10 Marketing Tools Based on Elixir

The choice of technology when creating a web or mobile app is crucial for the entire development plan.

Elixir is increasingly becoming the first choice by CTOs and is one of the most liked programming languages among programmers.

There are important reason why the popularity of the Elixir language is growing. The largest companies are more and more willing to use it [5 top-tier Companies that Use Elixir]. Thanks to Elixir solutions, such as productivity, scalability, and parallel processing, it enables the development of MVP app into fully-fledged applications with global scalability.

In this blog post, I'd like to introduce you to 10 marketing companies that are based on Elixir. I will explain why they chose Elixir language and what needs it responded.

Moz

Moz is a global tool appreciated by many marketers. The company provides the Moz Pro suite for digital marketing analysis and SEO. Moz Pro gives marketers access to valuable and timely data in many dimensions of marketing - search engine results, keyword performance, site indexing, and site optimization.

Moz Pro provides support for mobile search engines along with ranking data that provides a competitive advantage.

In 2016, Devin Ellis decided to explain why they chose Elixir.

We are abandoning MySQL database storage—our current infrastructure’s decisive bottleneck—in favor of a database-free architecture and an Elixir-driven data indexing model. 

Ellis explicitly gives the reasons why they decided to change the technology. He explains problems with database architecture, limitations, and scalability with the non-standard use of MySQL and Ruby.

Our build pipeline was written in Ruby, which is ill-optimized for concurrency. While parallel I/O is performant enough, parallel computation requires multiple processes, each bearing the overhead of the full application environment.

By transforming from Ruby to Elixir, Moz got impressive results by compressing data files, better query performance, and building speed. [details]

Moz appreciates Elixir language for many other reasons:

• provides optimized solutions for parallel computing,
• it is robust and reliable,
• it is perfect for distributed systems,
• achieves impressive performance to dynamics,
• enables flexible code management.

Elixir technology enables Moz Pro to manage a powerful web analytics tool economically. This powerful tool is developed by a team of only five programmers, and it wouldn't be possible without the committed Elixir community that helps solve issues that appears on each step of development.

Pinterest

Pinterest is known to users as a social media platform for sharing photos, browsing inspiration, looking for new brands, trends and exchanging pins. For marketers, it is an excellent source of promotion of business and page views for SEO. Pinterest's potential both among users and marketers means that the tool has over 454 million active users per month (data for Q2 2021).

Technology transformation is behind Pinterest's success!

The popular social media service already had over 70 million users in 2014. However, that's ⅙ less than is possible now, thanks to the change in technology.

It was in 2014 that Pinterest decided to transform technology from Python to Elixir. This is a bold change for the application, which was already popular all over the world. Considering the fact that Elixir language was only 2 years old, it's even more impressive (Jose Valim created the language in 2012). Pinterest used Elixir to deliver 14,000 notifications per second across 15 servers. For comparison, the previous Java system used as many as 30 servers.

Developers used Elixir in the rate-limiting system for the API and Ads API, ensuring faster response times than the previous Memcached-based system.

Extra advantage of Elixir- code reduced to a tenth of the old code!

It’s small, it’s elegant, it’s thoughtful, it’s fun, and it’s very, very, very readable once you flip over into functional programming mentality, which took my intern a week. - said Pinterest Software Engineer Steve Cohen.

Looking at the data from the business side, the change of technology to Elixir language allowed Pinterest to increase the number of users, which consequently increased the application's business potential. From year to year, the number of users and pins, boards, and business accounts is growing dynamically, which is possible only if the technology has the appropriate scalability and parallel processing capabilities.

SurferSeo

SurferSEO is a tool that is a blessing to many content marketers, copywriters, and freelancers involved in SEO. SurferSEO facilitates the daily work of marketers and increases their efficiency.

The tool acquires data in real-time exactly as the Google robot sees it. Thanks to the advanced tool, you know what is missing in the article to position it organically in the search engine. In addition, SurferSEO allows you to preview competing reports for the indicated key phrases, which effectively optimizes the text for SEO.

Extremely competitive compared to other tools is the "Serp Analyzer" function, which allows you to preview the TOP 50 articles on Google. It displays articles that will appear in Google after entering specific key phrases and the "Content Score" indicator, which suggests a particular number of key phrases, words, headings, and photos, which is the most optimal to get high search engine results.

