Marketing is not an easy task for brands. There goes a lot of effort to reach the targets they want to achieve, and it costs a lot for the brands. One might think that the money spent on marketing is always good and has excellent ROI. But, many marketing expenses get wasted, and this can never be justified.

Every year, billions and billions of dollars are wasted on marketing and do not bring business. Compa- do is set out to tackle this global problem by delivering a modern digital customer acquisition platform that is as zero-waste and as customer-focused as possible. Brands collaborating with Compado to grow their customer base are only billed for effective new customers. Compado has built a tech platform that sports highly effective customer-acquisition frontends. It owns a variety of digital user interfaces on its own media sites, on syndicated media sites, on its publisher network that are set up in such a way that they are only visited by shoppers who are ready to take action and that fuel the purchase motivation of a shopper even further.

How it works

Now, when someone adds a brand to Compado’s tech platform for purchase-motivated audiences, this is exactly what will happen: The brand will enter their system and then, subsequently, be presented to shoppers across various frontends on their publisher network, such as shopping guides, ranking lists or quizzes. The distribution algorithm identifies the best frontends to promote the product and starts pushing the details there. With this architecture, they can deliver new customers at a success fee. And this certainly helps their mission, which is combating the global problem of wasted advertising.

You gotta put the right kind of infrastructure and instruments in place and then, given you have motivated people on board, everything else follows suite. That’s what’s happening in Compado.

Company values

Compado started its operations in 2016-17. Since then, they have won various awards by virtue of their unique solution. In Germany, Compado has already been named one of five start-ups to watch in 2022. They have also been recognized internationally. Adding more to this, Compado is recognized as one of the best companies of the Year 2022 by the CEOViews consortium. Acknowledging the same, Andreas Hoogendijk, Compado’s Chief Executive Officer, said, “This certainly is a special moment and puts a smile on our faces. Let’s say the journey’s been long and demanding.”

Compado has been a completely remote company with only digital offices. However, they haven’t let this come in the way of building trust with their clients. They regularly visit their client’s offices or invite them to various trade shows and networking events. According to Andreas Hoogenijk, these two factors have helped them build trust;

Simple products and great people.

Product: A product that’s set up in a simple manner goes a long way in creating trust. They are a customer acquisition channel and are delivering new customers to partnering brands. And they only need to pay them for those customers, for nothing else. So, as a brand, you see the customers coming in, and you see that you’re only billed for those customers. That’s very transparent and very effective.

People: Every brand has a success manager in Compado, a dedicated Account Manager that makes sure that a brand is set up correctly and grows its customer base through the platform.

Culture

Management at Compado believes in getting the steer in the hands of its employees. Get together a bunch of proactive, very smart, remote-working enthusiasts and see what happens. Speaking further about their culture Joschka Weltgen, their Chief Strategy Officer, said, “I’d say we have a healthy fully-remote performance culture: For us, that means everyone is measured against goals – we call those Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and all goals, from Trainee to CEO, are public. This, of course, helps a lot with remote working. Everyone knows what’s expected of them, and it’s all transparent and public. It’s hard to get lost this way. Next to working with a public goal-setting system, Compado is asynchronous-first. With those two concepts – OKRs, and async-first – you can clearly see that it takes a certain working style, certain skills, and certain ideas to make this kind of remote work effective. Of course, you also gotta give room for socializing; this exists in remote working companies, too. We meet 2-3 times a year on bigger company retreats.”

CSR activities

Compado as an organization has been environmentally conscious and climate-neutral (actually, even climate-positive). They do not have a business value in them, but they feel it’s not hurtful for business, either. They organize various charity events like Fokus Zukunft, Treedom, and beefuture focused on environmental issues. These were the initiatives started- ed by the employees and were done without considering the business impact.

Adding more about the CSR activities, Joschka Welt-gen said, “We do have shared values, like positivity – we call it ‘Rise and Shine’, or teamwork – we call it ‘Better Together’, and those somewhat relate to our charities: Together we’re supporting initiatives that are making the world a better place, and that makes us happy, too; but it’s not something we have to do to be successful at business or something that we view as ‘strategic’. It’s grass-roots, really, coming from our employees.”

Bringing out innovations

Compado uses various tech stacks to ensure that the brands can reach the right audience. This ranges from automated and individualized brand recommendations, supported by Machine Learning and AI, to technologies for identifying purchase-motivated audiences. Regarding staying innovative, they keep brainstorming and setting up the priorities for the coming three months every quarter. This brings a lot of new ideas and fresh concepts along; regularly reflecting and aligning helps them to stay innovative.

“You gotta put the right kind of infrastructure and instruments in place, and then, given you have motivated people on board, follow suit. That’s what’s happening in Compado.”

Future of the company

The ad distribution platform already has brands from various industries, and in the future, they wish to expand this to various niche markets. Other than the obvious – expansion, they are also adding new user interfaces that they can use to match brands and customers. Also, to expand their reach, they are adding new media sites to the platform, be it owned media sites or syndicated media sites of partnering publishing companies.

They are already matching millions of customers to brands every day and can do several million more. The market for efficient waste-free customer acquisition is big, and so is the need for consumers to find trusted shortcuts to trustworthy, value-driven brands in a world full of choice overload and shortened attention spans. They are right on track to becoming a leading global digital customer acquisition source with unbeatable efficiency.

If you are reading this, and you’d like to add a modern digital customer acquisition service to your marketing mix, too, that bills you only for new customers, you can request access to their tech platform online through compado.com/access.