The UK-based personalized digital content marketing company Idio has secured $2.35 million from Notion Capital in its first round of external funding since the service launched in 2006.
The cash will go towards fueling its expansion into the US, where it already has customers and a freshly opened East Coast office with “a handful of staff” – a number that looks set to increase in the near future thanks to the injection of cash.
Its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, essentially, allows brands and marketers to personalize content sent out to subscribers in real-time, thereby increasing engagement, and ultimately, hopefully, revenue. Helpfully, it already integrates with a multitude of different digital marketing channels, whether that’s email, social media, web or mobile – a combination of big data and content marketing that has been referred to as ‘Big Content’.
By tracking individual customers across a brand’s marketing activities, whether that’s web and email campaigns or some other combination, Idio builds up a better picture of the type of content each customer is more likely to interact with, giving the brands better insight into what works and allowing Idio to inject its own personalized stamp on the communications.
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Idio’s co-founders, Edward Barrow and Andrew Davies, told The Next Web that with several industry experts predicting a growth in the personalized digital content market for the coming years it was the right time to seek external investment.
“We’ve been going for quite some time. [We’ve been] bootstrapped since back in 2006 but what we realized was that the opportunity in content marketing and personalization and big data was really coalescing very quickly,” Barrow said.
The rest of the cash will be used to rapidly increase overall expansion in terms of the product roadmap and sales, Barrow added.
For the privacy-conscious reader concerned about recent data leaks and scares (although most notably brought to global attention again recently thanks to the NSA’s PRISM surveillance system), Barrow points out that the service only uses natural language processing, and on systems where a customer has already opted-in to having a relationship with that company, by signing up to an email newsletter, for example.
“One of the key things is that this data is being used directly with clients you actively engage with and in a transparent way,” Barrow said. “We’re quite staunchly against the use of third-party cookies and using this data for ulterior motives where it has been gathered with no benefit provided to the end customer. This is all about saying how can an organisation deliver you relevant information that is valuable for you.”
Image Credit – AFP/Getty Images
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