While many companies are just beginning to interact with their clients on social media, others are employing advanced social marketing tools to proactively reach out to new and existing customers. Moontoast, a pioneering provider of social marketing, social commerce and social analytics, announced the launch of a new suite of social applications to help enable their growing list of partners create a variety of campaigns that deliver measurable results. 

Moontoast offers digitally distributable marketing applications and social analytics to facilitate the development of programs that engage customers, deliver leads and spur both digital and physical product sales. The company’s newest applications can be distributed anywhere online and make it easy for users to receive and respond to offers.  

The interactive applications work in tandem with the Moontoast Social Media Suite, a SaaS platform which was built from the ground up to deliver critical insights that help their clients understand relationships, relevancy and results. Customized views allow users to see which messages led to interactions, transactions and endorsements and compare their results with those of other users in related field. Moontoast also keeps users informed on Best Practices, detailing which offers are working best and outlining strategies that are driving results. 

“Social media have now reached the third wave,” said Blair Heavey, CEO of Moontoast. “The first wave was social listening, where companies wanted to learn more about what clients were saying about them. The second wave was publishing, with companies creating fan pages and Twitter accounts to disseminate information. The wave we’re now riding is activating, as brands recognize the need to strategically employ social media to acquire new customers and engage and transact with existing customers.” 

Moontoast has created a social marketing library of applications, including: 

Sweepstakes, an application that can be used for any lead generation initiative, such as email newsletter sign-up forms, embedded on both the company website and affiliate sites, limited edition purchases and new product launches. A recent shopping spree sweepstakes helped one client achieve a 25% increase in their email files. 

Pin it to Win It promotes products via the pinning of a selection of merchandise or other prizes, enabling brand offers to spread across Pinterest. 

Voting/Quiz and Polling rewards fans for giving their opinions on product design or answering a series of questions on issues relevant to the company. 

Email for MP3 or Coupons: Allows companies to give away a new music single or deliver coupons in exchange for an email address. 

Moontoast is a three-year old company with offices in both Boston and Nashville. After an extensive development phase, the applications were made available in late 2011. In the ensuing year, Moontoast has secured more than 40 customers, including several Fortune 500 firms in publishing, music, retail, and consumer packaged goods. While most of their base is in B-to-C, they have B-to-B clients as well, including a company that they have helped to significantly increase sales of data reports and subscription services. A recent initiative in conjunction with a major music label to support victims of the Aurora, CO movie theater attack drove over 8,000 individual contributions in less than two weeks. 

Gartner Research recently named Moontoast a “Cool Vendor“ in music and eCommerce.and Billboard magazine designated Moontoast a “Top Startup of 2011.” The company was also recognized as a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD), which helps position their customers to better reach and engage their Facebook communities with relevant content and offers as well as measure the results. 

How did they choose the engaging company name?  As several alternatives were being debated, one of the founders made a definitive statement “We’re going to the moon…and there’s no way that we’re going to be toast.”