Brandcast Aims to Bring Salesforce-Like Services to Small Business

A new cloud company is hoping to bring elements of Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) services to the small-business market, and it has Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff as a supporter. Brandcast, which has launched its cloud platform for brand management, hopes to make it possible for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to establish and manage their brands across a "consistent cross-channel web presence."

The company just launched, and as part of its unveiling, it announced its first round of funding, which was led by Benioff. Salesforce's head honcho contributed $1.8 million to help the fledgling company get on its feet. Brandcast is being led by founder and CEO Hayes Metzger, a former Salesforce engineer, whose last venture was the launch of social media community BandPage (originally a Facebook app).

Metzger's new business is basically focused on cloud-based automated marketing for SMBs. According to Brandcast, brands need "total web coverage" to support all of the ways people interact with different brands. The company has been running silent in beta since late last year, but with Benioff's support and technology in place to provide the automated marketing the company believes businesses need, it's ready to cast a wider net with its own marketing.

"Brandcast not only creates an online destination for your brand, but also has built-in mechanisms for driving traffic to that destination," said Metzger in a prepared statement. "It's simple enough for anyone to use, yet powerful enough for huge companies to pull enterprise content management into the cloud."

With the sheer number of different ways and locations people are talking about and interacting with brands big and small, maybe Metzger is on to something with a cloud-based automated marketing platform. The platform's purpose is to make it easier to manage a variety of online content and resources from a single location. That includes managing websites, blogs, Etsy shops and social media channels.

The platform is now available. To kick things off, Brandcast is offering a free one-year subscription to the first 1,000 signups.