In our Martech Insider Newsletter, we interview noteworthy marketing technologies each month.
For June 2020, we chose to spotlight Smartly.io, which offers a 3-in-1 platform for automating and consolidating social advertising activities. Florian le Clerc de la Herverie, Head of France, answered our questions.
Hello Florian, can you describe your positioning?
Smartly.io is a solution to automate and scale social advertising activities. But rather than words, here’s a 2-minute video that sums up our approach: Smartly.io
What problems do you solve?
As a marketer, how can you effectively use the advertising potential of social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snap? Through a single platform, our clients can automate their social advertising activities by integrating the creative, distribution, and reporting aspects.
What are the main features?
The major focus is on automation: we eliminate manual and repetitive tasks to enable testing, iteration, and performance improvement at scale. We have developed our own solutions based on three pillars:
- Campaign Creation: Naming convention, tracking, automatic campaign launch & updates, etc.
- Creative Management: Store, tag, create, and iterate images and videos.
- Optimization: Integration of third-party data (S2S, Google Analytics, Mobile Partner, etc.), budget allocation technologies, automatic bidding, ad rotation, scaling, etc.
An advanced reporting layer complements our approach.
The expected impact: productivity gain, production cost reduction, and performance improvement
What is your “Killer Feature”?
The creative aspect is the lever that has the most impact on performance. Our solutions allow large-scale personalization of ads across all networks and agile testing of different concepts. This is one of the keys to our clients' success. Here are some illustrative cases.
Can you talk about your API policy?
We do not have our own API but build our solutions on the APIs of Facebook, Pinterest, Snap, etc.
What is your client onboarding process?
We have a detailed 3-month onboarding process that allows for platform familiarization and access to our team's expertise: account structure, technical setup, data integration, etc. All aspects are reviewed based on best practices for each channel. There's no point in automating if the foundation isn't optimal.
How does client support work?
One of our key features is our support. We offer 24/5 chat support handled by our team. All employees, from Marketing to Sales to Legal, provide 4 hours of support per week. We stay close to our clients and our solutions, which helps us remain humble and receive real-time feedback on areas for improvement. We're very pleased with our clients' feedback, which has earned us the number 1 ranking in 11 categories in the G2 Summer 2020 after the Winter version.
Each client also has a dedicated Customer Success Manager, whose role includes strategy support, training, and innovation.
How do you see the evolution of your market?
It's moving extremely fast, and keeping pace is a real challenge. We notice that all players are moving towards automation. The effectiveness of their algorithms in terms of performance is evident—Google’s smart bidding, Facebook's Dynamic Ads and Campaign Budget Optimization, and more recently Pinterest's Shopping Ads & Snap's Dynamic Ads. The real battleground will naturally be in the creative aspect. The differentiating factor will be the brands' ability to test and iterate quickly to reach their audience in a personalized manner, thereby improving their performance. Smartly.io has pivoted towards this for several years, and our recent funding will only accelerate this positioning. We are very confident and excited about the months and years ahead!
Thank you, Florian, for your time and detailed answers.
About Smartly.io:
- Number of Offices (and locations): 16 offices (covering all continents)
- Number of Employees: 380 people
- Team Distribution (Sales, Developers, Support, etc.): Product/Tech: 38% of Smartlies know how to code or have a technical profile.
- Type of Clients (Key Accounts, SMEs, Agencies):
- Clients advanced in digital who need to move even faster. Our ability to innovate and offer unique approaches are decisive elements.
- Clients in transition needing a partner to better understand their social media acquisition and save valuable time in their transformation.
- Media agencies that combine the two aspects according to their clients' needs.
- Main French Clients: La Redoute, Fnac Darty, Carrefour, Virtuo, Ralph Lauren, Club Med, iProspect, Zenith, Keyade
- Funding: Raised €210 million in December 2019
- MRR: N/A, managed over €2 billion budgets on our platform in 2019
- Main Competitors: Bidalgo, Kenshoo, Sprinklr
At SaaS Advisor, we have several successful missions with large groups and work with various market vendors.
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