<p>Insight Venture Partners is a leading global private equity and venture capital firm investing in software, eCommerce, internet and data-services companies. Founded in 1995, Insight has raised more than $6.5 billion and made more than 190 investments worldwide. Our mission is to find, fund and work successfully with visionary executives who are driving change in their industries. We provide them with practical, hands-on growth expertise to foster long-term success. For more information, visit <a href="https://insightpartners.com">insightpartners.com</a></p>
BrightEdge Secures $42.8 Million Investment to Build Platform
110-Percent Renewal Rate, 300-Percent Brand Growth in Past 12 Months Position BrightEdge to Become Industry Standard in New World of Marketing
SAN MATEO, CA – June 11, 2013 – BrightEdge today announced that it has closed $42.8 million in Series D funding, led by Insight Venture Partners. Insight Venture Partners joins existing investors Intel Capital, Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures and Illuminate Ventures. The investment serves as a strong endorsement of the company’s vision to create a new standard for how modern businesses of every size and industry understand and measure the value of their content marketing strategies across all digital channels.
In the new world of marketing, where brands are publishers, consumers are influencers and content is created, shared and accessed at quantum scale, marketers must think like scientists more than artists. And while many vendors focus on back-office systems to automate marketing workflows and process, marketers still fly blind when it comes to actually measuring and understanding the value of their content for all of the sites on which they publish.
BrightEdge’s S3 platform harnesses big data analytics so businesses understand the revenue impact of earned content, attract customers from the billions of searches happening each day and understand impact created by web sites, search engines and social networks in a measurable, predictable way. It processes massive volumes of data and systematically analyzes content across every channel in real-time, stitching together individual interactions to allow businesses to understand the value of their content in terms of traffic, engagement and revenue. Its customized dashboards, targeted recommendations and strategic analysis empower marketers to focus their efforts and implement initiatives that drive maximum business impact.
“Marketing today doesn’t have a go-to platform like IT, finance and HR. That’s changing and BrightEdge is front and center as a company with a massive value proposition,” said Brad Twohig, principal, Insight Venture Partners. “BrightEdge has the opportunity to become marketing’s must-have platform and we are excited to invest in the company and their success. This is a transformative opportunity within a $12 billion interactive marketing arena that doesn’t yet have a standard.”
BrightEdge has experienced tremendous growth since its inception in 2007. Major milestones over the past 12 months include:
Continued, Rapid Customer Growth: The company has added more than 300 direct clients in the past 12 months, including SuccessFactors, SurveyMonkey and Choice Hotels International, Inc. Today, more than 6,000 brands and 600 direct clients leverage BrightEdge, including Microsoft, 3M, Nike, Marriott and Performics.
An Enterprise Standard: Since commencing commercial operations in 2010, the company has grown to dominate its category, serving 9 of the top 10 largest hotel groups, 7 of the top 10 online retailers and 7 of the top 10 largest technology companies.
Record-Breaking Business Performance: BrightEdge has seen a 110-percent customer renewal rate and 300-percent brand growth over the past 12 months, best-in-class across SaaS vendors in both public and private arenas. In addition the company saw a 200-percent return on capital in revenue run rate in FY2012.
Patented Technology: BrightEdge has defined the market with dozens of innovations, included issued patents for Share of Voice to help marketers understand true market share and beat their competitors online, and a Reverse Index which helps marketers understand their web wide performance. An additional 26 innovations have patents pending.
“Marketing has never been more data-driven or outcome-focused, and now, strategies backed by science and measurement are modern business essentials. We’ve built the first platform to bring sophisticated analysis to the consumer-facing part of marketing across all digital channels – and major global brands are already realizing transformative results in traffic, engagement and revenue,” said Jim Yu, founder and CEO, BrightEdge. “Our massive growth, customer impact and this newest round of financing validate that we're well on our way to disrupting a $12 billion market and creating a new standard for marketers and modern businesses worldwide.”
