Working out of Boston's Seaport, Techstars alum Crowdly is getting ready for a bigger push into the realm of word-of-mouth marketing—which is what the startup has built an entire platform around. It's also a kind of "wild west" situation, Crowdly CEO Dan Sullivan told BostInno, and that means there's an opportunity become a leader in the space.
"It works incredibly well in a very measurable way, and I think there’s a lot of interest."
In its aim to become the dominant player in the word-of-mouth marketing world, Crowdly just closed on a small round of about half a million dollars to hire a total of eight salespeople, which brings its total funding to about $3 million.
"Our industry is incredibly hot right now," he said. "It works incredibly well in a very measurable way, and I think there’s a lot of interest."
Crowdly grew its revenue by 250 percent last year and it became profitable sometime between the last quarter of the year and the first quarter of 2016, Sullivan said, though he did not disclose any specific revenue figures. The startup counts several large brands among its roughly three dozen customers, including Lowe's, P.F. Changs and Sweet Baby Ray's.
The startup falls under the broad category of influencer marketing, but instead of helping brands pay influencers on various social media channels to promote their products, Crowdly helps brands identify the brands identify their largest advocates online and give them away to organically share messages about those brands.
For example, Sweet Baby Ray's used Crowdly's platform to find brand advocates to joined their new ambassador program that would help drive future word-of-mouth campaigns. The original goal was to find 7,500 brand advocates, but they ended up finding more than 9,000 because of Crowdly. And from that, Sweet Baby Ray's was able to reach more than 4.5 million people during its campaign and get its content shared 250 percent more than from its existing social media channels.
"By going to that word of mouth channel, they get 2.5 times more shares from 8000 people than the rest of that community combined," Sullivan said. And the kind of content they share isn't the kind of contests that Sullivan said is worse than spam, but the kind of content they want to share because they're enamored with the brand.
"I think it’s the right time to be more aggressive and capture that emerging market," Sulivan said.
Image via Flickr.
