Mavrck, the leading influencer marketing platform for enterprise consumer brands, today announced it has closed a $120 million investment from global growth equity firm Summit Partners. The new funding will help accelerate the company’s product expansion and support Mavrck’s mission to build the operations cloud to power and execute all types of social proof at scale.
Influencer marketing has evolved dramatically in recent years as customers seek and expect a more authentic brand experience across the entire customer journey. Research demonstrates that consumers today are more influenced by what others say and display online than by what brands message directly. This concept of social proof – which essentially describes the trust formed from the collection of experiences with a brand or a product, including recommendations, content and reviews from a network of friends, like-minded strangers, creators and influencers – has increasingly become an essential brand building tool for consumer enterprises.
The Mavrck platform is designed to help global brands to harness the power of social proof that consumers trust today with end-to-end relationship management, workflow automation, and measurement for integrated marketing programs across influencer, creator, advocacy, affiliate, ambassador, referral, and loyalty. Since Mavrck’s founding in 2014, its customers have used the company’s social proof platform to activate more than three million creators worldwide to generate sponsored content, which has been engaged with by more than 240 million consumers.
“The trust economy, built upon the rise and acceleration of digital democratization and fueled by social proof, has arrived, and with it comes a new set of rules, behaviors and opportunities for brands, creators and consumers,” said Lyle Stevens, Co-Founder & CEO of Mavrck. “Influencer marketing has evolved dramatically from its earliest, celebrity-centric iteration. This investment will help us to take petabytes of historical data and build recommendation engines to connect enterprise marketers with the right creators, the right way, at the right cost.”
Estimated to be a $100 billion industry, the creator economy has seen explosive growth in the past 18 months as people have turned to content creation as a secondary or primary source of income. With over two-thirds of brands doing influencer marketing in 2021 (up from 55% in 2020) according to eMarketer, the influencer marketing industry is one of the fastest growing segments and is estimated by Research and Markets to be a $85 billion industry by 2028 with a CAGR of 30%.
Nearly 5,000 marketing professionals across more than 500 global consumer brands rely on Mavrck to more effectively access and manage relationships with content creators. Marketers at organizations large and small are seeing the positive impact on both brand and bottom line, with influencer marketing and social proof efforts delivering performance as much as 3-7x higher than traditional forms of marketing.
“At Summit, we have invested across the commerce segment – in both brands and the technologies that support their growth – and we believe strongly in the impact and potential of authentic brand relationships as a means to build value,” said Michael Medici, Managing Director at Summit Partners. “Brands are increasingly seeking to harness the power of the very long tail of content creators to help drive brand awareness and influence purchase activity,” added Sophia Popova, Principal at Summit Partners. “Mavrck’s platform is purpose-built to support brands in these efforts. We are delighted to partner with Lyle and the Mavrck team for this next phase of growth.” Both Michael Medici and Sophia Popova have joined the Mavrck Board of Directors.
Mavrck is the #1 influencer marketing platform for the enterprise on software review site G2, and the company was named a “Leader” among the top influencer marketing platforms in Forrester’s evaluation, The Forrester New Wave™: Influencer Marketing Solutions, Q2 2020, achieving the highest scores possible in Data Management, Workflow, Communications & Automation, Measurement & Reporting, and Product Vision.
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