• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 13, 2011

Marketers gain a little freedom from IT departments on Monday. Crowd Factory has built out functions in its social-marketing suite allowing brands to create custom microsites and a Facebook-based landing page for group deal campaigns and other social-marketing programs.

In a few clicks, marketers can generate custom landing pages for campaigns and integrate them across multiple points. The platform's tools support the creation of flash deals or group offers, providing control of the campaign design and the ability to track visitors and social interactions.

Landing page creation typically requires help from IT professionals, but too often marketing projects get tagged onto the tail end of long project lists. This do-it-yourself approach lets marketers create hosted Web landing pages or Facebook tabs using a wizard interface that guides them through text, image and other information entry. Once a few details are complete, publishing Web-based landing pages or Facebook tabs requires a click of a button.

This function is the latest in Crowd Factory's "codeless campaign" strategy to give marketers more choices without getting IT involved. The tools also provide insight into the direct connection between social activities and conversions.

Crowd Factory also recently introduced Social Offer, which allows companies to develop and launch their own group deals and promotions.

"It's really about speed," said Sanjay Dholakia, Crowd Factory CEO. "As a marketer, we need to move at the speed of marketing as opposed to the speed of IT."

That's not a dig on IT, but the group responsible for keeping computers, networks and the Internet connections up and running fields requests companywide. Marketers need to run campaigns that sometimes have a lifespan between one and two weeks. By the time a ticket gets filed and the project rolls into the queue, the window closes.

Marketers at large companies such as Microsoft, Sony Music, HBO, Universal Music Group, McAfee, Mitsubishi Motors, American Red Cross, VEVO and Billboard need to maintain a much greater level of control and speed for campaigns, especially when building out social campaigns that occur in real-time.

"It literally takes 15 to 20 minutes to create a landing page with the tools," Dholakia said. "The landing page for the Lionsgate movie 'from Prada to Nada' went live on Friday after signing the contract on Thursday."