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Why Sprinklr Is Pouring Money Into The Influencer And Advocacy Space

This article is more than 9 years old.

First Dachis Group, then TBG digital and now BRANDERATI – the company appears to be turning itself into an acquisition fire hose.

So what’s going on here? Why is Sprinklr, an enterprise social platform provider, acquiring companies in the influencer, social advertising and social business space?

The short answer is that Sprinklr understands that the world is becoming hyper-integrated. So that in order to remain competitive, businesses need to be able to track and influence their potential prospects at every touch point.

With its latest acquisition of BRANDERATI, they are acquiring the people and software to help their customers facilitate brand advocacy. That’s a fancy way of saying that Sprinklr will give their customers new solutions to connect with trusted influencers and advocates to help promote their own products.

According to Ekaterina Walter, BRANDERATI’s Co-founder and CMO, “By combing our engagement platform with the larger campaign management and scheduling functions in Sprinklr, the platform becomes a unified command center for activation of both advocates and the broader community.”

Take trusted advocates of a brand and combine them with a larger digital marketing campaign and suddenly you've amplified the entire campaign by as much as 16X. We've seen this with my clients and the research proves it out. What’s unique here is that Sprinklr, combined with BRANDERATI, does it with technology and does it at scale.

So in a hyper-connected, hyper-integrated world, it’s not enough to throw ads up on websites or on social networks, organizations must add trust into the customer acquisition formula. And the best form of buyer trust is through recommendations from people we trust.

If twentieth century marketing was powered by big television, radio and print buys to influence potential customers, twenty-first century marketing will be powered by trusted communities of influencers and advocates that are promoting products they like. Those communities, and the content they create, will help brands attract the right customers for a fraction of the cost.

Given Sprinklr’s recent list of acquisitions and their new focus on advocacy and influence, it appears Sprinklr will become maintain its frontrunner position in the enterprise social media and customer acquisition space.

But are they taking on too much too soon? Acquiring and integrating people and technologies are mindbogglingly difficult – I've witnessed both success and failure here. Even if Sprinklr figures out how to integrate the acquired company cultures, they will have to either scrap the acquired technologies and rebuild them on their platform, or hope that the development teams can integrate them over time. There’s no easy solution.

I don’t know how it will play out, but Sprinklr’s business strategy definitely has my attention.