Conductor Proves Web Presence Management Is A Real Thing With $27 Million In Series D

Conductor, the web presence management platform that looks to put an end to ads, has today raised $27 million in Series D funding led by Catalyst Investors, with participation from existing investors including FirstMark Capital, Matrix Partners, and Investor Growth Capital. A new investor, Blue Cloud Ventures, also joined the round.

The company started out as an SEO-based platform, but has watched the transition of the marketing and advertising space and found that it’s not about how much you pay to put content online, but about the quality of the content and the strategy used to share it.

“The marketing industry must reinvent itself to work,” said cofounder Seth Besmertnik. “With multiple screens and DVRs, we don’t watch commercials like we used to. And that same behavior keeps playing out online. Marketers will spend more than $100 billion this year on paid media.”

Instead of focusing on the price of ad banners and ad words, Conductor looks at the demographics that are drawn or targeted by a certain brand. For example, Huggies is probably targeting adults with youngish children, mostly moms. Conductor then looks at what that demographic clicks on (in almost any demographic, people click far more on unpaid content than they do on advertisements) and helps the brand formulate content and strategy.

So in the Huggies example, Conductor would help Huggies get the right content on Pinterest, Instagram, Google, and Facebook, and do so in a way that is optimized for discoverability on those various networks.

Conductor also provides full analytics on its tools, letting you see how content performed on various platforms.

“It’s our job to identify the right people, and pay attention to their journey from Point A to discovering good content,” said Besmertnik. “And because this is a new way of marketing, and brands don’t necessarily have “web presence” in their vocabulary, it’s up to us to succeed for them.”

Conductor clients pay an annual licensing fee to gain access to the analytics platform and Conductor’s web presence advisors. Pricing starts at around $24k/year and the highest paying clients on the platform are paying around $500k/year.

This latest round of funding bring’s Conductor’s total financing to more than $60 million.