Marketers spend a lot of time and money testing their digital campaigns across channels, creative formats and audience targets. Marketing research and development platform Quantifi aims to ease that strain by automating the process.
The company launched on Tuesday with $2 million from a number of strategic investors including High Alpha Capital, a VC firm started by ExactTarget and Salesforce vets Scott Dorsey, Eric Tobias and Mike Fitzgerald, along with Kristian Andersen. Salesforce vet Scott McCorkle is executive-in-residence at High Alpha. Quantifi was developed with High Alpha Capital’s sister company, startup incubator High Alpha Studios.
Quantifi has seven clients, including LIDS Sports Group, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Menguin and DiscountFilters.com.
“Innovation has created a huge opportunity for marketing R&D,” said Quantifi CEO RJ Talyor, also a Salesforce and ExactTarget vet. “We’re helping marketers rapidly test across new and existing platforms, targeting options, creative and audiences at scale.”
Quantifi uses machine learning and its data co-op to help marketers save time on A/B tests. All of Quantifi’s clients are opted into the co-op, but marketers don’t have to participate to use the platform.
A small coffee subscription service used Quantifi to expand its marketing efforts beyond Facebook. Quantifi created, tested and reported on 336 different ad combinations across channels like LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest and Instagram within 22 days. Quantifi’s chat-based coach helps marketers make smart decisions about where and what they should test based on the campaign.
“Marketers don’t want to make thousands of different experiments,” Talyor said. “The platform surfaces best practices, tricks and tips as well as insights coming from the data co-op to make the best suggestions.”
It’s time-consuming figuring out which message is right for different audiences, said Wendy Munis, director of digital advertising at LIDS Sports Group. “So what ends up happening is we’re just not doing very many experiments,” she said.
Mudis plans to run A/B test campaigns on Quantifi weekly to better target LIDs’ messaging. She likes Quantifi for its ease in reporting and engaging UI.
“Quantifi allows us to slice and dice the results in a way that guides us for what the next campaign should be,” she said.
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High Alpha Studios helped launch Quantifi by putting together initial concepts and offering resources around product design, HR and legal services and fundraising. The firm continues to help with branding and sales.
Over the past few years, the marketing cloud space has consolidated under enterprise SaaS companies like Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle.
While Quantifi isn’t itself a marketing cloud, its backing by a group of ex-Salesforce execs shows that there’s still room for startups in that space, Talyor said. Despite the maturity of the marketing cloud landscape, startups have the opportunity to fill a number of gaps in scaling creative that speaks to individual consumers, and in collecting and displaying actionable data.
But for Quantifi, an eventual acquisition by an enterprise marketing cloud company is not out of the picture, Talyor said.
“All options are on the table,” he said.
