Click here for Part I & Part III

Developing brand ambassador networks companies can tap into to build buzz and word-of-mouth marketing

Raavi Iqbal is the co-founder and CEO of SocialLadder. Launched in 2014, SocialLadder is a mobile peer-to-peer marketing platform designed to help live event promoters build hype and sell more tickets by growing their networks of brand ambassadors and social influencers. Users can incentivize their teams of ambassadors with rewards and challenges, and monitor and track progress in real time through a score-based leaderboard and advanced social media analytics.

EDWIN WARFIELD: SocialLadder recently announced a partnership with Eventbrite. Can you give us the background about what led to that partnership and what it means for the future of your platform?

RAAVI IQBAL: Through just working with our customers, we had driven several million dollars in ticket sales through Eventbrite’s ticketing platform. Eventbrite is the largest ticketing platform of its kind in the world. They do close to $5 billion in ticket sales. They saw that, somehow, we were driving millions of dollars through their platform.

We ended up getting a call from their CFO, who said, “Hey, you know we want to understand more about what you guys are doing. Come to San Francisco.” So, we went and met with their CFO and their head of product in San Francisco. We had a sit-down with them, and at the end of the meeting they asked us to come on-platform. What I mean by that is they asked us to integrate SocialLadder with Eventbrite, to the point where anyone in the world that launches an event on Eventbrite—and there are two million events launched per year on Eventbrite—should see a link on the side that says “brand ambassador program,” and when they click that, instantly their event should be able to get created and published, and an ambassador program created on SocialLadder. That’s what we have been able to launch with Eventbrite. That’s been a huge partnership for us. They’ve been a strategic partner for us and a channel partner driving new business to SocialLadder.

With the success of that partnership we realized—again, another epiphany that we had; as I said, it’s never been a straight road—that the key to making SocialLadder scalable is ultimately to make it completely self-service. What we mean by self-service is any brand, any live event, should be able to quickly setup an ambassador program on SocialLadder on their own.

We were able to do that for Eventbrite and we went out and raised another round, which we’re about to close right now, of $1.5 million, and that’s really about throwing fuel on the fire. It’s about replicating this channel partner model with other ticketing providers as well as attacking other verticals with the technology.

Nothing about SocialLadder ties it specifically to live events; it’s just the first vertical for us. What we see with SocialLadder is that we’ve created a scalable word-of-mouth marketing technology and we want to apply that to many other verticals. Word of mouth works in live events: we all go to live events because we hear about it from a friend. It works in travel: we go on trips and we go to places because we hear about them from friends. It works with any lifestyle brand: half the people wearing Lululemon, as an example, are wearing that because they’ve talked to a friend who loves that brand. There are many, many lifestyle brands out there that realize that word of mouth is the best way to grow their brand, and those are the verticals that we’re attacking.

Connect with Raavi on LinkedIn

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ABOUT NEWMARK KNIGHT FRANK

Newmark Knight Frank (NKF) is one of the world's leading commercial real estate advisory firms. Together with London-based partner Knight Frank and independently-owned offices, NKF's 15,000 professionals operate from more than 400 offices in established and emerging property markets on six continents.

With roots dating back to 1929, NKF's strong foundation makes it one of the most trusted names in commercial real estate. NKF's full-service platform comprises BGC's real estate services segment, offering commercial real estate tenants, landlords, investors and developers a wide range of services including leasing; capital markets services, including investment sales, debt placement, appraisal, and valuation services; commercial mortgage brokerage services; as well as corporate advisory services, consulting, project and development management, and property and corporate facilities management services. For further information, visit www.ngkf.com.

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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