What’s more likely to convince you to try a new restaurant: a banner ad or your friend’s latest Instagram? Santa Monica-based MomentFeed is betting on the latter, with a range of tools that gives brands the ability to tap into the marketing potential of individuals’ location-based social posts. To that end, the company raised a $5.5 million Series A this week led by Signia Venture Partners, with participation from Draper Nexus, DFJ Frontier, Double M Partners, and Daher Capital.
[ibimage==29604==Large==none==self==ibimage_align-center]
“We’re finding that big national brands see this as a huge opportunity, a way to interact with their customers as if they are a local business, building real relationships between consumers and the people they come in contact with,” said CEO Robert Blatt.
That’s because, for many businesses such as restaurants, brick-and-mortar stores are where 95 percent of the cash changes hands. MomentFeed gives its clients a way to tap into the social activity that takes place at specific retail locations — your local Home Depot, for example — and turn it into marketing moments.
“Because we capture the social and mobile activity around these physical locations, we can link that activity directly to what companies care about, which is the cash register, linking tighter and tighter marketing activities to changes in foot traffic and revenue and things that matter to a business,” said Blatt, whose proprietary tools allow the company to derive unique insights.
Using PinSync, MomentFeed optimizes location data in Facebook, FourSquare and Google+ so that when a customer checks in, the latitude and longitude is accurate. Another tool, LocalVoice, lets brands monitor and activate on location-specific social conversations by tracking geotagged mentions. That means when someone Instagrams their favorite meal tagged at a specific restaurant location, the brand can re-share that image on their Facebook page and explain where it was taken.
Handy as these tools are, they’re made significantly more valuable by MomentFeed’s Business Intelligence, which provides real-time ROI data. This tool allows businesses to track performance against local competitors, and take a look at location-specific analytics as well as information across the brand.
Today, the company counts nearly 50 brands, including the Home Depot and 7-Eleven, among its clients. Although the majority of clients have over 100 locations nationwide, Blatt says they cater to anyone with more than five stores. As MomentFeed continues to scale, it will have to grow its team accordingly. Blatt expects his numbers to swell from 40 now to 100 by the end of 2014.
To Blatt, who took over as CEO just this year, success in mobile marketing depends on not relying on what’s already been done; MomentFeed's previous CEO and founder Rob Reed now serves as Chief Innovation Officer to ensure continually ground-breaking products. “Our customers form a relationship with us, not because of exactly what we have today, but because that they believe that in partnering with us, they will always be ahead of the curve, so our responsibility is to always do that,” he said.
If social media marketing proves anything, it’s that people are excited to connect directly with brands. As advertising shifts from brand messaging to social advertising, the degrees of separation between customers and sellers also decrease — and that’s a wave Blatt and his team want to ride. The next time you dine at a MomentFeed customer’s location, remember: Yours could be the post that snags them their next big sale.
.png)
