The marketing industry demands all types of technologies to increase efficiency, insights and return. Today, marketing is becoming more customer oriented and data focused to effectively reach consumers on a personal level. Data and analytics have become popular tools for providing fruitful insights to influence future strategies of Fortune 1000 organizations. Businesses are on the lookout for a marketing partner that will handle their marketing needs and present efficient solutions, so that management can concentrate on core activities. Limelight is a unique marketing platform that will help build and measure your in-person marketing activities.
About Limelight
Limelight is a software platform that empowers experiential marketers and their agency partners to plan, build, communicate, and measure, any in-person marketing activity. Their solution uses scalable technology to dramatically decrease the cost and time currently associated with developing custom on-site digital experiences. Its digital touch points allow for the delivery of comprehensive data and analytics for every live experience. These insights provide marketers with a level of visibility into live programs and customer profiles that has never been possible in the experiential industry before now. Thanks to this, Limelight allows marketers to not only prove the marketing performance of their experiential budgets, but also improves the event-over-event ROI of activations.
Creator of Limelight
Jonah Midanik is the CEO and Founder of Limelight. He launched his first company, Casino Media Group, while in high school, becoming an entrepreneur at an early age. The online gaming agency evolved into the Immersion Media Group, an experiential marketing agency with millions in annual revenue, servicing Fortune 1000s across North America. With a data-driven approach, attributed to his degree in electrical engineering, Jonah went on to hold senior marketing roles at both Virgin Gaming and Ultimate Gaming. Through Limelight, Jonah strives to provide marketers with the tools and data they need to succeed in the experiential industry.
Early Days and Conception
From the early days of Limelight, Jonah’s goal has been to develop solutions and value directly influenced by client needs. Two years later, Limelight’s team hasn’t changed their philosophy in the slightest. They interview every core client to gain a deep understanding of their current experiential marketing capabilities and what their ideal future would look like, 3 to 5 years in the future. Leveraging these insights, the team at Limelight develops the tools and strategies to deliver a software vision that aligns with client needs and allows Limelight to stay ahead of the competition in the experiential industry. Limelight is also directly engaged in the local technology and startup ecosystem of Toronto. Their involvement in the burgeoning start-up community is supported with great investor relations, in both New York and Silicon Valley, that help Limelight identify key trends and future developments that they integrate into their own product.
Journey Toward Market Leader
Before Limelight, a system didn’t exist that could build out every digital touch point, without any coding required, and offer comprehensive analytics across a live activation. The status quo involved multiple vendors, long development times, and high costs, that produced disconnected experiences, with no visibility into the performance of all that time and money.
The biggest challenge in the early stages of Limelight was the same challenge any category creator faces. It was an educational journey, where not only did the Limelight team need to make prospective clients aware of Limelight, but it was also imperative to make them aware that a problem existed in the first place. Early adopters of Limelight included very forward thinking organizations who saw the possibility of the future and were open to Limelight’s cheaper, better and faster solution.
The way the team at Limelight overcame this challenge, from a marketing perspective, was by creating laser targeted content based on specific use cases. For example, producing tactical Auto Show Guides for the automotive industry prospects. These pieces were based on data collected from thousands of activations by Fortune 1000 companies, and offered insights not readily available anywhere else. They distributed these pieces to senior marketing executives who understood the logistical challenges of the industry. Eventually, these pieces gained enough traction to overcome the educational hurdle.
Limelight has already doubled revenue in each of its two years of existence. Continuing their successful expansion into the US market will see the company double for the third year straight, if not triple, as their software becomes more standardized across current and new client organizations.
Solutions with Satisfaction
Clients see benefits in cost, performance, and visibility, by using Limelight. They dramatically cut the cost of digital software development for experiential activations. Limelight’s data capture product also allows clients to increase consumer engagement, thanks to it’s built-in conditional experiences. Every consumer need is different, so the same marketing material and tactics don’t fit everyone. Therefore, every consumer is treated to a unique personalized experience, conditional on their own responses and interactions with Limelight’s digital touchpoints. Finally, the greatest benefits clients realize, are complete visibility into every live marketing program from a single dashboard. This level of real-time control is unheard of in the experiential marketing industry. Using Limelight, clients have instant access to every activation with an ability to restrict access to individual staff members depending on their role in the corporation.
Driving the Future of Marketing
In terms of experiential marketing data, Limelight expects insights to play a massive role in the industry moving forward. There will be more data than ever on event attendees, and experiences themselves, that will propel experiential marketing budgets moving forward. The winners of this data race within the experiential industry will be those that generate the most meaningful and usable insights about consumers, and the experience itself. This is how Limelight is building for the type of future their clients are aiming for.
Jonah’s Advice for the Young Entrepreneurs
Jonah says, “For any entrepreneur, I believe the most important advice is to be passionate about what you are setting out to do. It will always be an uphill climb, but you will be far more likely to maintain the motivation and insight behind you to keep pushing on. Once you have the thing you’re passionate about the rest is about surrounding yourself with good people. Startups live and die by the connections, culture and the skills of their small motivated team. Every person in your start-up needs to have the drive and commitment to become rockstars in their given area. That doesn’t mean they need the hard skill right off the bat, but need to have the drive to learn and learn quickly.”
“Finally, when push comes to shove, it’s important to trust your gut.”
