Social media dashboard maker MarketMeSuite, which targets SMBs with tools that help them better manage their Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn postings in order to target leads, has raised $ 1.1 million in new funding today, in a round led by Boston-area VC Jeff McCormick of Saturn Venture Partners. The company also recently uprooted from its home base of Norwich, U.K. to set up shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the results of that move have already proven successful for the business.
According to company CEO Tammy Kahn Fennell, MarketMeSuite has seen its customer base grow from 15,000 in September to over 30,000 now, and since the relocation, which took place just two months ago, engagement has gone through the roof, she says. 70% of MarketMeSuite’s users now return daily – a metric which promoted them to ask their customers, what is it that we’re doing right here? Customers told them that company’s Inbox for Social Product was so usable, it just became a part of their workflow. “It’s almost like checking my email,” they said, notes Fennell.
“Most small businesses don’t want to spend hours reading Facebook posts and Twitter posts,” she explains. “They just want to convert new customers and improve their bottom line.”
The company, now a team of five, will use the additional funding to hire around half a dozen to expand their marketing, biz dev, and development team. Fennell had great words for her scrappy developers, who she says do the work of twelve. “But maybe they’d like to sleep at some point,” she adds.
Also in the works are changes to the company’s core products, which currently help small business owners stay on top of their various social media presences. While today, a lot of what MarketMeSuite does is focused on proactive marketing and helping businesses target incoming leads, the plan is to expand to help business owners find out who they should be targeting in their area. Some of these connections will come in through the “friend of a friend” social graph, but the new features will even expand beyond that into the greater social sphere at large. “The next step is to do more of the work for them,” Fennell says.
The company updates its products monthly, and plans to have phase one of this new development out in around three months, and part two by year-end. Also in the works are improvements to the analytics feature, still in beta. “We want to show users not just that their following and fan base is increasing, but what they’re doing that’s leading to these things,” says Fennell. “That’s very different than what you’re seeing in analytics these days.” That, too, will be out by the end of 2012.
