Social Marketing Startup Tiger Pistol Raises $3.1M As It Plans For US Growth

Tiger Pistol, a startup offering social marketing tools for small businesses, is announcing that it has raised $3.1 million in Series A funding.

The company started in Melbourne, Australia, and I first covered it in 2012, when it left beta testing. Since then, Tiger Pistol (named after the tiger pistol shrimp) has moved its headquarters to Los Angeles, though it retains an office in Melbourne.

Co-founder and CEO Steve Hibberd told me that the business is already “slightly profitable” in Australia, but the move and the new funding signal growing ambitions in the United States.

“We’re going to invest primarily in our growth into the US marketplace,” he said. “That’s driven by our own understanding that there’s a real gap that our product meets.”

Tiger Pistol helps businesses maintain their presence and monitor their reputation on sites including Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, and Yelp, and also to promote their content through ad campaigns (the company joined Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program earlier this year). And for small businesses that want to make things even easier, Tiger Pistol offers a “Do It For You” service package, with pricing that starts at $249 a month.

Asked how Tiger Pistol stands out from other social marketing tools, Hibberd pointed to the breadth of its offerings, to its focus on “real business outcomes,” and to the technology it has developed to looks at past data and produce “recommendations on exactly what to be doing and the configuration of how to be doing it.”

The company will also be working with partners who will resell a new white label version of Tiger Pistol’s products to their customers. The first partner in this vein is Melbourne IT, an Australian Internet company that focuses on domain name registration. (Hibberd said Tiger Pistol is working to strike similar deals with US companies.)

Melbourne IT also led the Series A, with participation from individual investors including Liberty Financial’s Sherman Ma.

Introducing Tiger Pistol’s ‘Do It For You’ packages – 60 Sec from Tiger Pistol on Vimeo.

Featured Image: Tiger Pistol



from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/0LPqu8RZae8/

via IFTTT