On Tuesday, we covered the launch of Nimble 2.0, a simple, affordable social relationship manager designed to give SMBs the same mileage out of social that enterprise has been able to create with its CRM strategies. For most companies, managing customer relations on social media is difficult, time-consuming, and less-than-precise, and they outsource different parts of the social media management, marketing, and sales to disparate solutions.
Thus, B2B startups are increasingly looking to throw a wrench into the gears of legacy CRM models, providing SMBs with lightweight solutions that make it easier for them to interact with customers on social networks, track those conversations and manage relationships across platforms.
Today, the space greets another unified management player, as New York City-based Tracx is officially launching its social media management platform into the wild after several years of building, tweaking their infrastructure and beta testing. Simply put, the startup is offering a modular and scalable platform that enables professional users to build, manage, and monetize their social presence. Using its proprietary tech, the startup allows brands and agencies to define their “ultimate audience profile,” manage, and to monetize that profile to drive engagement, conversion, and good old ROI.
To support its launch, tracx is also announcing that it has closed a $4.4 million round in series B funding. The round was led by Flybridge Capital Partners and Revel Partners. As part of the round, Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge and Charlie Kemper of Revel will be joining the startup’s board of directors. The team says that it will be using its new capital to push its service in international markets, ramp up hiring, and continue touching up its UI.
With a growing number of options out there for social CRM, tracx’s SaaS solution looks to go beyond simply managing Twitter and Facebook feeds to providing brands with a more granular view into the entire lifecycle of social media campaigns. From planning, testing, and strategizing how to most effectively distribute content to better understanding and communication with your brand’s social media influencers, tracx wants to offer an end-to-end service that allows brands to get more bang for their increasing spend on social campaigns.
But the real key to the startup’s value proposition is its data engine. Tracx says that it is currently collecting and analyzing “over a terabyte of social data every second” — which is mind boggling if you think about those big data implications — to give its customers a more accurate, realtime view of audience segmentation across marketing, sales, and customer relations.
Like Nimble, tracx wants to go beyond “listening and monitoring” platforms by offering big picture analysis of the competitive landscape and giving them more realtime data than the next service to enable them to quickly strategize, research, and measure conversations that matter most to their business. And access detailed reporting.
Bringing big data to social CRM can have a big effect on how deep marketers are able to go in planning the best ways to reach and engage their customers. Companies don’t want to bring a knife to a gun fight, and building a SaaS solution on top of a massive data silo — as long as that realtime engine doesn’t encumber the user experience — allows brands to arm themselves with more effective ammo in an increasingly data-driven world.
Tracx launches with 180 brands and agencies in tow, including Coca Cola, Interpublic Group, and Porter Novelli, to name a few.
For more, check out tracx at home here.
