Standalone marketing technology platform Captora has raised $22 million in Series B financing.
The company, co-founded by the former chief revenue officer of independent marketing automation platform Marketo, claims to siphon in-site demand data to flag the highest potentially performing areas for a marketer to put their dollars. The latest round of funding will go toward product development and to fuel international expansion.
“We wanted to build a platform that was context-aware and that helps marketers show the ROI on the spend they’re putting into content,” said Paul Albright, co-founder and CEO of Captora.
“A lot of people are putting money into work flows,” Albright said, but the focus at Captora is determining what content works for what persona across a variety of locations and verticals.
The round was led by New Enterprise Associates with support from existing investor Bain Capital Ventures. Captora’s Series A round, which it closed last March, was valued around $5 million.
CTO Anindo Mukherjee for four years developed machine-learning algorithms at Google to decipher content quality and change ranking, which the company says is a core part of its platform.
“I think digesting data around ‘What content do I have and what gaps are there between what my competitors are doing vs. what people want to consume’ is the challenge,” Albright added. “The key strategy was to make sure we were omnichannel across (display, search and social) to help marketers determine what channels buyers are active in.”
In addition to the aforementioned Dynamic Capture Manager for more “predictive” content marketing, Captora has developed a Marketing Execution Engine, utilized by some 35 marketing automation providers such as Eloqua, Marketo and Pardot to help drive more quality leads into those systems and, ultimately, show more measurable ROI.
“We put a lot of science behind to not only improve the conversion rate of display or search vs. other campaigns, but report back what kind of mix is working for what type of buyer and how high-quality are those leads as they convert down the pipeline,” Albright said.
But why wouldn’t Marketo or Eloqua do it themselves? The purpose of many marketing automation systems (MAS) is to convert leads into buyers, but Captora’s main thrust is to help marketers prioritize campaigns, identify proper calls to action and then optimize and measure content against revenue goals to filter higher-quality (and more voluminous) leads to those MASs. Although they solve different problems, they are “complementary,” Albright noted.
