Case Study: The Influence Marketing Initiative
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 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. 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.
