands [who] pivot quickly to create content that is relevant and engaging and drive business KPIs … that will be what wins in the future.”
Similarly, Collmer said that in a period of uncertainty, brands need to respond more quickly, rather than simply falling silent: “Shutting up and going away is not a great way to position yourself.”
Update: This post has been updated to correctly identify the executive at Citi and to include a quote from Monkey 47.
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BlueOcean uses automation to deliver affordable brand audits in seven days
BlueOcean is a new startup offering companies a relatively fast and affordable way to see how their brands are performing and what they can do to improve.
CEO Grant McDougall and COO/President Liza Nebel (the pair founded BlueOcean with Chief Data Scientist Matthew Gross) told me they’ve been developing the technology for two years. And although the startup is only officially launching now, it has already worked with prominent brands like Microsoft, Panda Express and Pabst Blue Ribbon.
BlueOcean is focused specifically on the world of brand audits, which are basically detailed analyses of the aspects of a brand that are and aren’t working — and according to Nebel (whose experience includes working on brand and digital strategy at Ogilvy), a single audit can cost brands millions of dollars, often resulting in reports “that aren’t even actionable.”
With BlueOcean, on the other hand, a brand provides only two things — their website and a list of their competitors. Then they get their brand audit one week later, for just $17,000, including recommendations for how to improve.
To do this, the company says it’s applying an “automation-first approach.” McDougall said BlueOcean is pulling from hundreds of different data sources, which will vary from industry to industry, and applying algorithms to understand things like, “What’s the right taxonomy? How do we acquire that data?”
BlueOcean founders Grant McDougall and Liza Nebel (Image Credits: BlueOcean)
He added, “Strategically, we tend to move up in the organization,” giving both marketing teams and C-level executives the advice they need.
For example, Nebel said that one of BlueOcean’s clients include a large alcohol holding company, which recently launched a line of hard seltzer under an existing alcohol brand. The startup’s brand audit recommended that the company (which Nebel declined to identify) launch a separate hard seltzer brand instead — and now, the company will be launching three different brands.
Nebel also walked me through what she called the “five-minute version” of a brand audit for TechCrunch, which looked at our performance in terms of potential customers, positioning, messaging, offerings and existing customers. Ultimately, BlueOcean gave us a “moderate” score of 97 (but hey, we scored well on being “memorable” and “inspiring”) and recommended steps like publishing a more “steady drumbeat” of content on social media and improving our app experience.
“BlueOcean has become a great addition to further enable us to sharpen our ability to monitor, understand and act through the lens of brand across all of our commercial offerings,” said Microsoft’s director of brand strategy Tim Hoppin in a statement. “We’re excited to work with BlueOcean and use their tools and expertise to strengthen our relationship with the millions of global customers we connect with daily.”
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App Annie launches ad analytics product Ascend
App Annie is building on last year’s acquisition of analytics company Libring with the launch of a new version of Libring, rebranded as App Annie Ascend.
CEO Ted Krantz told me that while Ascend will be sold to existing App Annie customers, the real hope is to reach “a dramatically different market” as App Annie moves beyond just providing app market data by offering advertising analytics as well — particularly for game publishers and other companies on the supply side of the ad industry.
Krantz argued that with mobile platforms and browsers adding more limitations to user tracking (most recently with Apple’s announcement that it will give users the ability to decline app ad tracking), “the room is going to get pretty dark” for advertisers — creating an opportunity for App Annie’s approach of combining broader market data with a publisher’s own first party data.
To achieve this, Ascend offers what Krantz said are “hundreds of connectors” to pull data from the different platforms like AdColony, Unity and Chartboost, allowing customers to see these data sets “side by side.” Krantz emphasized that this data is very much for the customer’s own use and will be “quarantined” from App Annie’s larger market data, at least initially.
“Over time, we have the ability to open that up [for] benchmarking data,” he said, adding that this approach is part of what makes Ascend unique: “You’ve got to have that benchmarking data from your peer group. Without the market data, you can’t be certain you’re making the right calls.”
