Instaon: Making online advertising accessible to anyone

The online marketing landscape is harsh, complex and evolving at lightning speed. As an ex-Googler and freelancer, I have experienced this evolution through countless of clients & agencies around the world.

Fact is that the market is intoxicated with numerous traditional (local) agencies and complex tools.  While some agencies might be a very good fit for certain small & medium businesses, there is without a doubt a gap in the market for the rest of them.

I also believe that in 5-10 years from now, the market will change drastically and there will be only a few online digital (automated) agencies leading the game. Instaon was created as a direct consequence of that and to become the leading one.

We are building the very first Software-as-an-Agency platform, where automation and results are key. Let me show you how we are building the marketing solution of tomorrow.

SMB's challenges

By definition if you are a small (or medium sized) business, you don’t have high advertising budgets, no advanced marketing department, and limited time ressources. However, you do know how important online advertising is today in order to grow your business.

Today’s solutions for small businesses are the following: you do it yourself or you hire local agencies (freelancers). I’ll tell you why both options are really challenging (and sometimes impossible!) to make you succeed online as a small business:

Doing it yourself: The never-ending evolution, the tremendous complexity, the rise of new technologies and the frequent updates of large publishers make this option almost impossible. If you are not an expert or dedicated 80% of your time (which you probably don’t have), chances are little you succeed in the online jungle.

Local agencies (or freelancers): Agencies are not meant for everyone. Their high management fees make it complicated to reach profitability for a small (or medium) business with a limited advertising budget (<3000$/month). The more services you ask for, the more opportunities they have to charge you. The time and effort they put into helping you, will sometimes cost more than what you had prepared to spend in your ads. Moreover, as local services providers they often have limited experience & know-how on similar businesses.

Example

You open a Yoga Studio and have a 1000$ marketing budget per month to kick-off your new business.

Believe me, for optimal results you will need a cross-channel strategy and be present on major social media’s and search engines.

What would be the management fee of a local agency to manage this for you on a monthly basis? Let’s say 350$. We are talking about minimum 35% of your overall budget.

How many similar businesses did they manage as a local service provider? zero, one, two maybe? Their ads setup & management can’t compete with tools that manage hundreds of similar clients and learn on how to get optimal results.

SaaA? What is that?

If you ask me how I see the marketing solution of tomorrow for small & medium businesses, I would definitely describe it as an “Software-as-an-Agency”:

SaaA would automate most of the tasks, use the power of AI to improve clients’ results with historical data from similar businesses and advice on marketing strategies depending on the business and objectives.

SaaA would have a world-wide reach and as consequence be able to learn from hundreds of similar clients across the globe to optimise before ads creation. Delivered results would outperform any other local player.

SaaA would also cover all major online marketing services in order to become the one-stop -shop for SMBs (website (landing page) creation, paid marketing, creatives, etc). They would cut the high upfront costs of digitalisation and allow all SMBs to start their journey online.

SaaA as one-stop-shop, would also optimise budget distribution in real-time over the different channels to improve overall campaigns results.

SaaA would add a layer of service with marketing experts for bigger clients to accompany them in their growth and advice on more industry-specific subjects.

SaaA with its global team, could support all export campaign in other countries & languages with the help of local experts.

SaaA would have a live support 24/7 to help clients with questions or problems.

Instaon

Mission & vision

The mission & vision is clear. We want to make online marketing accessible to anyone. We want to help small & medium businesses grow, by building the advertising solution of tomorrow; A fully automated marketing platform (agency) backed by AI, making SMBs succeed online without breaking the bank.

Instaon Product

Every big project needs to start somewhere. We decided to focus on what can bring the fastest results in terms of growth for small & medium businesses. Paid online advertising.  How is Instaon changing the advertising landscape:

1. Artificial Intelligence (NLP/NLG)

Our algorithms are learning & improving everyday. They provide relevant automated advertising outputs with limited required inputs from our users.

Keywords selection: for search advertising keywords, your keyword selection is key. Keyword research can be complicated & time-consuming. At Instaon, we provide an instant & exhaustive list of keywords for any kind of business. (volume is key) After set-up, we optimise by adding or excluding new terms.

Creatives: if you are familiar with online advertising, you know the importance of creatives and the A/B testing of these. At Instaon, we automate your text ads copy-writing, while leaving you in control of what you want to publish or not. Social media’s ads are nothing more than text ads with visuals. We are working on automated high-converting image suggestions (coming soon ).

Landing pages (under construction): The missing puzzle piece is post-click landing pages creation. Imagine a network of thousands of landing pages changing content & visuals depending on the in-coming traffic source. We are on it.

2. Independent Instaon eco-system

Our 2 years of development has led us to build an independent Instaon eco-system. What does it mean? Users provide advertising inputs, we create Instaon campaigns and they can be translated into any platform instantly.

Possible use cases examples:

You could create an Instaon campaign with an advertising objective under 5 minutes and appear on 5+ channels (Facebook, Instagram, Google, Bing, Twitter, etc). Instaon could thereafter optimise and deliver cross-channel budget-optimisation & add other channels to explore new opportunities.

Duplicate one good performing campaign onto any other channel. From Facebook to Snapchat ? From Google to Facebook? Yes, sir.

In more technical terms, you can see Instaon as a simplified demand-side-platform (DSP) for major advertising channels & meant for SMBs.

Today, we are offering Google, Facebook (Instagram) &  Microsoft Ads. More to come.

3. Ultra-Scalability

The automation & scalability of Instaon, allow us to provide a high-quality service to a large volume of incoming leads on a freemium model.

4. Simplified & single account

No more need to create 6 different business manager accounts to be able to launch ads on different platforms. Signup on Instaon, credit your account with your advertising budget, tell us where you want to appear & we execute

Instaon Experts

“SaaA would add a layer of service with marketing experts for bigger clients to accompany them in their growth and advice on more custom subjects. We are aware that some human interaction will be important “

We provide a self-service solution, but are aware that human interactions are crucial for some users. On one hand for trust building & strategic guidance and, on the other hand for clients interested in a Do-it-for-Me solution.

To support these users and because some services aren’t (can’t be) automated yet, we have a team of Instaon experts ready to help our them. Online marketing experts that control, review and improve the overall ad performances of our bigger clients. (=paid plan)

Conclusion

We are building the marketing solution of tomorrow to help small and medium businesses grow online.

Give it a try and feel free to leave a comment below with new features / improvements ideas you’d like to see in the future.