Advocate Marketing Leader Crowdly Announces Strong Company Momentum and New Platform Launch

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwired - Aug 6, 2014) - Crowdly, the innovative advocate marketing platform, today announced strong market momentum and new customer wins including SodaStream and William Grant & Sons brands Balvenie, Glenfiddich, Hendrick's Gin and Sailor Jerry. The accelerated motion comes with the launch of Crowdly 2.0, which provides actionable ways for leading brands and their agencies to surface, identify and build relationships with their best fans -- driving advocacy, brand loyalty and sales. Crowdly grew revenues over 300 percent in H1 2014 compared to H1 2013, and increased its customer base by 400 percent over the same period.

"So much of the success of our spirits has been due to the word-of-mouth we've earned from advocates who love our brands," said Jayme Brown, Manager of Digital Content and Relationship Marketing at William Grant & Sons USA. "Bringing that online, and connecting with our most engaged fans and influencers is no longer a nice-to-have, but a necessity. Crowdly is helping us identify and connect with those true advocates as individuals and cultivate real, long-term relationships to provide them a more meaningful experience, while improving brand loyalty and encouraging increased word-of-mouth influence."

Crowdly, profiled by the Altimeter Group in "Leveraging Social Identity" as one of only two selected companies to address the advocacy stage of the customer lifecycle, now boasts enterprise customers across verticals including consumer packaged goods, liquor, lifestyle, hospitality and more. Customers include top brands like Hilton, Lowe's, SodaStream and William Grant & Sons. Crowdly also works with marquee agencies BBDO, Edelman, Hill Holliday, MMB, Mullen and Vayner. To date, Crowdly has helped brands and agencies find and build relationships with over 1,000,000 organic advocates worldwide, while generating a 4X average increase in advocate engagement.

Crowdly's advocate marketing platform empowers large consumer brands to identify, segment, rank and make real connections with the advocates that love them, helping brands drive true advocacy and word-of-mouth buzz by authentically engaging with influential fans at scale. Only Crowdly can surface and connect a brand with all of the existing advocates hidden within their Facebook community.

"Crowdly's new platform capabilities allow us to track individual fan engagement and influence over time, and connect with true brand loyalists," noted Laurie Warden, Director of Strategy at MMB. "This helps us tie influence to ROI, and foster smarter relationships that drive the bottom line."

The release of Crowdly 2.0 significantly enhances customers' advocate marketing capabilities, allowing them to go beyond Crowdly 1.0's ability to surface and identify advocates. With Crowdly 2.0, brands can make information on their most influential organic fans immediately actionable, using simple yet powerful ways to not only identify, but now also to connect with advocates on a one-to-one or one-to-many basis. The new release builds on the existing advocate marketing platform and helps companies create a direct owned channel to reach their top advocates, allowing them to analyze and improve interactions for ongoing relationships. With Crowdly 2.0, companies are driving more value from word of mouth programs, leading to more loyal brand advocates and ultimately higher revenue through consumer purchases.

Brands and their agencies using Crowdly 2.0 can now:

• Identify the advocates that love them most by surfacing, contextualizing, and ranking the most influential people within a brand's Facebook community.
• Activate these advocates for initiatives or product launches through targeted, gated outreach on a one-to-one or one-to-many basis (and build a direct earned channel to their top fans).
• Use Crowdly's powerful insight and reporting capabilities to understand the people, topics, and trends driving word-of-mouth about clients' brands.
• Easily create and track real-time fan segments based on the conversations that matter, including creating effective custom audiences and look-alikes for paid media on Facebook.
• Tie individual social history to loyalty and rewards programs, finally allowing marketers to directly connect brand advocacy to purchase.

"We're in the middle of a fundamental shift where great brands are now taking a digital first approach to their word-of-mouth and advocacy initiatives. More than ever, brands are emphasizing the need to connect these strategies with their true, passionate fans, not a rented list," said Dan Sullivan, president and founder of Crowdly. "It's been rewarding to see our traction skyrocket over the past year. The accelerating shift in brand priorities from purely high volume reach to high value interactions gives us plenty of reason to be optimistic."

For more information on the Crowdly platform, visit: www.crowdly.com

About Crowdly
Crowdly is the leading advocate marketing platform empowering large consumer brands to build a base of authentic advocates, activate them, and learn from their behavior to increase word-of-mouth promotion and brand advocacy. Working with top brands like Hilton, Lowe's and SodaStream, along with agencies like BBDO, Edelman and Hill Holiday, Crowdly seamlessly integrates with Facebook to show brands the lifetime influence of their top fans and a complete history of fans' interactions over time. Through identifying and fostering Superfans, Crowdly helps brands drive stronger word of mouth marketing and greater ROI.