With the pandemic forcing people online, social media use exploded, for obvious reasons. And with that, the opportunity to reach audiences and push messaging. More brand-oriented platforms such as Sprinkler, Sprout Social and Hootsuite have obviously risen in use, but so did traffic to Oktopost, a much more B2B-oriented proposition.
Founded in 2013, Oktopost has only ever registered an $800,000 early-stage funding, and has run on revenues and profit ever since. Today that changes with a growth funding round of a $20 million minority investment from London-based growth equity firm Expedition Growth Capital.
Oktopost’s schtick is that it is an enterprise-grade platform for B2B marketers to curate content, organize, and manage campaigns for corporate social media accounts, employee advocacy and social selling. It can also handle social listening and analytics. It also boasts native integrations with Adobe’s Marketo, Salesforce’s Pardot, HubSpot, and CRM systems such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. Oktopost’s customers include Fujitsu, Mitsubishi Electric, Xerox, SWIFT, ACI Worldwide, ContentSquare, ChargeBee and SUSE.
The above functions have hoved into view with far greater importance as social media users upped their interactions online, and companies needed to, to put it mildly, get their act together as social media “ate the world” in the last 16 months.
Oktopost says it plans to use the funding to advance its product roadmap, boost customer success, accelerate marketing and sales, and explore strategic acquisitions — as well as grow its workforce by 50%.
Daniel Kushner, co-founder and CEO of Oktopost, said: “Our mission from day one was to establish the first-ever B2B social media marketing platform with the ability to measure and quantify the value of social media in terms of lead generation, pipeline influence, customer acquisition and ultimately ROI… As siloes break down between marketing and sales within B2B companies, and as social selling becomes more widespread, we believe Oktopost is uniquely suited to provide the functionality desired.”
Oliver Thomas, managing partner at Expedition Growth Capital said: “There are a number of social media tools out there catering for B2C companies but we haven’t seen a platform that is specifically tailored to the B2B journey until Oktopost. The ability to manage, track and analyse social activities is increasingly a must-have for B2B sales and marketing organisations. Daniel and Liad have built the best product in the market to serve this need. They have also built a terrific culture and we’re excited to be part of the journey from here.”
Speaking to Kushner, I asked him what effect the pandemic had had on the business.
“It’s gone bananas,” he said. “Our focus is 100% on B2B organisations. Our platform is divided into corporate social media, so Twitter, LinkedIn company pages, etc. The second is what we call employee advocacy social, where you want your employees to be a part of the corporate brand, with employees sharing on a personal LinkedIn, Twitter accounts, social messages.”
He said that this ecosystem — the platform to support both corporate social and employee advocacy — means they can prove return on investment for customers: “What are they getting from doing all this social? The platform is designed to provide those kind of metrics to show the real business impact of social, the real impact that it has on the business. And not just fluff metrics that you normally get on social.”
