MarTech Interview with Adrien Menard, Co-founder & CEO Botify

Adrien Menard, Co-founder & CEO Botify shares a few thoughts on the future of search marketing and what B2B marketers need to keep in mind to drive better search marketing ROI:

Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Adrien. We’d love to hear more about your journey through the years and what inspired Botify?

Botify was founded in France in 2012 by myself and Thomas Grange and Stan Chauvin. The three of us worked together at a digital marketing agency when we discovered a major flaw in how companies were conducting SEO; they were focusing too much on content and keywords, without knowing if Google and other search engines were even crawling those webpages. In fact, almost half of the pages of large, enterprise websites are not crawled by Google. When a page is not crawled or seen by Google, it will never rank in search engines, and therefore cannot drive traffic or revenue. This is how Botify was born – we recognized a huge opportunity to make more of large enterprise sites be discoverable by Google. Some of Botify’s first customers included EBay, BlaBlaCar, and Expedia. We entered the U.S. market in 2016 and now the U.S. now accounts for more than 60% of Botify’s revenue.

We’d love to hear more about the evolution of the Botify solution over the years since its launch? Congratulations on your recent funding as well, a few thoughts on this new round and how it will impact immediate near-term goals and growth?

Botify’s longest standing and most mature product suite is Botify Analytics, which is powered by our unified data model. Botify’s data model integrates all of the necessary data sources to get the most complete picture of a website’s technical health and organic search performance. In fact, Botify Analytics provides more than 1,100 metrics for any individual URL, and also allows customers to segment and filter the data any way imaginable.

It’s a super powerful application, however, in order to make that data easily actionable, we built Botify Intelligence. Botify Intelligence includes prescriptive insights and prioritized recommendations, helping brands define their action plan quickly. It also includes a monitoring and alerting solution to make brands aware of any problems or anomalies on the website before they turn into potential disasters.

Our newest suite, Botify Activation, is premised on actually implementing those actions, streamlining manual SEO tasks and maximizing SEOs’ and developers’ productivity, time, and resources.

Our goal is to enable customers to maximize revenue and performance from organic search, and do so efficiently and quickly. With our recent funding, we will continue to invest in product innovation, doubling-down on machine learning to speed the development of action plans.

The funding will also enable us to expand globally especially in Asia Pacific (the largest regional market for SEO) by growing operations there and expanding our collaboration with key brands and partners in the region. We are actively hiring in Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo across all departments.

Finally, we are expanding our partner ecosystem across technology, marketing, and solution partners. We plan to build upon the strong partnerships we’ve already forged; and continue to create alignment, interoperability, and collaboration opportunities with the partners that are essential to our customers’ strategies and success.

What are some of the top concerns still surrounding marketers when it comes to their overall search marketing objectives and strategies, can you talk about a few best practices that you feel marketers need to follow more on?

Marketers are embracing search as a way to generate profitable, efficient, and sustainable traffic, yet are still struggling with measuring its ROI. Historically SEO has been harder to measure than other channels and has been underutilized. Botify is working to quantify the impact of organic search by linking SEO to performance and ROI. We commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a study on enterprise organizations prioritizing SEO and its effects on their long-term revenue. The results showed that SEO can generate a 584% ROI in less than 3 months for companies using Botify.

If you would like to see more coverage of Botify, click Here.

Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Rodolphe, tell us more about Potloc and what inspired this journey?
I created Potloc with Louis Delaoustre as a response to a much-needed revamp to the way consumer research has been conducted up until now, as consumers changed behaviors during the past 2 decades due to globalization, the rise of mobile technologies, and interconnectivity, the opportunity to make these changes happen was unique.

Potloc was born as a way to advance the methodology, using today’s technologies, and placing consumers at the heart of it all. Since we use social networks to deploy our surveys, we have access to insights of a new generation of consumers: Millennials, Gen Z, as well as other demographic and interest groups –including shoppers and non-shoppers.

In today’s highly personalized marketing and advertising environment, how do you feel marketers can improve how they grab insights from their audience to improve their targeted campaigns?

Traditionally, marketers have relied on traditional methodologies to survey their customers for more than 30 years now. Panels, phone interviews, mall intercepts all have their merits and their place in understanding consumers. However, with the advent of social media, we are now more connected and present online than ever before. There are 4.3 billion social media users worldwide. That’s a little over half the world’s population. So I would say to marketers: If you are targeting people with your products and services online through paid ads on social and other media platforms, and trusting your revenue generation with what people are doing from their phones and computers, don’t you think you should be capturing what their thoughts and experiences are in the platforms they not only love and trust but also spend a large chunk of their time at?

Getting insights from the very people you target with your campaigns, at the times when they are most open and willing to answer (usually while scrolling their social feeds), about the topics they care about, gets you fresh, honest responses that will inform not only your campaign strategy, but also your customer experience, R&D, and personalization tactics.

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