Justin Spring recently shared his philosophy with me. His experience and passion to elevate wastage of resources has produced a fantastic looking product. I recommend you to trial a demo today.
Thanks Justin for taking the time out.
Can you describe BringShare as if I knew nothing about it?
BringShare is the simplest way to track your marketing. We mash up all your marketing data together in one place to provide you with your full digital marketing picture. Our marketing channel-specific dashboards -the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Dashboard, Social Media Dashboard, Paid Search Dashboard and Email Marketing Dashboard, give you a look at how each marketing channel performs as a whole, while the Master Dashboard shows you how these different internet marketing channels perform against one-another.
The simplest way to put it is this: our six unique dashboards show you everything you need to know to make your reporting easier to understand and more robust.
What was your inspiration for creating BringShare?
My cofounder Danielle Walton and I also founded a marketing agency in the past. We were able to grow our digital agency 100% every year through diligent analytics analysis and reporting, but generating digital marketing reports for all of our clients every month was getting to be ridiculously manual and time consuming. It would take 20-40 hours a month and there was no tool out there to make it simple while still providing our clients with all of the information they need to stay informed. At this point, we saw a clear problem and shifted our attention to providing BringShare as the solution. Our philosophy was (and still is) to simplify and accelerate the online marketing analysis function so our fellow marketers can focus their time on being smarter marketers instead of wasting valuable time manipulating data -and that’s what we did.
Since the commencement of your SaaS product, what have been the highs and lows for BringShare?
As a relatively young company, one of our bigger challenges is setting priorities for what to integrate with and when. It can be incredibly difficult to balance the need to provide your members with everything they need and more and defining priority for what can happen when. Development hours are always limited, so we end up doing what’s best for our members. We take their feature requests and suggestions incredibly seriously and end up iterating around what will increase the digital marketing experience for them while also keeping our system at the cutting edge of emerging trends by being quick to add platforms like Pinterest when they start to gain momentum and affect the digital marketing world.
Which top 3 features of BringShare would you say outshine the competition?
- Our (brand new) SEO Dashboard, Paid Search Dashboard and Master Dashboard are killer. All three have a Print/PDF functionality, which means you can click a button and instantaneously have a digital marketing report in seconds for any date range. This is a game-changer to a lot of marketing agencies and we’re pretty proud of that.
- We’re also pretty proud of our automatic CPA, ROI and Conversion Rate Calculator. This gives you your top 3 most important digital marketing metrics by any date range with just a couple of clicks. We segment out your data to show you your overall ROI, CPA and conversion rate on the Master Dashboard, while also providing this data on a marketing channel basis on the SEO, Social Media, Email Marketing and Paid Search Dashboards.
- Lastly..it’s hard to pick just 3.. but I would say our Paid Search Reporting Dashboard as a whole truly is a game-changer. At our current pricepoint, any company that does Paid Search can do all of their reporting on BringShare’s platform at a tiny fraction of what is costs them as a company doing things manually. Paid Search was a major pain for us when we were reporting for our marketing firm, so it’s truly amazing to be able to cure that specific major problem digital marketing agencies face every month.
Do you have time to read the SEO blogs while developing BringShare, if so, which blogs/twitter accounts do you follow?
Our main focus is ensuring that BringShare Members posses everything they need to be the best marketers possible. A large part of fulfilling that is staying at the brink of emerging digital marketing trends. We’re constantly staying up-to-date with anything and everything marketing oriented. Just a few blogs/twitter handles we like to stay in-the-know with include:
- Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
- Search Engine Journal
- Search Engine Land
- Marketing Sherpa
- Adage.com
- Inc Magazine
- The Google Analytics Blog
- Inside AdWords
- Mashable.com
- The 37signals Blog (We love their approach!)
There is a broad range of techniques within the SEO industry, how do you think BringShare manages to facilitate this?
There are definitely an incredibly broad range of techniques within the world of SEO. That why, with BringShare, we strive to bring you simplicity and only the data you need. We do this by not just being another data aggregator that brings you a ton of information you won’t be able to use easily. We strip away all of the data that doesn’t matter and leave you with only the most important, actionable SEO data that truly affects your bottom-line. We are the one central place you go to understand how your Search Engine Optimization efforts are performing, how your other digital marketing channels are performing, and how that affects your business as a whole.
Without giving too much away, what juicy features are on your roadmap for the next 12 months?
Well, like I said before, we love to listen to BringShare members when looking for juicy future features. We’ll be integrating with Campaign Monitor in the short term, but beyond that the most I can currently say is to keep your eyes open. We just launched a brand new Search engine Optimization Dashboard yesterday and in the last 6 months alone we have launched:
- The Ultimate Paid Search Dashboard with one-click paid search reporting
- Digital Marketing Phone Call Tracking
- A Brand new Social Media Dashboard complete with digital analytics data from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn and more
- BringShare’s Automatic Return on Investment (ROI), Cost per ACquisition (CPA) and Conversion Rate Calculator
- ..and a ton of user experience pieces that streamline the analytics analysis process. We’re constantly iterating based on what our members are telling us and what is important in the market.
What third party tools do you wish you could implement but don’t currently have an API?
Pinterest is definitely a place where we would like to further analytics to take a look at how this social media channel affects the bottom-line of business, so it would be nice to have an API there, but unfortunately they do not have one yet. Fortunately, BringShare is still able to track Pinterest Revenue/Conversions as well as website visits from the site.
Who inspires you in life and how is this transposed into your work life?
There are a lot of people and historic figures that inspire me. I’m an underdog kind of guy so I’m always motivated by people who come from nothing and then make a big impact on the world. I’m currently reading a Richard Branson book. I’m inspired by his “screw it, let’s do it” mentality. Fearing failure only prevents success and Branson embodies that philosophy in everything he does.
What conferences are you attending over the next 12 months?
We attended SXSW last March and had an amazing time. There are a ton of emerging marketing trends that pop up during that week, so we’ll likely be back again.
Justin didn’t quit his day job in the quest to launch BringShare – an online tool to help marketers simply track all of their marketing efforts in one place – and for good reason. His day job consisted of running Adept Marketing, a highly successful start-up that he and his business partner launched in 2007 to provide predictive marketing models for small and mid-sized companies looking to grow market share online.
