Although online marketing has created lots of new opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses to reach new audiences, the new marketing landscape comes with its share of new challenges.
Running a business is a full-time job, and few owners have the luxury of being marketing experts as well. But without that expertise, it is difficult to assess which of their marketing efforts are paying off, and what they can do to increase web traffic and sales.
With its online marketing intelligence platform, Clickx wants to help small businesses improve their digital strategies. The Chicago-based adtech startup combines analytics from a company’s social media and marketing platforms to help them understand what drives potential customers to their site.
“Most small and medium-sized businesses are doing some kind of marketing — organic search, paid search and paid social media — those are all disjointed platforms, ” said co-founder Samuel Thimothy. “We provide the technology to bring analytics and intelligence from all those different platforms into one place. That gives them a single place to see marketing performance across those channels.”
Tracking marketing efforts across channels also gives business owners a more holistic view of how people are finding them, he said.
In addition to analyzing traffic from external marketing platforms, Clickx takes a deep dive into a website’s architecture and internal traffic data to help companies understand how they can turn more visitors into customers. It also keeps an eye on competitor websites to help users stay ahead of the competition.
Samuel Thimothy created Clickx with his brother, Solomon Thimothy. The pair has run a digital marketing consultancy together since 2006, but the work on Clickx didn’t begin until the middle of 2015. Solomon said the platform was originally created to meet their firm’s internal needs. By 2016, the pair had begun selling Clickx as a standalone service.
“We had so many different metrics that we had to look at for our consulting firm, and as we scaled and added more customers, there was no way to bring on more teammates with the system we had,” said Solomon. “We built everything internally, tested it by giving it to our customers, and they liked it. We used to give them spreadsheets, but nothing will ever be as intuitive as a dashboard.”
Starting at around $300 a month, Clickx would be a significant investment for many small businesses. But the company’s co-founders said that cost is easily recouped through increased efficiencies.
“There’s millions and millions of dollars wasted on advertising,” said Solomon. “SMBs are often spending $100,000 or $50,000 with all these different random providers, and they have no idea what’s working and what’s not.”
Solomon said around half a dozen people work on Clickx on a full-time basis, and that he expects to double that number in the next six months. The pair have been bootstrapping the project up until this point, but they are currently considering the option of taking outside funding in order to scale the company more quickly.
“The small business market is actually big business,” said Solomon. “So we really want to get advisors and investors and take it to the next level. If we want to reach something like 200,000 customers, we have to go big.”
Images via Clickx.
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