Basic/ Condensed...

Few marketing automation vendors focus on the very top of the funnel: buying signals in social media. That’s exactly the key differentiator Vocus touts for its marketing automation system.

Vocus’ claim to fame, its social media integration, works by using technology from the Engine 140 acquisition. The company licenses the Twitter firehose and looks for buying signals at all stages of the buying process.

Vocus finds 15 million of these signals each quarter, totaling up to 60 million a year, and it feeds those into prospect-nurturing campaigns for its marketing automation clients.

The company is also working on technology to do the same for other social media sites — although not Facebook, which unlike Twitter is a closed system — and for blogs, which it is already checking but has not yet integrated into the buying signals funnel. In essence, it is not just automating marketing but also automating lead generation.

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Basic/ Excerpt...

To sum things up, GTCR has bought itself a very competitive marketing automation product for small to mid-size companies.  It will still mostly sell the business marketers but the social media, directory listings, and press release functions give Vocus more opportunity to serve consumer marketers than usual. The company now reports more than 8,000 marketing automation users,. expected to yield $40 million in bookings in 2014.  This easily makes it one of the largest stand-alone vendors in the industry. If GTCR allows Vocus to spend more freely on marketing and to continue improving its product, there is a good chance that Vocus can elbow its way to a top position in the hyper-crowded SMB marketing automation universe.

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Basic/ Excerpt...

Marketing and PR software firm Vocus, a public company, agreed to be acquired for $446.5 million today — that’s 48% more than it was worth at market close last Friday. Vocus’ board of directors approved the purchase price of $446.5 million in a merger agreement with Chicago-based private equity firm GTCR. That price represents a premium of 48% on Vocus’ closing share price on April 4 (it was $12.18). The deal has yet to close and is pending shareholder approval.

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Basic/ Digest...

The updates included in the Spring '14 release provide the following:

• Workflow automation: Workflows allow users to automate marketing communications by using workflow logic. They can be used to send an email, add or remove a contact from a list, update a contact record, sync a lead to Salesforce.com, move the contacts to alternative workflows, or remove the contacts from the workflow.
• Lead scoring: Lead scoring allows a marketer to automatically qualify a lead based on history, actions, and contact information. Scoring in Vocus Marketing Suite allows the user to set and customize lead scores by adding intuitive rules.
• Salesforce.com integration: The Salesforce.com sync integrates the business' marketing automation system to Salesforce CRM, allowing marketers to interact on the same systems as sales without duplicating efforts. This bi-directional sync of contacts and leads between the Vocus Marketing Suite and Salesforce.com lets users maintain the most up-to-date record of a contact seamlessly between the two systems. It also includes custom filters to control which contacts sync.

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