Selligent and Strongview Join Forces to Create Global Marketing Tech Company

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Oct 16, 2015 

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Adotas  |

The newly combined company will offer comprehensive technology for omnichannel and email marketing.

Selligent, Europe’s rapidly growing marketing automation and data management solutions provider, announced that it will merge with StrongView, a U.S. company dealing with contextual marketing solutions. Combining Selligent’s omnichannel campaign management and targeting expertise with the enterprise email marketing capabilities of StrongView creates a global leader in B2C digital marketing technology. Selligent, which is headquartered in Brussels, and StrongView, based in Redwood City, CA, are both owned by HGGC, a middle market private equity firm with deep investment experience in enterprise and marketing services technology.

“We are excited to bring our investments in Selligent and StrongView together to create a global marketing technology powerhouse,” said Rich Lawson, CEO and Managing Partner of HGGC (pictured top left), who will serve as Chairman of the combined business. “With its broad roster of US-based enterprise and mid-market clients and its best-in-class email technology, StrongView is the perfect complement to Selligent’s omnichannel marketing platform, which is currently deployed mostly in Europe. As a result of this merger, marketers will benefit from an innovative global technology platform that enables brands to recognize and act on consumers’ fast-changing circumstances before, during, and after each moment of engagement.”

The merged company will carry the Selligent name. Selligent CEO Andre Lejeune (pictured left) will lead the combined company’s management team as CEO and StrongView CEO Bill Wagner will move into an Operating Partner role at HGGC.

Recognized by Forrester Research, Inc. as a leading provider of email marketing solutions, StrongView’s powerful enterprise-grade technology will significantly deepen and broaden Selligent’s existing omnichannel campaign management capabilities. Together, the Selligent and StrongView technologies give current and future customers access to a broad and robust suite of digital marketing solutions from a single global provider.

“We are thrilled to further enhance our software solutions with the addition of StrongView’s powerful email marketing capabilities. As one company, we will be very well positioned to provide brands in Europe and the U.S. with efficient and effective always-on consumer-first marketing,” said Lejeune. “Most important, our combined offering will enable brands to create rich experiences across channels and grow meaningful customer relationships over time.”

Selligent was acquired by HGGC in July 2015, and StrongView was acquired in September 2015. The merger of these businesses is the latest example of a key HGGC strategic advantage – employing its extensive network and capital resources to help middle market businesses bolster their growth platforms through geographic expansion and complementary combinations. HGGC previously combined iCongo, an eCommerce software and services provider, with hybris, a larger multi-channel commerce business, to create the world’s largest independent eCommerce software company, which was later sold to SAP.
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Selligent and Strongview Join Forces to Create Global Marketing Tech Company

Marketing tech startup Vidgyor raises USD 500K funding from AngelPrime

Bengaluru-based video advertisement platform for Internet TV, Vidgyor has announced the $ 500K funding round from the seed-stage venture capital fund AngelPrime. The startup enables broadcasters to monetize live TV streaming on the Internet by replacing standard TV advertisements with personalized video ads. The funding will be utilized to expand Vidgyor’s target user base, increase marketing efforts and further develop their technology.

Vidgyor was co-founded last year by Mahaboob Khan and Parth Desai who were earlier working in online video space and MNCs like Yahoo! & STMicroelectronics. The company is also one of the seven alumni of the fifth batch of startups from the Noida-based T-labs. At the moment, it has already signed up with leading broadcasters and aims to achieve a positive growth in the near future.

What the problem Vidgyor is addressing?

Currently, Internet TV features the same ads, which run on broadcast TV. Video publishers are unable to monetize live TV streams delivered over Internet, as the advertiser has not paid for showing them online. On the other hand, advertisers are unable to reach out to the online audience who prefer watching TV over Internet through a mobile device.

Vidgyor enables broadcasters and content distributors monetize live TV streams delivered over internet by auto-detecting original broadcast TV ads and replacing them with different set of targeted mid-roll ads. The organization has developed a technology platform that can effectively provide incremental revenue through deployment of mid rolls. The solution integrates with no disruption to the current digital workflow and works with any Internet connected devices – be it Desktop, Mobile, Tablets IP Set-Top Boxes etc. It also seamlessly works with any CDN, Video Player, or Encoder.

Bala Parthasarathy, Managing Partner, AngelPrime believes that personalized advertising for live TV over Internet has largely been an untapped market in the country and Vidgyor aims to address this effectively.

How does the platform benefit advertisers and users?

Vidgyor enables personalized ad targeting and provides high quality user experience to the end user. Advertisers also benefit more from this model, as they will now be able to reach out to the right audience and user base. The Vidgyor platform can integrate with any VAST compliant video ad network and also provides a dashboard to track revenue and manage campaigns in real-time. Vidgyor claims that its solution can help increase video publisher’s inventory by 5X to 10X on Live TV feeds across devices thereby increasing scope for monetization.

Vidgyor’s innovative solution has enabled IndiaTV to generate revenue from our Live TV streams. We are exploring synergies to use the solution with our global content distributors.

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Alok Soni

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Alok Soni prefers to keep his bio short owing to a dearth of creativity. Feel free to reach out to him at alok[at]yourstory[dot]com or follow on twitter @aloksoni

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Marketing tech startup Vidgyor raises USD 500K funding from AngelPrime

Ten Less is More Brand Growth Drivers For Today's Tech Drenched Landsape

The greatest risk reward scenario today for big and small brands is dealing with tech’s immersion in every aspect of your marketing strategy and tactics.

