Marketing TechnologyConvertr look to provide integration in an increasingly crowded martech ecosystem

Convertr look to provide integration in an increasingly crowded martech ecosystem

Convertr CEO Emma Bowkett calls for an open marketing ecosystem and details how to win back the customer’s trust.

30-second summary:

  • Convertr is an API-first data routing and optimization platform, which was launched in 2011 by entrepreneur Emma Bowkett.
  • Convertr is looking to advance its integration and workflow capabilities. This will allow their customers to better connect and manage data points across their tech stack. 
  • By just doubling down and being a bit more human and tongue-in-cheek about it, brands can really engage their end customer, who will be a lot more willing to have a data relationship with them.
  • If you understand where people spend their time and how they engage with content, both in their professional and personal lives, and use that combined data to enrich their profile, then you’re going to deliver a better result with that customer, in the long run.

The marketing and advertising technologies sector has experienced rapid changes in the last few years. And the pace of this change is accelerating due to the proliferation of data across multiple channels, which enables marketers to build ever more precise profiles of their customers. One company looking to help marketers do just that is Convertr.

This application programming interface (API)-first data routing and optimization platform was launched in 2011 by entrepreneur Emma Bowkett (CEO) who saw an opportunity in the changing landscape of the industry and pounced on it.

Source: Convertr

Emma says: “We saw a huge gap in the market. The ecosystem of publishers, media agencies, brands and their tech stack, was very misaligned and operating in silos from a data transparency standpoint. In order to fix that widespread issue in the landscape, there was a real need for technology players to come in and have the ability to work all of those verticals, and bridge the gap between them.”

That is exactly where Convertr came in and has since helped the likes of Oracle, Cisco, Dell, Dennis Publishing, Mediacom and Contentive, enhance their digital marketing through real-time efficiencies in customer acquisition and data partnerships.

But in a market that is constantly getting saturated by vendors, how is Convertr looking to stand out?

Becoming a connective glue in a crowded marketplace

“There are a ton of vendors in the market today and the problem consistently keeps getting worse, because for the buyer – they’re still operating and buying technology in silos. And the real pain point that we solve is the ability to connect the dots between those silos and become a system of rapport, that all users can use across the ecosystem, to ensure the data flows in real time and can be optimized,” explains Bowkett.

Emma told us that a major strategy for Convertr, over the next 12 to 18 months, is to advance its integration and workflow capabilities. The expanded offerings will allow their customers to better connect and manage data points across their tech stack. 

She sights this ‘open marketing ecosystem’ as a key trend for 2020, and she isn’t the only one.

The largest independent marketing cloud platform, Acoustic’s CMO Norman Guadagno, recently echoed her sentiments in a chat with us: “That is the future. The future is about integration and openness and we’re trying hard to push our company in that direction, too.”

But an overly complex or siloed data ecosystem is not the most immediate challenge many companies face, and Convertr’s data-privacy features provide peace-of-mind with evolving regulations.

Thriving in the regulated data-privacy era

Recently, the industry has witnessed a groundbreaking shift in the way customers think about data, privacy and brand trust.

The culmination of high-profile corporate privacy scandals and new wide-sweeping data legislation (such as GDPR and the CCPA) has forced consumers to get to grips with their digital footprints. 

It’s compelled companies to confront and re-evaluate what’s at stake concerning commercial data collection and processing.

The stark reality is consumers trust companies less today than in the past. According to PwC, only 12% of consumers said they trust businesses more than they did a year ago, while 17% trust companies more today than a decade ago.

So how can the trust be regained? And how do companies like Convertr thrive in this regulated data-privacy era?

“We need to think about the human element. We are now in an era where we need to create a value exchange. People don’t mind giving up data for that because they understand that they’re gaining something as well. But brands need to be very clear and upfront with the value exchange they are offering, be it in their privacy policy or their opt in/opt outs,” says Bowkett. 

“I think a lot of brands over complicate the matter today. By just doubling down and being a bit more human and tongue-in-cheek about it, they can really engage their end customer, who will be a lot more willing to have a data relationship with them.”

Emma believes a shift in how companies cultivate their leads, can also result in better engagement with the end-consumer.

“I have noticed a trend that business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) is somewhat merging in terms of how marketers start to think about attracting the right type of lead. If you understand where people spend their time and how they engage with content, both in their professional and personal lives, and use that combined data to enrich their profile, then you’re going to deliver a better result with that customer, in the long run,” she says.

Leading by example

It’s worth heeding Emma’s insight. Convertr have over the last few years shown that they know what they are talking about. 

They helped Dennis Publishing evolve their lead generation arm into a business that’s both ‘ready for the future and better serves their customers’.

Prior to the partnership, Dennis’ lead gen team spent 70% of their working week simply fixing data errors and maintaining the end-to-end operational process. 

With an end-to-end platform in place, Dennis’ team could finally streamline their lead generation process: Instead of relying on eight different tools, they now use just three powerful platforms and have cut their manual maintenance time to just 5%.

A leading global technology brand saw similar results when they engaged Convertr to optimize their events data processing dropping their average processing time from 76 hours to under 5 minutes. 

The company has a complex Eloqua implementation to support their global market, and their incoming events data needed to follow a detailed data QA and formatting process before it could be uploaded to the appropriate programs. 

With Convertr in place, events data is now processed and routed in real-time, human-error is removed, and they enjoy more clarity of performance from this high-volume channel.  

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