Social Marketing Automation News: Marketo Acquires Crowd Factory

San Mateo, Calif.– Marketo announced on April 18, 2012 that it has redefined marketing automation with the acquisition of Crowd Factory, Inc., a leading social campaign management platform. With its first acquisition, Marketo breaks social marketing from its usual silo, making it an integrated and integral part of every online marketing initiative. With social marketing a mandate for every company – large and small, business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) – this combined solution enables marketers to amplify and measure social-enabled campaigns to deliver more customers and gain an immediate competitive edge.

“Social marketing campaigns and marketing automation have been like the proverbial two ships passing in the night, with most social marketing tools sitting in silos disconnected from mainstream marketing processes. Today we have changed that game,” said Phil Fernandez, president and CEO of Marketo. “By combining Crowd Factory with Marketo, marketing professionals can finally use integrated social campaigns to boost the reach and impact of every marketing initiative they undertake – at every step in the customer lifecycle. Since releasing our first products four years ago, Marketo’s innovation has repeatedly reset the standard for marketing solutions, and we’re thrilled to do it again with this revolutionary development in social marketing automation.”

Crowd Factory is a complete social campaign management platform that helps marketers accelerate social and word-of-mouth marketing, grow their marketing databases with unique social profiles and attract new customers. The platform allows marketers to add social applications and messages quickly to every channel – Facebook Pages, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds, landing pages, websites, banner ads and emails. These applications encourage social sharing, supercharging the results of every multi-channel marketing campaign. Then, Crowd Factory automatically tracks the reach and impact of this social sharing, providing direct feedback on the return on investment (ROI) of social marketing. Companies of all sizes, including Molson Coors, Sony Music, Jive Software, Quickoffice and British Telecom use Crowd Factory’s social marketing software to drive real business results every day.

Now, marketers have a breakthrough solution that unifies Marketo’s broad platform for marketing automation, sales effectiveness, and analytical reporting with Crowd Factory’s platform for rapidly creating and deploying social campaigns like customer referrals or sweepstakes.

 Sanjay Dholakia, CEO of Crowd Factory commented the following:

“Crowd Factory pioneered the idea of Social ROI by empowering marketers to push viral campaigns throughout the social web, and then track that valuable social activity back to individual influencers and conversions, this fits perfectly into the vision of marketing automation that Marketo has led: that all marketing activity matters and can be measured against the bottom line. We are excited to join the Marketo team and help companies of any size in any market segment generate more campaigns, more leads and, ultimately, more customers.”

“I like this combination a lot,” said Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group, LLC, a customer strategy consulting firm. “A 21st-century multichannel marketing strategy has to incorporate social channels as well as traditional or it’s going to fail. To succeed at that, there needs to be a technological underpinning that can handle all channels in conjunction with the increasingly demanding requirements from customers. The combination of Marketo and Crowd Factory is as close to the complete package for this as you’ll see for a long while.”

“The prospect of combining Crowd Factory’s social capabilities and platform with Marketo’s marketing automation platform – especially lead scoring – is a really exciting and innovative development,” said Christine Poirier, Manager, Digital and Relationship Marketing at Molson Coors. “Our reach with email campaigns is limited to the consumers in our database. However, with Crowd Factory we are able to easily give our consumers a way to share our brands and our content with their friends, in an authentic way. This helps us amplify our reach, while also giving our consumers a fun way to engage with our brands and with their social networks.”

“As a customer of both companies, this is terrific news – it’s all about reducing friction in the marketing funnel and scaling our ability to effectively reach, educate and nurture our target customers,” said David Karel, VP of Marketing at Bizo. “Our revenue growth is accelerating and Marketo has played a big role as we’ve ramped our marketing effort from ‘zero to 100 mph’ these past couple of years; in fact, our marketing programs contributed almost as much business in Q1 as they did all of last year. We just signed up with Crowd Factory to continue our growth by giving a social lift to all of our content and campaigns. Integrating this power with Marketo will help us drive better results at each stage of the sales and marketing funnel.”

Marketo will continue to support and invest in all current products and customers of both companies. And with combined innovation from both companies, Marketo expects to introduce an exciting new unified product family soon, one in which social campaign management comes to life, where every marketing campaign is a social-enabled marketing campaign. Customers will get an inside view at the Marketo User Summit, May 22-24 at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square.

About Marketo

Marketo is the fastest growing provider in Revenue Performance Management. Marketo’s powerful yet easy-to-use marketing automation and sales effectiveness solutions transform how marketing and sales teams of all sizes work — and work together — to drive dramatically increased revenue performance and fuel business growth. The company’s proven technology, comprehensive services and expert guidance are helping more than 1,800 enterprise and mid-market companies around the world to turn marketing from a cost center to a business-building revenue driver. Marketo also offers Spark by Marketo™, a new brand of marketing automation tailored specifically for small businesses – the fastest-growing and largest segment of today’s economy.

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