OpenView Partners Help Launch Exinda's Influence Marketing Strategy
Boston, MA – A year ago, Exinda was an expansion stage company with a great product offering and very little brand awareness in the markets it wanted to target. Exinda CEO Michael Sharma said it was a little like trying to shout from the mountaintop without a voice.
So Exinda turned to Boston venture capital firm, OpenView Venture Partners, which invested in the WAN Optimization company in 2007. Together, they planned to take the company’s brand awareness from darkness to light. “We were very confident in our product and we knew that we just needed to find a way to let people know about it,” says Exinda Vice President of Products Ed Ryan. “Whatever strategy we put in place had to be targetable and resource efficient.”
OpenView’s answer was Influence Marketing. A form of word-of-mouth marketing, Influence Marketing is an organic, grassroots marketing effort in which companies build relationships with key influencers in its market—bloggers, analysts, trade publications—and hope those relationships lead to positive coverage through those mediums. In Exinda’s case, OpenView sought particularly niche influencers, employing social media and specialized trade publications and websites.
OpenView Labs Marketing Analyst Amanda Maksymiw and Venture Partner Firas Raouf led the initiative for Exinda. By the time they handed it off earlier this year to Kevin Suitor, the company’s new VP of Worldwide Marketing, Exinda had accomplished its goals and OpenView had a framework of best practices to offer to its other portfolio companies.
“I think it was hugely successful for Exinda and OpenView,” says Maksymiw. “Exinda was kind of the Guinea Pig for us and I think what we put together for them can be put in action for a lot of different companies. The core principles and best practices are definitely repeatable.”
Sharma says Influence Marketing, more importantly, won’t simply be a one-time success story for Exinda. “It’s become kind of hygienic to an extent,” Sharma says. “It’s part of our (marketing) routine.” Click here to read the full story.
About OpenView Venture Partners
OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion stage venture capital fund with a focus on high-growth software, internet, and technology-enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, who collectively bring several decades of technology and management experience to the firm, OpenView is able to help portfolio companies with quickly ramping up Product, Go-To-Market, and Organizational and Operational functions to best practice levels. The firm was founded in 2006 and has a total capital under management of approximately $240 million. OpenView Venture Partners is based in Boston and invests on a worldwide basis.
About Exinda
Founded in 2002, Exinda is headquartered in Andover, MA and established regional offices in Canada and the United Kingdom to support the growing global demand for its products and services. Exinda also invests heavily in ongoing Research and Development, which operates in our Melbourne, Australia facilities. Exinda’s unified performance management (http://www.exinda.com)(UPM) solution brings together a suite of advanced, best-of-breed, visibility, traffic-shaping and WAN optimization technologies into a single, easy to-use appliance designed to improve network performance.