Mavrck snags $2.5 mln Series A from GrandBanks Capital

Mavrck, formerly Splashscore, today announced that it has raised a $2.5 million Series A financing round from GrandBanks Capital to fuel its aggressive growth trajectory and launch the white-label version of its social influence marketing platform. The company’s proprietary influencer activation engine makes Mavrck the only solution that enables brands to identify and activate their most influential customers across social networks at scale. “Mavrck is displacing the traditional display ad and ultimately transforming the future of digital marketing by changing the way that brands engage with consumers on social,” said Tim Wright, General Partner, GrandBanks Capital. “The company’s new enterprise platform addresses the challenge of driving sales on social and they are the right team to successfully attack this enormous market opportunity.” According to comScore, social networking on mobile alone has accounted for 31 percent of all growth in total Internet engagement in the past year. While overall engagement on these platforms increases, consumer engagement with organic content from brands continues to plummet. Mavrck’s platform is the first in the industry to help brands activate everyday influencers to create branded content at scale and outperform paid social media with conversions. Mavrck will leverage the funding to accelerate product development on various social platforms and to expand the company’s marketing, sales and engineering teams. Mavrck is currently working with over 20 brands such as Sears and Unilever and leading agencies including GroupM, Mullen and Weber Shandwick. “Brand loyalty and sales do not increase as a result of users accidentally or sporadically clicking on a display ad – consumers look to their social networks for human connections, recommendations and validation,” said Lyle Stevens, CEO and co-founder, Mavrck. “Our team has proven that one everyday influencer creating branded content can get three of their friends to convert on a regular basis, which is much more effective at driving sales than obtaining strangers to merely follow the brand on social. We are now positioned to help top performing brands take advantage of this marketing strategy at scale.” Transforming Social Influence to Drive Sales While most social influence marketing solutions focus on the size of an influencer’s reach, Mavrck optimizes for the percent of reach an influencer engages around a relevant topic or keyword in order to be the most effective platform for driving sales on social. The Mavrck social influence marketing platform is now available for brands to white label and is the only platform to leverage a proprietary, algorithm-driven activation engine to: Launch a branded VIP community that a brand’s most influential customers apply to join for exclusive content, rewards and experiences. Identify the most influential customers, fans and followers across demographics, locations, relevant keywords or life events to help brands create target audiences. Activate target audiences of influencers in a brand’s community to create and distribute branded content that converts better than traditional social ads. Engage with the content created and distributed by a brand’s most influential customers to build long-term strategic relationships. Mavrck clients can gather actionable insights, feedback and first party data from customers, captured in a real-time dashboard. Mavrck identifies influencers on Facebook now, and enables distribution of branded content on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter, with plans to roll out the algorithm to all social networks where a consumer can create content by the end of 2015.