Austin-based Social Marketing Platform Enables Brands to Measure and Grow UGC
LoudCrowd, the user-generated content (UGC) platform designed to help brands get more customers creating branded social content, announced $2.2 million in seed funding. This round is led by LiveOak Venture Partners, with participation from existing investor Active Capital and prominent Austin angel investors including Steve Schaffer, founder and former CEO of Offers.com. David Stewart, Venture Partner at LiveOak Venture Partners, will join the Board of Directors as part of this financing.
Customer Led Growth – or the idea that a brand’s most valuable marketers is its customers – is the secret growth recipe for many of the fastest growing apparel brands in the world. LoudCrowd customers like Kendo Brands, Oh Polly, and Ryderwear have capitalized on their ability to get their customers to create UGC at scale. This organic content resonates with consumers who are suffering from influencer and ad-targeting fatigue.
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“We believe that we are witnessing the democratization of marketing, and that the most successful brands in the world will increasingly leverage their customers to grow,” said Stewart. “LoudCrowd has built a platform that enables brands to scale their earned media with measurement tools and customer incentives.”
The team, consisting predominantly of former TrendKite executives, has achieved 40% month-over-month growth since May. “At TrendKite we solved earned press for brands, and here we are solving earned social media so that it can be leveraged as a true marketing channel,” said Justin Papermaster, the co-founder and President of LoudCrowd and former sales leader at TrendKite. TrendKite sold to Cision in 2019 for $225 million.
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Co-Founder and CEO Gary Garofalo added, “With COVID-19 impacting traditional retail, there has never been a more important time for brands to strengthen their presence on social media. It isn’t possible to infinitely scale social spend, so brands need to turn to their customers to get the word out. It’s the ultimate growth channel for consumer marketing”.
“The future of marketing will be organic, social, and customer-led,” says Pat Matthews, CEO and Founder of Active Capital. “There is such an overload of paid & influencer based marketing in the market right now, leaving audiences fatigued and craving authenticity. LoudCrowd makes it incredibly easy for brands to drive customer-led growth in a time when they desperately need it.”
In 2021 LoudCrowd will look to continue its rapid growth with several new products aimed at automating social marketing engagement, benchmarking brands, and measuring customer LTV. To support these products, LoudCrowd is hiring a variety of roles focused on engineering, sales and marketing.
Benefits of LoudCrowd include:
- Powerful UGC analytics to reveal which customers, ambassadors, and content are driving the most value
- The ability to engage and reward your most valuable customers
- Best-in-class tools to scale and manage ambassador programs
- The first platform that can create completely automated rewards programs to encourage customers to post on social media
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