It is a powerful tool that requires scalable, stable, and parallel processing. This is where Elixir comes in.

SurferSEO is a relatively young company, operating on the market since 2017, which was created as an MVP project. However, the creators chose Elixir for a reason, and as they say, if it had not been for this choice, Surfer would not have escalated as quickly as it is now.

If it had not been for the bold decision of Lucjan Suski (then CTO, today CEO) to choose Elixir technology to build the application, Surfer would be in a different place today. Both in terms of the scaling of the application itself and the development of the product team, to which, among others, because of Elixir, more talented people join. Elixir is our foundation. - says Tomasz Niezgoda, Marketing Executive & Partner at SurferSEO

At the moment, SurferSEO has over 4.5 thousand users around the world, and the tool itself is expanded with additional functions and possibilities, which are a must-have for SEO masters.

Linkly

Linkly is one of the SaaS tools for marketers or agencies designed to shorten links and target audiences. The application allows you to integrate with Google, Facebook, or Twitter retargeting pixels to create groups of recipients, which is especially required in the case of digital advertising campaigns.

Linkly allows you to use advanced targetting, such us by country, device, or link rotator. It adds branding options by adding up to 50 domains to your account and adding links with the possibility of personalizing metadata. In addition, it enables complete tracking link analysis thanks to comprehensive reporting and identification of search robots.

Chris Muktar, Founder of Linkly, explains precisely why the application is written in Elixir language.

Writing in Elixir is a joyful experience. It follows similar paradigms to Rails, including MVC, and even looks similar. Unlike Rails, the code is compiled before it is run. This is a useful step as it allows you to catch errors that you otherwise might not have. - admits in the article.

The founder of Linkly mentions the extraordinary performance of Elixir, which in the case of SaaS is much better than Rails and has lower requirements for the hardware used. Muktar also appreciates the availability of up-to-date Elixir Hex packages - JSON parsers, HTTP clients, Markdown formatting, and parsing tools.

I found, it was very easy to use Elixir’s Tesla package for interacting with HTTP endpoints of services, and finally ended up preferring working this way, versus using pre-packaged gems, as it’s lighter, and allows you to understand what’s happening.

Even though far fewer Elixir programmers are on the software development market, Chris Muktar admits that it's just a fantastic language for real "rock stars" programming and would use it in future projects without hesitation.

Discord

You may be surprised by the application for players in the list of marketing tools, but we can perceive Discord as a social medium with marketing potential for good reasons. First, it is based on messaging and channels with a specific topic among users. Especially effective as a community-building tool in domains such as blockchain technology or its subdomain - NFT.

Using the available Global Video Game Market Value statistics, we can estimate that in 2025 the market will reach a value of almost 270 trillion dollars. Therefore, you will not be surprised by the popularity of this tool among players now.

Elixir solutions are the basis of Discord's chat infrastructure from the very beginning. According to current data, 6.7 million active servers spend 4 billion minutes on calls every day, and the application alone is used by over 140 million active users per month. The tool is based on a video, text, and voice communicator depending on the user's preferences.

The constantly growing community and the opportunities used by investors in the gaming industry mean that Discord has a bright future ahead of it, which is why Elixir has become, above all, a pragmatic way to have a solid architecture and scale of the entire application.

Walnut

Building customer experience by creating a code-free and configurable online platform is one of the main motives for creating Walnut - a startup combining marketing with sales at the product presentation and market research level.

Walnut focuses on the perfect product presentation through UX on the possible template providing data from the customer experience analysis. Ultimately, such a tool is to shorten the customer decision time and provide data to marketing and sales departments, ensuring marketing automation and causing a higher conversion.

Walnut technology captures the software's front end (and disconnects it from the backend), giving the user complete control over the appearance and functionality of the product. With access to state-of-the-art editing tools, Walnut allows you to customize your product demo to suit each prospect while also giving you access to analysis and reporting.

Driftrock

Another company offering marketing tools that are based on Elixir solutions is Driftrock. It is an advanced and custom tool for generating high-quality leads.

The tool enables the integration of over 20 lead sources, no matter if they are obtained from social media, Google, or your CRM. Thanks to this, you can implement complete marketing automation, including user tracking and new leads with high purchasing potential.

