Bounce Exchange, a behavioral marketing provider, has acquired B2B social media marketing startup GoChime, Bounce announced on Tuesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
GoChime extends B2B email campaigns to social and display media. It will now be a Bounce Exchange product called “Behavioral Audiences.” GoChime’s relatively small team has already integrated with Bounce’s team, which has grown from less than 100 employees last year to almost 200 now.
“Email is the No. 1 way B2B marketers have used for reaching target audiences, but 85% of those emails go unopened,” said GoChime CEO Austin Evarts.
GoChime supports data onboarding via Facebook/Instagram, Twitter and Google properties (Gmail, YouTube and search) – in other words, the places that enable drag-and-drop first-party audience matching. Its real bread and butter, though, comes via the big marketing enterprise platforms like Oracle, Marketo and HubSpot (all three of which are customers as well as partners).
Beyond its enterprise cloud partners and clients, GoChime works with companies like Backstage, an audition and casting service, and the inbound marketing agency Kuno Creative, which targets very specific audience sets (such as a medical supply company that wants to find cardiothoracic surgeons). In other words, it’s for nurturing leads on very specific B2B audience sets.
Bounce Exchange’s behavioral analytics, like profiling users based on where their mouse moved or how they scrolled on a mobile page, may not seem like a direct fit for GoChime, but Bounce is interested in adding a category, according to Bounce co-founder and CEO Ryan Urban.
Urban said his company took a look at GoChime and others after deciding the company needed to expand its B2B customers. Urban described B2B as a necessary third leg of the business alongside its core publisher and ecommerce customers.
He also insisted Bounce Exchange doesn’t want to beat Oracle, Marketo or HubSpot at their own games. It just wants to take a cut of the ad revenue it can funnel their way.
“It’s about making [enterprise cloud automation] products more valuable so Oracle, Marketo and HubSpot will want to suggest us to their clients,” he said.
In the case of its customer HubSpot, GoChime syncs the company’s audience lists to Facebook, and automatically makes changes in that data across platforms based on user activity. For example, someone who doesn’t open an email can be targeted with the same message, or someone farther along the funnel can be prompted to call a salesperson directly with a product like Facebook’s “Call Now” mobile ads.
The result is that “we don’t have to continuously, manually upload CSVs to the ad platform,” said HubSpot senior marketing manager Niti Shah. “With multiple audiences and campaigns each month, a feature like this is huge for executing successfully.”
