From New Zealand to Silicon Valley: Victoria Ransom’s Wildfire Journey (Part 4)

Sramana: Do you have a segmentation of your customer base?

Victoria Ransom: There are a lot of SMBs using our product but our focus has been on mid-sized and large brand businesses. That is where we have growth that is powered by our sales force. Our SMB growth does nicely on its own without any additional involvement on our part aside from providing good support.

We have scaled our sales team rapidly to meet the market opportunity with the mid-sized and large brand customers. We have 30 of the top 50 global brands as our clients. When you look at the world’s 50 most valuable brands, you will see that more than half of them use Wildfire. Facebook uses the Wildfire platform itself.

Sramana: What type of sales are you doing?

Victoria Ransom: We have some senior account executives who are out meeting with clients, but we predominantly use telesales. We have offices in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. We also have an office in London and a presence in Germany, France, and Singapore. One of the great challenges of our business is that we could really be targeting any business in the world. Everybody needs social media. There are certain industries that have adopted social media faster than others.

Sramana: Where is your telesales workforce located?

Victoria Ransom: Predominantly they are in California. We have a great office in Redwood City. Our culture is something that is passionate to me. We do have some sales offices in other places, but primarily that is on account of our more senior sales people. We started with a campaigns product but we have now expanded our product offering.

We have a complete suite for a company’s social media marketing needs. We run campaigns, we do content management across multiple social networks, and we keep track of what people are saying about those campaigns.

Sramana: Do you cover YouTube campaigns?

Victoria Ransom: Facebook is obviously number one. We are also integrated with Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Companies can also use us to publish content on their website and have it connected with Facebook so you can still get the social sharing.

Sramana: Would you give me a typical client’s use case?

Victoria Ransom: There are a lot of different use cases because there are four different products. One example would be a client called Blowfish Shoes. They are an online shoe retailer and they are using Wildfire’s suite which we sell on a subscription basis. We charge anything from $2,500 a month upward based on the number of social properties a company has. They use us to see what their fans are saying about them, and they use our analytics dashboard to understand how they are performing.

They use the Wildfire platform to run a year-long campaign on their Facebook page. Every day they use our content management system and they have promotions where they would give away a pair of shoes to one lucky person. That enabled them to highlight that particular pair of shoes and the campaign really became a window to their store. You could see video about their shoes. People could chat and ask photos.

What they needed was an easy way to change content on a regular basis and that is what Wildfire delivers. They promoted it through the newsfeed, and they had phenomenal results. They grew their fan base by 2,500%. They grew their email database by 1,000%. They also drove a considerable amount of sales. More than 64% of people who engaged on their Facebook page went to their website to browse. Almost 50% of the sales they generated during that one-year period came through the Wildfire campaign.

This segment is part 4 in the series : From New Zealand to Silicon Valley: Victoria Ransom's Wildfire Journey
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