About BrightEdge
BrightEdge is the essential content marketing platform for modern business. It transforms online content into tangible business results such as traffic, revenue and engagement. BrightEdge’s S3 platform is powered by a sophisticated big data analysis engine and is the only company capable of web-wide, real-time measurement of content engagement across all digital channels, including search, social and mobile. BrightEdge 600+ customers include global brands such as 3M, Microsoft, Netflix and Nike. The company is based in San Mateo, CA with offices in New York City and London.
The Content Catalyst: How Content Drives Search & Social Synergy
News Item Author Name
Jim Yu
News Item Published Date
News Item Summary
Today, many a search marketer lives in a world driven by Pandas and Penguins. SEO as we used to know it has changed forever.
As Google shifts its focus to quality and relevancy, content marketing adoption has soared. It is no coincidence that the increasing focus on content marketing closely follows the significant Google algorithmic changes aiming to give users a better search experience.
Feature Subtitle
The Content Catalyst: How Content Drives Search & Social Synergy
Probably two things: a huge social network, and a great place for recruiting or finding a job.
True enough. LinkedIn these days is, in fact, 225 million members strong. And 70 percent of Brandz's Top 100 advertises jobs on LinkedIn. But I'm going to suggest that this answer doesn't go far enough. Something's missing: it's that LinkedIn is also a fantastic marketing platform. In fact, while most of us have been busy posting our resumes and contacting old friends, some of the world's top brands have learned to leverage their employees as brand ambassadors, as well as to maximize customer evangelists to grow brand awareness, and ultimately drive business.
So, let's explore from this different perspective just what it is that LinkedIn provides.
<p>We publish more than 800 content-rich articles each month, and the BrightEdge platform helps our team track keyword performance across multiple verticals.</p>
The relationship between companies and people is entirely transparent in this age of content marketing. Social and mobile have torn down the walls of ads, sales pitches, and unwanted engagement. A treasure trove of data is out there to connect with customers, but it is massive, unstructured and siloed across many hubs of Internet content.
In the new world of content marketing
Everything is online, digital and measurable
Consumers are TRUE participants in business
Marketing is in a massive transformation period characterized by:
The move from art to science
Aligning marketing activities with revenue growth
Data volume and complexity
Every brand is a publisher
Business opportunity
Marketing has never been more strategic to companies, and measurement is essential. In the new world of marketing, where brands are publishers, consumers are influencers and content is created, shared and accessed at quantum scale, Marketers must think like scientists more than artists. Why? Because 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years, and this data is a treasure trove of insight into customers.
The massive volume of data available can help every marketer truly understand their market and measure their initiatives at big data scale. With search, marketers could understand intent, now with social they can understand interest, affinity and immediacy.
Content marketing impact
BrightEdge has built the first platform to bring science to the consumer-facing part of marketing – how consumers interact and engage with the content companies produce across all digital channels.
BrightEdge connects the dots to measure the value of content, including:
Powerful web-wide, real-time measurement —Transform content into tangible business results such as traffic, revenue, and ongoing engagement across all digital channels, including search, social, and mobile
Effectively link social & content strategies — Uncover when a topic is trending on Twitter, and correlate that with highly converting content from your site to drive cross-channel conversions
Forecast value of projects — Forecast the financial impact of content marketing prior to the start of projects
Make a business case for content marketing — Drive executive investments in content by making a business case based on forecasted business results
Big data processing power — BrightEdge processes over 100 terabytes of data each week, and over 150 billion URLs in total
We publish more than 800 content-rich articles each month, and the BrightEdge platform helps our team track keyword performance across multiple verticals.
Personalized Success Kit is a task list that is automatically generated when BrightEdge administrators create new users. The Personalized Success Kit allows administrators to customize tasks based on new users’ role, goals, permissions and level of expertise. Sample tasks include reviewing the Help Section to get familiar with the BrightEdge platform, uploading keywords, tracking competitors, creating role-based dashboards and identifying keyword opportunities.
