THE POWER OF DELIVERING CLICKS.
If you’d been told 20 years ago there would be an advertising medium that would allow you to communicate directly to your target market, and pay only for ads that worked, you wouldn’t have believed it.
Social media has transformed marketing. But pay-per-click ads on Twitter, Facebook, and the like have proven tricky for small businesses to use. And few of those businesses have the funds to pay professional agency fees to optimize their socialmedia opportunities.
That’s where Toronto- based Needls comes in. Justin Hartzman, its co-founder and CEO, calls it the world’s first “robo-agency.” Sign up for the service, and its algorithms go to work finding new customers for your ads you would never find on your own.
“There are 50 million small businesses on Facebook, but only three million of them are using Facebook’s ad platform,” Hartzman notes. “That’s a huge disconnect.”
When you try to sign up to post ads, you encounter a bewildering world of jargon, menu options, and tutorials — none geared to a business owner’s attention span.
Needls has a short, free application process that asks applicants a handful of questions. Most importantly, you’re asked to select five or more keywords or phrases to target your ads. If you’re a dentist, for instance, you might say “dentist,” “cavities,” “braces,” “whitening” and “crowns.” You then pick a geographic market ( e. g., Canada, Manitoba, Winnipeg or a specific postal code), and a budget (Needls’ robo- mascot seems to like recommending $175 a month).
Once you sign up for a monthly membership (an additional $100 a month), Needls uses data- science smarts to scrutinize millions of Twitter, Facebook or Instagram posts to find people who need your products or services.
But it doesn’t just look for those keywords; Needls’ “natural language processes” unearth a treasure- trove of messages that sound like calls for help. If someone in North Winnipeg tweets that their tooth hurts, Needls will serve them your ads, too.
Hartzman says the company can read between the lines of socialmedia posts with 65- per- cent accuracy — nearly double the industry standard. The system assesses its own progress based on the number of clicks its ads receive, and it learns as it goes, he says. “We now have a year of this data, and every day we get more.”
Hartzman favourite customer story is a dog- walker in the U. S. who joined Needls last month. To make the best life for her family, she said, she needed more clients. Four weeks later, she reported, “my phone hasn’t stopped ringing, and I had to hire more dog walkers.”
That reflects Needls’ goal: to grow small businesses by finding them new clients at low cost. ( You pay only when a prospect clicks on your ad.)
Getting here has been a long journey. Needls’ partners — Hartzman, Jeremy Poriah Koven and Michael Koral — are childhood friends who have run other Internet companies together, including website-development firm All You Can Eat Internet, and WeSellYourSite.com. They started Needls in November 2014 as a tool for marketing consultants to serve small clients who couldn’t afford agency fees. But they have now put their other businesses on hold as they pivoted to serve millions of small businesses directly.
The partners pooled $500,000 to start the business, investing much of that in developing its natural-language technology. Last summer, they were one of five teams invited to participate in Gener8tor, a 12- week accelerator program in Milwaukee, Wis., that guarantees each company at least US$ 90,000 in capital, and multiple opportunities to meet top Midwest investors and mentors.
Hartzman says the team wasn’t much interested in attending. “We didn’t want to leave our kids and our families. We had to give up 6 per cent of our company for very little. But after we talked to other people, it was a no- brainer. We knew they would help us move forward.”
It was “an awesome experience” that enabled Needls to raise a $ 1- million seed round from U. S. investors, who ranged from tech entrepreneurs to, yes, a dentist. “That demonstrated to us that the landscape of technology investment in Canada doesn’t really exist,” Hartzman says. “In the U. S., it’s part of the culture. Investors know they need to support entrepreneurs and build the economy.”
Now, Needls has about 400 subscribers, and hopes to top 20,000 clients by the end of next year. The company isn’t yet profitable, but Hartzman notes it is still fine- tuning its technology — and may try to raise another $4 million or more later this year.
But that technology creates a bonus payback for Needls: the company uses it to find its own prospects. “If some company’s website says, ‘ Call us for a free es- timate,’” we know they’re looking for customers,” says Hartzman. “So we’ll show them our ad.”