A former division of app development company BNotions has struck out on its own, making its foray into digital marketing last week.
Making its official launch on Nov. 25, Gallop Media was originally incubated as a business unit at BNotions, a Toronto company that develops mobile, social, and Web apps. It made its soft launch as a separate company earlier this year, focusing on media while BNotions focuses on mobile app development. While its employees still share an office, starting in the New Year, Gallop will be making its own way.
The company focuses on using data and mobile strategies to track customer behaviour, giving customers more of what they want based on past behaviour. Not only does that gain their loyalty, but it also attracts new consumers for their clients, says Farzana Nasser, Gallop’s chief strategy officer.
Take Vu Digital LLC, which has built apps for both iOS and Android. It curates news and headlines for consumers, based on other articles they’ve read using the app, Nasser says. Within seven weeks of working with Gallop, Vu scored quadruple the number of user downloads and managed to get on the featured pages for both the Apple iTunes App Store and Google Play.
On the social side, Gallop is also part of Facebook Inc.’s preferred marketing developer program, meaning it gives the company’s developer team access to more of its resources and application programming interfaces. That helps Gallop find customers who fit their target market.
“What we’re focused on with Gallop is really using data to intelligently target and reach the highest value users in the marketplace, and really drive ROI and true business results for the clients that we work with,” Nasser says. “By doing that, we’re able to really target high quality users, versus just trying to get volume … and matching up that data with social data to find the best users.”
Before joining Gallop, Nasser worked for a startup in New York City. Now she’s working at Gallop and focusing on growth hacking, which means harnessing data and analyzing it to get insight on what customers want, then acting on that information to gain more customers.
But she’s spent much of her career working in marketing departments for brands with larger budgets, like at General Mills Inc. Having experienced traditional marketing, she says many marketers are still rooted in older ways of thinking.
“I think industry-wide, the fundamental shift that needs to occur is that right now, the majority of marketing budgets is still spent on television. And it’s very clear, based on consumer behaviour in the last few years, that consumers are spending more time on digital mediums than they are on television. Yet marketing budgets have not been allocated to actually speak to consumers where they are,” she says.
“What I’d really like to see moving forward is a more accurate shift towards the dollars going towards where customers are today, versus where they were five years ago.”
She adds that for marketers, it’s no longer about just doing simple A/B testing. Now, marketers need to adapt to trying out several kinds of campaigns at the same time to figure out what’s working, and what’s not, based on what the data is telling them.
Although Gallop only officially launched about a week ago, the company is looking to keep working with its clients on different campaigns. It’s also looking to hire – right now, Gallop’s team of 10 is split between its office in Toronto and an outpost in New York.
The company is looking to add media solutions analysts, engineers, and people in sales and business development. It aims to add its job postings to its site in the coming weeks.