Case Studies
How Quo put 60% of its marketing investments into offline channels
Twenty months ago, podcasts were Quo's only offline channel. Today offline is 60% of its marketing budget. How geo holdouts, MMM, and a shared framework with Finance turned conviction into evidence.
Pranav Piyush
Co-founder, CEO
How Quo built confidence to put 60% of its marketing investment into offline channels
Twenty months ago, Quo's only offline marketing channel was podcasts: a small, early bet with limited investment.
Today, more than 60% of the company’s marketing budget is invested in offline channels.
That didn’t happen because of a change in conviction. Quo already believed that channels like podcasts, TV, OOH, and creators could push growth. What changed was its ability to measure each channel’s incremental impact well enough to make larger bets, adjust investment, and explain those decisions internally.
Who is Quo?
Quo helps small and midsize businesses make sure they never miss a customer conversation. The platform brings calls and texts into one place, helping teams communicate more effectively, understand what's happening across their conversations, and use AI to make sure important calls aren’t missed. The goal is to help businesses turn those conversations into revenue.
Like many Series B SaaS companies, Quo's early growth engine was search, with organic SEO content and paid SEM making up most of the mix. But search was getting harder to win, so Quo knew this wouldn’t carry the next stage of growth.
As the company began exploring beyond digital acquisition, it faced a common problem: offline channels influence demand without producing a directly attributable click. They needed a way to understand whether those investments would create incremental growth and, if so, how much to invest in them.
That's where Paramark came in.
The challenge: conviction without proof
Quo did not need to be convinced that offline marketing could work. Its founding team had seen how narrative, brand, and organic demand generation could influence buyers long before they reached a measurable conversion point. That drove much of Quo's early organic growth and, over time, transformed Quo into a marketing-led organization.
The new issue was accountability.
Click-based attribution worked reasonably well for paid digital channels, but it could not capture the full effect of a podcast ad, a TV campaign, or an OOH placement. As investment increased, Quo needed answers to practical allocation questions:
Which offline channels are creating incremental demand?
What level of spend is sufficient to generate a reliable signal?
When should the team scale investment, and when should it pull back?
“If you can't figure out the effectiveness of it, it's going to be really hard to get investment behind it,” says Tori Murray, Senior Director of Paid Growth at Quo.
What changed with Paramark
Tori joined the team shortly after Quo began working with Paramark. She'd never worked with a marketing mix model before, and had expected to spend her early months making the case for offline spend. Instead, she found the case already made and a partner already in place to prove it. “I felt a lot of relief, to be honest. The belief was there, so I could spend my energy on proving it instead of selling it,” she said of those first weeks.
Paramark became part of how Quo evaluated offline investment: designing tests, interpreting the results, and giving the team evidence for its next budget decision.
OOH was the clearest example. Unlike a paid-search campaign, OOH cannot always be tested with a small experimental budget. Quo had to commit meaningful spend before knowing whether the channel would generate incremental impact.
So Quo and Paramark built a geo holdout experiment. The campaign ran in some markets while similar markets were held out as controls. The team could then compare how demand changed in the two groups before and after the campaign.
The test produced several signals. Paramark's model showed incremental lift in overall traffic. Quo also saw more customers choosing phone numbers with area codes corresponding to the markets where OOH was running. And the exposed markets were showing different results from the controls.
“None of this was perfect, but the signals all pointed the same direction, and that direction was positive,” Tori says.
That was enough to justify testing OOH again in the fall rather than treating the initial campaign as a one-off bet.
Creator and influencer marketing required a different approach. Here, Quo could create clearer variation in spend by concentrating investment into one- or two-week bursts rather than keeping the channel at the same level indefinitely. That variation gives the model a stronger signal to work with and makes the impact easier to isolate. Over time, Quo expects to balance these bursts with a more consistent, always-on creator investment as confidence in the channel grows.
Bringing Finance into the conversation
The larger the offline bets became, the more important it was to involve Finance from the start.
Finance already saw marketing as a growth lever, but that did not mean every new channel received a blank check. Before a test begins, the teams agree on a budget large enough to produce a meaningful signal, enough to inform a real decision without committing indefinitely to an unproven channel.
The purpose is not to guarantee a positive ROI but to make uncertainty actionable. Once a test runs, the team has a shared framework for what comes next: scale and optimize when the evidence is promising, or redirect investment when it is not.
That requires accepting that some tests will not work. But for Quo, an inconclusive or disappointing result is not a reason to stop experimenting. It is information the team can use to avoid funding the wrong thing.
As Tori puts it: “If we don't test it and just rely on what's safe, we're never going to know.”
Finance and Data are therefore part of the measurement conversation itself: discussing model assumptions, reviewing the signals used to evaluate performance, and understanding the limits of what each test can show.
“If you don't bring your partners along on that journey, then the trust can start to erode,” Tori says.
From “does it work?” to “what should we fund?”
Quo’s measurement challenge has evolved with its marketing program.
The question is no longer simply whether offline channels can work. It is how much to invest in each channel, when returns begin to diminish, and where the next marketing dollar is most likely to create incremental growth.
“Believing is one thing, but being able to back up that belief with multiple data points is the key,” says Tori.
That is especially relevant as Quo continues to scale channels like podcasts, test OOH, and expand its creator program. The same measurement infrastructure that helped the team make its first meaningful offline bets now supports ongoing budget-allocation decisions.
Twenty months ago, podcasts were Quo’s only offline channel. Today they’re one of several, and offline channels account for more than 60% of Quo’s marketing investments, which have quadrupled in the same time period.
Paramark did not give Quo a new belief about offline marketing. It gave the company a disciplined way to test that belief, decide how much to invest, and defend those decisions with evidence.
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