San Mateo, Calif. – April 18, 2012 – Marketo today announced that it has acquired Crowd Factory, Inc., a social campaign management platform. 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.
Crowd Factory is a 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.
“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,” said Sanjay Dholakia, CEO of Crowd Factory.
“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 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.
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.
