Last month, Marketo announced that it was acquiring social marketing startup Crowd Factory to add a social component to its marketing automation tools. Today the company is releasing its first products to come out of the deal.
Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez says this represents the two companies’ technology “all put together into a single hybridized product.” Actually, Marketo is releasing two products, Marketo Social Boost and Marketo Social Promotions, as part of a new Marketo Social Marketing suite.
“I think there’s a tremendous pent-up hunger to take social marketing out of the silo and to bring it into the mainstream,” Fernandez says.
And by that, he means that these aren’t just tools for marketing on Facebook, but rather for adding a social element to a broad range of online campaigns.
Sanjay Dholakia, formerly CEO of Crowd Factory and now Market’s senior vice president of product marketing and corporate development, says there are two big pieces to the suite. First, it helps you “put this word-of-mouth lift on everything you’re doing” by adding a social element to relatively traditional marketing and advertising. For example, he says you could direct your AdWords campaign to a Marketo landing page (that includes social sharing, so that each paid click that you get through the ad can multiply into many more visitors. Second, he says this will help companies reach their audience in new ways, like sweepstakes and flash deals. And of course there’s analytics data to help you see the measure of your campaigns.
Fernandez announced the new suite today as part of the Marketo Summit 2012.