MarTech Interview with Austin Harrison, CEO at Northbeam

Austin Harrison, CEO at Northbeam catches up with MarTechSeries to chat about adtech/martech tips for today’s evolving online marketplace:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Austin, tell us more about yourself and also, we’d love to know about Northbeam and its core offering.

I’m the CEO and co-founder of Northbeam. Three years ago I met my co-founder Dan Huang. With my background in audience analysis and Dan’s background in AI, we knew that machine learning models could unlock a more powerful solution to the marketing attribution problem.

In this time, we’ve focused our efforts on data integrity (ruthlessly collecting, cleaning, and stitching data so that marketers now have the most accurate data possible, both across platforms and devices), as well as the forecasting capabilities of our machine learning models. The result is the ability to determine if an ad campaign will be ROI positive (or ROI negative) BEFORE you spend tens of thousands of dollars.

We’d love to hear about your new funding round and what’s in store for the near future in terms of innovations?

We raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Silversmith Capital Partners. We’re using the funds to further product development, including expanding its machine learning capabilities.

Could you share a few best practices for B2B teams when it comes to optimizing ad spend?

Track your data like you’re a B2C company. It’s important to be ruthless when understanding which marketing channels drive positive ROI, and which do not. You can drive higher returns by understanding the impact of each touchpoint.

What are some of the key challenges marketers/advertisers face when trying to decipher their customer’s journey?

Knowing what mix of marketing spend yields the biggest impact. The average customer requires seven touchpoints to convert and every ad platform wants to take credit for the conversion.

Marketers need to know what combination of touchpoints (e.g. IG influencer + Paid TikTok + email) yields the biggest ROI.

How do you feel marketers can make better use of marketing intelligence in more fruitful ways to gain better traction in the market?

Identifying which KPIs are relevant and then setting performance benchmarks against those KPIs. Northbeam’s data is forward-looking, meaning you have a competitive advantage if you know what performance benchmarks you need to hit on day one of a campaign for it to be profitable by day 30…

Some last thoughts on the future of martech?

Data will be the lifeblood of all retail and ecommerce stores. It’s not enough to just have the marketing data. Top brands will leverage ALL of their data to make smarter decisions. By understanding COGs, shipping costs, returns, and all other costs related to running a successful business, brands can make more informed decisions. And they can make them faster, taking advantage of opportunities that their competitors fail to identify until it’s too late.

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