Driftrock keeps customer segments in sync with non-standard audiences, providing better results in Lookalikes campaigns and reducing the risk of burning through marketing budgets to digital campaigns.

The Driftrock app development team brings together Ruby gems, Elixir packages, and web apps on Heroku to keep the site running smoothly.

We’re increasingly reliant on automated tests, feature toggles, and backward compatibility - topics that have featured heavily in our retrospectives. [source: Driftrock's Journey to Continuous Delivery]

Meltwater

Meltwater is a company that provides advanced solutions for social media, PR, and content marketing. Media monitoring, social listening, social influencer management are just some of Meltwater's solutions.

Meltwater facilitates media networking, translating press releases into multiple languages, and provides a media distribution network. In addition to social media management functions such as post scheduling, the ability to share content across various channels, the tool monitors essential conversations on the web, tracks industry topics, and monitors your brand reputation.

Thanks to AI and data science, Meltwater can provide information about the company in real-time. It allows you to monitor data appearing in your company's media and your competition and trends closely related to your industry. This facilitates a quick reaction of marketing and adapting communication to customer expectations.

It is during media monitoring that Meltwater uses Elixir solutions.

My team and I have built a solution that mines a stream of online articles for real-time insights for our customers. This component’s logic could be dramatically simplified if we could assume that it never receives near-duplicates of articles. While deduplication of identical documents is simple, detection of near-duplicates (i.e. “same thing, just slightly different”) is a complex but well-researched problem space. To solve our problem, we ended up building a locality-sensitive hashing library for Elixir. Read on to find out why and how we built and open-sourced ExLSH. [Read more]

AuthorityLabs

AuthorityLabs is an SEO automation software for websites that is popular with marketers all over the world. The tool allows you to track local and mobile rankings daily by adding domains, keywords, and locations you want to follow. With AuthorityLabs, you will access detailed and up-to-date search data by region, city, or postal code.

The founder of AuthorityLabs is Chase Granberry, who is also behind the Logflare tool.

Elixir is so easy to pickup. And it makes a great backend if you decide to spit out the frontend down the road.

— Chase Granberry (@chasers) November 8, 2020

SweetIQ

The "Near Me" brand experience is a solution provided by another marketing application based on Elixir language - SweetIQ. Through a holistic and bold approach to the digital marketing era, SweetIQ fosters engaged customer relationships.

Some of the tool's benefits are data analytics, reviews management, and store locator software that enable the creation of microsites. SweetIQ focuses on SEO best practices for local businesses and large businesses with multiple brick-and-mortar stores. In addition, this solution allows you to update the data in the CMS of store locations without involving various teams.

Elixir is responsible for the backend of the application, incl. enables address parsing.

FAQ

What are some marketing tools based on Elixir?

Elixir-based marketing tools include Moz, Pinterest, SurferSEO, Linkly, Discord, Walnut, Driftrock, Meltwater, AuthorityLabs, and SweetIQ, each offering unique features for SEO, social media, and content marketing.

How does Elixir contribute to the performance of marketing tools?

Elixir improves marketing tools by providing scalable, stable, and parallel processing capabilities, which is essential for handling large amounts of data and user interactions in real-time.

What specific advantages do companies find in using Elixir for their marketing tools?

Companies find Elixir advantageous for its ability to handle high traffic, real-time data processing, and efficient parallel computing, which enhance the performance and scalability of their marketing applications.

Can you provide examples of how specific marketing tools benefit from Elixir?

Examples include Moz for its SEO platform, Pinterest for social media engagement, and SurferSEO for SEO content optimization, all leveraging Elixir for better performance and scalability.

How has the transition to Elixir impacted companies like Pinterest and Moz?

Companies like Pinterest and Moz have experienced improved performance, reduced server costs, and enhanced scalability after transitioning to Elixir, contributing to their growth and efficiency.

Why is Elixir a preferred choice for SaaS marketing tools like Linkly?

Elixir is preferred for SaaS marketing tools for its performance, scalability, and concurrent processing capabilities, which are crucial for handling large volumes of data and interactions.

What are the common features among marketing tools developed in Elixir?

Common features include real-time data analytics, high scalability, efficient parallel processing, and robust performance, catering to various marketing needs and operations.