- SmartBug Media — a leading Intelligent Inbound marketing agency — announced it raised a growth equity investment from American Discovery Capital
SmartBug Media — a leading Intelligent Inbound marketing agency that assists businesses in generating leads, increasing awareness, and building brand loyalty through inbound marketing, digital strategy, design, marketing automation, and public relations— has announced it has received a growth equity investment from American Discovery Capital (ADC).
This deal validates SmartBug Media’s remote business model and positions the company to accelerate its growth and to capitalize on numerous expanded opportunities in the inbound marketing services market.
ADC is known for partnering with innovative business owners and entrepreneurs who have built successful and established businesses with strong fundamentals that are well-positioned for future growth. And among middle market companies where there is a growing reliance on marketing and sales automation, the ADC relationship enables SmartBug to strengthen its already leading market position. Plus the partnership also enables SmartBug to further capitalize on a market need for companies that offer strong sales, marketing, and technical experience to take advantage of the explosion in cloud-based sales and marketing technologies.
Ever since SmartBug launched in 2008, the company has been a 100% remote company. And with a long history of innovation, SmartBug has consistently found better solutions to serve the marketing community and enhance the client experience. For example, most agencies rely heavily on interns and outsourcing, but SmartBug has chosen to provide veteran marketers and strong in-house talent.
While many agencies limit access to the strategists who are key to their success, SmartBug doubles down on the customer experience and guarantees direct access to strategists and encourages them to be an extension of the client’s team. And while many agencies have unpredictable delivery systems, SmartBug’s focus on process development and professional development results in high customer satisfaction and award-winning results for its clients.
SmartBug has also set up a strong business foundation early on by partnering with marketing leaders like HubSpot. As a result of this strategy, SmartBug has become the highest-rated HubSpot Solutions Partner in the world by hitting 335 five-star reviews to date, according to the HubSpot Solutions Directory. And earlier this month, SmartBug was named a HubSpot Elite partner — one of only six companies to earn this distinction worldwide.
Key Quotes:
“SmartBug is a leader in the digital agency space and a global leader in the HubSpot partner community The company has a wide range of unique and impressive attributes that made it an attractive investment for us. We are excited to partner with them and accelerate the growth of the SmartBug brand.”
– Mike Denbeau, partner at ADC
“Our goal was to provide employees with challenging careers along with the flexibility to spend more quality time and make lifelong memories with their families. We also had a hypothesis that a remote environment could help us hire better people faster, with our customers deriving great benefits from it. These philosophies have enabled us to attract the best talent in the market and build a high-retention hiring culture, proving our remote model successful, as we’ve scaled to 85 employees across 28 states to service more than 100 clients.”
– Ryan Malone, founder and CEO of SmartBug Media
“SmartBug has long been a top HubSpot partner and recently became one of just six companies to reach our highest Elite tier. It’s encouraging to see the market recognize the growth opportunity in a business that delivers world-class inbound marketing and customer experience services built around HubSpot’s methodologies and software. We’re excited to see what SmartBug does next.”
– JD Sherman, president and COO at HubSpot
