Company: Virally
Website: www.virallyapp.com
Founders: Liam Gooding and Matt Spence
Headquarters: Canterbury, Kent, UK
Year Founded: 2012
Twitter: @virallyapp
Facebook: facebook.com/virallyapp
Blog: blog.virallyapp.com
Brief Company Description: Virally measures and improves the ROI of content marketing.
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By Liam Gooding, CEO
Virally is a platform designed to measure, track and improve the ROI of content marketing.
Marketers use the platform to capture leads from their content marketing, spread their content further with social networks and track their results. The Virally platform uses social logins, viral tracking and social CRM to ensure that marketers can demonstrate a solid ROI on every content campaign.
How Virally Came About
The idea for Virally started when a client at our web development agency wondered if they could use social network logins to increase downloads of their content marketing campaigns, which were currently using a regular web form. A prototype of Virally was created, and the test results were beyond our wildest dreams! Virally was born and we raised £100,000 of Seed funding.
Marketing/Promotion Strategy
As Virally is designed for content marketers, it makes sense to promote Virally with content marketing and other inbound marketing techniques.
We want to offer CMOs and marketing staff lots of valuable content. We’re not just peddling our product, we’re developing relationships with people, helping them and earning their trust.
We kicked off 2013 with our content marketing survival guide which we plan to continue developing and adding to over time. We also plan to create more industry-specific guides, research reports and infographics.
Virally are writing guest blogs as well. We’re big fans of Joel Gascoigne and Leo Wildrich at Buffer who were writing 2-to-4 guest blogs a day, and built a huge community and successful company from that.
Market Opportunity for Virally
Content marketing is now widely accepted as best practice by CMOs. More and more companies are using content marketing to add value, earn trust and engage their leads and customers.
Virally amplifies content marketing and helps track the ROI of campaigns so there’s a huge market for the platform. Virally is an invaluable tool in the marketing department of the future, working alongside web analytics, email marketing, CRM, and marketing automation. As CMOs increasingly need to monitor and justify their content marketing campaigns, Virally helps them do that.
Big brands such as GfK NoP, Intuit, Regus and Unicef are using the platform already.
How Virally Differentiates from the Competition
Virally is fairly unique. We focus on ‘who’ viewed ‘what’, ‘when’ they viewed it and how their social networks reacted—such as retweets, referrals etc. This is hugely powerful when combined with other sales and marketing tools like Salesforce and Mailchimp.
If marketing departments get this deep understanding of what their clients are interested in, they can optimize future outreach and nurturing campaigns, listening to their customers’ exact needs and knowing when they’re ready to buy. Ultimately, they use the data from Virally to make more sales.
Business Model
Virally is sold as software-as-a-service (SaaS). Users pay a monthly fee for the platform, and this is dependent on the features required and their expected audience size.
For consultancy and advice, we’ve teamed up with Preferred Partners who can provide advice on how to best use the platform and campaign management services.
Current Needs
We’re always interested in hearing from talented developers—we’re solving some pretty complex Big Data challenges. We’re also really keen to hear from marketing directors and managers to collaborate on future reports and guides. If there are any agencies handling content marketing for clients, they should get in touch about our Partner Program.
In terms of funding, Virally hopes to achieve sustainability in 2013, and we’ve started talks to raise a second round of funding (£600k-£1m) which we anticipate closing in mid-2013.
Founders’ Story
I started a web development agency (Fruitbowl Media) during university, which was acquired before starting Virally. I also founded the first digital co-working space in the South-East of England (Fruitworks), which has also since been acquired.
Matthew Spence (co-founder/CTO) was a lead developer at the University of Kent’s development team, integrating large scale systems for the university and working on other projects with UK universities. He left to work on startup ideas with me before Virally emerged as a market favorite.
Virally – www.virallyapp.com
