Kentucky natives Michael Browning and Clay Turner know a thing or two about business. When they decided to leave their careers in marketing and finance in 2014 to start Onovative, a banking-communications software company, they saw a chance to shape the future by learning from the past. “We want to solve some of the industry’s most frustrating problems with technology,” Clay says. By cleverly combining marketing automation and a customer relationship management (CRM) system with a communications platform, Onovative gives financial institutions a smarter, easier way to communicate.
Onovative harnesses Google tools so that their small business can make a big impact. AdWords, Google’s advertising program, allows them to target specific products and offerings, while also controlling when their ads are shown. “We learned that people tend to search for products like ours at certain times during the week, so we schedule our ads to only show during those peak times,” explains Michael. They use Google Apps for Work, including Gmail and Google Drive, to communicate and share information securely. “It’s very easy for a small business to use and comforting to know that all of your information is protected like it’s supposed to be,” says Clay. Onovative especially relies on Google Analytics to gain valuable insight into where their customers are coming from and what they are interacting with on the site. “Other businesses ask us what our secret is. It’s really Google Analytics,” Michael says.
Onovative now has nine employees with plans to hire more, and their client base has been doubling every quarter. They are committed to helping financial institutions of all sizes to better serve their customers and hope to double the business by the end of 2016. To do so, they know who they’ll turn to. “The number one reason for our marketing growth is Google,” says Michael. “Google is the only marketing channel that connects people with solutions when they have a question in their heads. There isn’t a marketing or advertising channel that comes close to what we get from Google Search and AdWords.”
Source: StartupNation