Companies already using Ascend include Reddit and Jam City.
”Ascend takes away the burden of integrating, maintaining and constantly updating dozens of APIs, allowing us to focus on what matters: achieving our KPIs and improving our campaigns,” said Reddit’s director of marketing Spiros Christakopoulos in a statement. “ Thanks to the critical insights Ascend provides, via its well designed reporting tools, it has become an essential part of our marketing analytics infrastructure.”
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Location data startup Bluedot raises $9.1M
Bluedot, a geofencing and location data startup used by companies like Dunkin’, KFC and McDonald’s, is announcing that it has raised $9.1 million in Series B funding.
The San Francisco-headquartered company claims that its technology its 20 times more accurate than competing solutions — something that CEO Emil Davityan attributed to its roots in the toll road industry, where it needed to deliver “lane-level” accuracy.
“Since then, we’ve delivered location-based solutions for retail, restaurants and other verticals,” Davityan told me via email. “The focus is on valuable, contactless experiences that prioritize the consumer’s needs.”
The company is extending its capabilities with the launch of a new product called Tempo, which is supposed to incorporate data like traffic patterns — and even the time it takes to get in and out of a car — to deliver real-time alerts when a customer is approaching.
That sounds particularly desirable in the middle of a pandemic, when businesses are increasingly interacting with customers via curbside pickup and drive-through — and presumably want to minimize contact even when the customers are inside the store. It also sounds a little creepy, but Davityan emphasized that the data is encrypted and anonymized.
“We don’t collect personal data, or track, share or sell location data,” he said. “It’s easy to make claims about being ‘privacy friendly.’ The real challenge is to live and breathe it, to make it central to your business.”
Bluedot says its footprint — as measured by unique monthly users — has increased 2,471% over the past year, and that it’s now powering more than 121 million location events each month.
The startup has now raised a total of $21.9 million. The new funding was led by Autotech Ventures, with participation from previous backer Transurban and new investors Forefront Ventures, IAG Firemark Ventures and Mighty Capital. Autotech’s Alexei Andreev is joining the Bluedot board, with Mighty Capital’s Jennifer Azapian joining as board observer.
“Software that can enable businesses to minimize contact is vital,” Andreev said in a statement. “Moving forward, we see the market favoring contactless solutions and Bluedot is poised to meet this demand. Bluedot’s differentiated offering, focus on consumer experience and scalability are key factors for any business’s future success, especially as we all rethink mobility and brand interactions.”
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Admix raises $7M to bring more ads to games, VR and AR
Adtech startup Admix is announcing that it has raised $7 million in Series A funding.
The London-based company was founded by CEO Samuel Huber (previously owner of an indie gaming studio) and COO Joe Bachle-Morris (who previously worked in the ad agency world). The company is working to bring ads to games, esports, virtual reality and augmented reality.
In-game advertising is already a huge market, but Admix says it’s differentiated by focusing on building a product that supports game advertising at scale, where advertisers can bid programmatically through traditional ad-buying platforms, rather than relying on an ad agency model.
For developers, Admix offers an SDK for the Unity and Unreal game engines, allowing them to drag and drop into their games ad formats like billboards, posters and 3D spaces. The startup says it’s working with more than 200 developers and is running campaigns from more than 500 advertisers each month, with past advertisers including National Geographic, Uber and State Farm.
“The concept of putting ads in games is obviously not new, but the scalability of our solution is what is revolutionary, delivering instant and consistent revenue to game makers, or streaming platforms,” Huber said in a statement. “This coupled with the fact that 1.5B people play games globally every day, means that gaming is becoming a truly mainstream advertising channel.”
Admix previously raised $2.1 million, according to Crunchbase. The Series A was led by U.K.-based Force Over Mass, with the participation from Speedinvest, Sure Valley Ventures and Nigel Morris (a former Dentsu Aegis executive), as well as other angel investors.
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