Technology is baked into every aspect of marketing – 67% of marketing departments plan to increase their spending on tech related marketing: platforms, processes and measurement and 61% are increasing capital expenditures on technology related offerings.

Growth Drivers For Busy Brands in Today’s Smartphone Drenched World

Pay attention to your “boring” infrastructure: domain name setup, hosting, server, email, marketing platforms, forms, apps, social platforms. These are critical assets and drive competitive advantage.

Organize and refine your Content Marketing and Team communications and processes with an Editorial Calendar (download and go link).

Go through a formal Customer Review Persona Analysis and know this is not a one time exercise (do a quarterly sanity check review) and the data has to reflect more than just baseline demographics.

Create and Curate high value Visual Content to reach today’s distracted consumers. Textual content is of course critical; but, images drive engagment with your brand. Consumers are distracted, multi-tasking entities and content clutter is everywhere. Quality is not the same as cheap BTW.

Pay attention to transaction volumes: most small businesses have insufficient raw data to make good marketing decisions. A/B testing, landing pages and analytics are all part of the equation. But, it takes transaction volumes to make really informed decisions and discern meaningful analysis of data.

Publishing content has a tradeoff and can kill your SEO efforts. Higher authority web sites will kill your SEO results if you are using the exact same content. It’s a tough tradeoff. Rewrite the content with at least 50% original content to offset this problem.

Know distraction rules and smart small businesses have to target their marketing as never before to get heard, innvest 75% of your marketing expenditures with digital assets where you have “command and control” – web site, video and textual content, images, infographics. #lessismore

Embrace technology and train your staff to deal with a shifting landscape of platforms and processes and get help via outsourcing to backfill where you have holes and can’t execute your marketing strategy.

Invest 75% of your marketing expenditures with digital assets where you have “command and control” – web site, video and textual content, images, infographics. Recognize social platform features and functions are evolving, requiring ongoing maintenance.

All social media marketing has burdened costs: It’s as strategic marketing mistake to think “social media marketing” is free, it is not – it’s labor intensive, necessitates sourcing and sharing great content and savvy community management.

“Building a High Value Brand Takes More than Algorithmic Growth Hacks”

“How Content Heroes and Heroines Are Made, Not Born”

“How to Generate More Revenue and Lower Costs With the Cloud”

“How to Win Your Darwinian Digital Battles”

“The 10-Second Race to Content Nirvana”

Ten Less is More Brand Growth Drivers For Today"s Tech Drenched Landsape

SEO For Startup Companies: How One Tech Company Nailed It

Many in digital media continue to underestimate the influence of Google. It’s no longer just a cool tech company; Google is now part of the global economic infrastructure. While many people are caught in the hype of social media, the plain fact is that Internet searches are what drive purchase decisions. You create demand in social media, but you capture demand and steal market share via SEO and your website. Yet even to this day big companies and tech companies often overlook SEO fundamentals.

No matter how innovative or a disruptive a new product may be, it’s more than likely solving an old problem. With old problems there is existing traffic – specifically, organic search traffic. If you can structure your website, content marketing strategy and user communities around the problem you are trying to solve, your startup website can be structured in a way to cultivate SEO value very early and get the traction you need earlier than later.

Yet, in the world of early stage startups, SEO is almost never considered in the pre-launch phase and rarely addressed post launched. In the tech startup arena, where Non-Disclosure Agreements and stealth modes still prevail, the secretive nature of high-tech startups doesn’t pair up well with look-at-me style of content marketing that dominates the digital landscape today. It’s a pity, because sometimes in those early days of being new, most startups get at least some form of spotlight. It’s in that critical time period when a lot of SEO value can not only be secured, but also positioned in a way to attract SEO rank as a startup ages.

Meet Parcel Audit Pros
One startup tech company, Parcel Audit Pros, got it right. Simply put, they developed an online solution that automatically tracks and processes UPS refunds and FedEx refunds. Money-back refunds from these shipping providers are “by request only.” So many companies unknowingly leave thousands of dollars on the table. While this may be a new concept to you, the niche is quite competitive online, and there are many large freight companies and shipping consulting companies that have offered parcel auditing for years. The business model is unique, because Parcel Audit Pros’ fees are contingency based. They only charge you a percentage of the fees recovered, and their fees are the lowest in the industry.

In this example, the founder and CEO of Parcel Audit Pros, Adam Call, was way ahead of the curve on search engine optimization. He knew early on that SEO and search engine marketing would be an important component of a successful launch and necessary to gain market traction. He knew what questions to ask SEO service providers and met with many before finding a good fit. In just a few short months Parcel Audit Pros has secured first page rankings for targeted keywords. As a rare tech company that focused on Internet marketing early on, they are getting the same organic visibility as other parcel auditing companies that have been in operation for years.

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From a search engine optimization standpoint, they are still very early in the process. Yet the results of an effective SEO campaign are undeniable:

With higher rankings come more search engine page impressions and visibility:

If you have a new company or are in the early stages of launching a new tech company or web application, consider the following to get a jump start on SEO.  There a many ways you can protect the confidentiality of your startup venture while still laying the groundwork for search engine performance:

1. Get a website up and running sooner than later.


2. Start blogging on topics about your industry and problems you are trying to solve.  In other words, start building your industry authority and credibility well before launch.


3. Get your social media accounts setup and active as soon as possible.


4. Work on creating content and establishing a content distribution channel early on.


5. Start the outreach process early so that you can find highly targeted and strategic guest bloggers for your website, as well as opportunities for your team to get published on other industry sites relevant t your niche.

SEO For Startup Companies: How One Tech Company Nailed It