Toronto and California-based LINKETT has quadrupled its customer base in the last year. Appropriately enough for a marketing analytics company, LINKETT has grown by streamlining and deepening its use of paid social media advertising.
LINKETT helps marketers assess and improve the performance of Digital Signage advertising within locations such as malls and airports. It uses internet-connected sensors to recognize smartphones in order to analyze the performance of ads through traffic and behavioral smartphone data.
CEO Douglas Lusted said LINKETT has grown by practising marketing techniques learned while attending Silicon Valley accelerator 500 Startups.
“500 Startups taught us how to market ourselves online,” Lusted said. “Their tools, tricks, and techniques helped our growth.”
Tools, tricks and techniques include buying Facebook ads through AdEspresso, a company Lusted met on the accelerator.
LINKETT, which began in Waterloo, has also been buying ads on Linkedin, which have worked best for them.
Lusted said LINKETT has learned how to monitor all its marketing channels to establish which channel gets the highest conversion rate.
“That tells you where to spend your money,” he said. “You need to double down on those channels that work best for your particular business.”
One thing LINKETT has been able to do only in the U.S. is email scraping or web crawling. This entails using software to find an individual’s email address and sending them a personalized message.
“It’s not sending spam.” Lusted said. “We’re sending a…personal email for a meeting, not selling. This has enabled us to reach our target audience without hiring anyone.”
Still, the company’s growth and recent investments from the Niagara Angel Network and 500 startups, in addition to earlier funding from BDC Capital and XDL Capital Group mean LINKETT is now adding to its team of nine.
The company is looking for a Toronto-based Chief Operations Officer, as well as sales developers.
The company is hiring in order to grow the business while supporting new accounts. The new accounts are mostly medium-sized companies.
“As a startup we need to move fast. We hope to grow with our clients,” Lusted said. “We want the whales in industry, but the bigger the account the longer the sales cycle.”
Lusted said sales talent is hard to find in Canada, and in the U.S. it is very expensive.
“It’s getting harder and harder to find sales talent in Canada. Fresh grads have rarely attended a sales course,” he said.
“In the Valley, with the Canadian dollar being low, salaries are almost double the price…”
Finding talent in the U.S. is important as the company is looking to scale as fast as possible south of the border.
The company is also refining its technology.
The LINKETT product features a dashboard linked to the cloud so the user can see which ads have the greatest impact on consumers.
Now, the company is refining its data so the LINKETT system will know which ads to play for each client at different times of the day for best results using machine learning.
For Lusted, who is only 23, it is an exciting time. “We owe 500 Startups a lot,” he said.
