Innovation is a buzz word high on the radar of every technology company, and that includes those in the local online ecosystem. Constant Contact has a dedicated 15-member team working to foster innovation internally and is now expanding its initiative through the launch of the Small Business Innovation Loft (SMB InnoLoft).

The SMB InnoLoft will house a new small businesses innovation program designed to support entrepreneurs as they solve problems for small businesses through the development of new products, features and services. As a part of the program, startups will receive residence at the new SMB InnoLoft center at the Constant Contact headquarters. While here, they will be mentored by Constant Contact experts as well as investors to help build their early-stage solutions.

According to Andy Miller, Constant Contact’s Chief Innovation Architect, any startup focused on small business solutions can apply to the program, particularly those looking for tighter product-market fit to expand their business. “This program is not meant to be self-serving,” Miller said. “We don’t want to only bring in SMBs that benefit Constant Contact, they do not have to do integration with Constant Contact. The idea is that working side-by-side, we’re confident that our internal team and the Small Business Innovation program participants will learn from each other and collaborate to drive innovation that benefits small businesses everywhere.”

In addition to the office space, participants will receive access to groups of small businesses that have opted in to trying new offerings, $10,000 to spend on marketing activities, and priority access and support from Constant Contact’s AppConnect integration team. The program is four months long and scheduled to begin in the summer.

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Small businesses are more interested in social today. The challenge is finding the right mix of content and advertising, do it yourself and managed service, that maximizes the opportunity for local businesses.

A panel today at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local conference, “Social-Local: Boosting Sales and Engagement,” took a whack at these questions. The session featured Joel Hughes, SVP, Strategy and Emerging Businesses, Constant Contact, and Chris Marentis, CEO, SureFire Social.

Hughes: Constant Contact is a big name in the SMB space — millions of very small businesses use their low cost email marketing services. The company is following its customers into social media marketing, and feels it is getting a grip on the right mix of services to drive results.

“Email marketing is something SMBs have traditionally understood,” Highest said. “Social media has become a very hot area for small businesses.”

ConstantContact has spent much of this year testing a “recipe” for small business social marketing success. The recipe that is emerging is a combination of content (postings) plus ads and campaigns in different combinations.

“SMBs want do it for me (DIFM). Getting them started is a big piece. Many will start with DIFM, and move to DIY (do it yourself). Others will want to maintain outsourcing.”

Marentis: Marentis’ company is focused on the national-local opportunity, helping national marketers engage with local customers through franchise or dealer networks.

“We like to focus on idea of working with national businesses have an opportunity to harness the power of independent businesses they rely on for volume (franchisees, dealers, etc.),” Marentis said. “This requires integrating services, and that is more than a dashboard.”

Marentis offered a case study, Gutter Helmet, a company that offers gutter protection services (which he concedes is about as boring a category as they come). He said the company was able to drive down its cost per lead substantially using an integrated program that included content marketing.

“They were paying $90 a lead (driven mostly by PPC),” Marentis said. “Now paying $20 a lead, and organic is driving more than 55 percent of their site traffic.”

He said businesses need to begin understanding that content marketing is not a cost, but an investment. And measuring and attributing results is key to that education process.

“The key is measurement, so you can show them what they are getting out of it.”

The post At Leading in Local: ILM 2013: Social-Local and the Science of Engagement appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The clock is ticking!  We are just one month from Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media, which is Dec. 10-12 in San Francisco. The event has shaped up to be the most exciting local event in recent memory – a 2 1/2 day extravaganza that focuses on local:  The Internet’s last and biggest frontier.

We’ve already announced a powerful lineup of 48 speakers, including local leaders at Google, Facebook, Go Daddy, eBay, Groupon, Hubspot, Intuit; and major thinkers and leaders, including Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, AllThings D‘s Kara Swisher and Startup Rising author Chris Schroeder.

Want more? We have some exciting new confirms.

• Amit Kumar, VP, and Head of SMB, Yahoo. Kumar is set to brief attendees on Yahoo’s local and SMB initiatives under CEO Marissa Meyer.
• Ralf VonSosen, Marketing Leader, LinkedIn. VonSosen is set to discuss LinkedIn’s approach to leveraging its vast network for marketing
• Joel Hughes, SVP, Constant Contact. Hughes joins SureFire Social’s  Chris Marentis to discuss ways to make social media really powerful for local.
• Jeff Folckemer, President, Local Edge. Folckemer joins a great Digital Agency session and will provide insight into Hearst’s view of what really works.
• Anna Zornosa, President, Ruby Rails. Zornosa, the longtime industry leader with prior stints at Knight Ridder Digital, Dealix and Women.com joins our special Women Leading in Local networking session.

Of course, it isn’t just about what’s on stage. We are staging the San Francisco edition of our Future Stars contest, which rewards talented local startups; and not one, but TWO great precon tours set. A limited number of attendees will be visiting with Yelp at its brand new headquarters in the historic PacBell building; another group will be meeting a super group of Bay Area startups at WeWork. More info on signing up is coming.

Will we see you in San Francisco?   Register here:

We’ll be touring Yelp’s new headquarters.

The post Leading Execs From Yahoo, LinkedIn, Constant Contact Added to Interactive Local Media (San Francisco, Dec. 10-12) appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Constant Contact has made a really big bet on presence management with the acquisition today of SinglePlatform, a provider of a one-stop “write once, read everywhere” presence management network that provides parsed searching capabilities and services for 600,000 SMBs, including 10,000 paying customers. The service also has valuable partnerships with a growing roster of major media players, including The New York Times, YP (formerly ATTi.com), Foursquare, Urbanspoon, Tribune, Gannett and Village Voice Media.

It has shaped up to be a big week for presence management solutions, with Yext picking up $27 million from investors to build on its base of 50,000 SMBs. The investor group includes Marker, a new fund, along with CrunchFund and existing Yext investors Sutter Hill Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) and WGI Group. The new investment gives Yext a valuation of $270 million.

Constant Contact is paying SinglePlatform $65 million in cash, $5 million in employment retention and has set aside another $30 million for earn-outs. Single Platform, which is based in New York and has about 100 employees, had raised $4.45 million from investors, including DFJ Gotham Ventures, New World Ventures, First Round Capital, RRE Ventures and Seamless Founder Jason Finger. SinglePlatform Founder and CEO Wiley Cerilli becomes GM and VP.

While the acquisition of SinglePlatform is expensive, it certainly makes a nice extension for Constant Contact, which has been evolving from a company that initially provided email newsletter management for SMBs to a broader SMB promotions platform. It now services 500,000 paying SMBs, which are being eyed by everyone from scheduling companies to Yelp, each seeing that social alerts and tagging quickly become substitutes for email. But Constant Contact has really gone on the offensive this year with a number of acquisitions and developments that have greatly diversified the company.

In a conference call this morning, Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman said to get the full revenue earn-out, the SinglePlatform team would need to bring in $74 million over the next two years.

Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman is keynoting SMB Digital Marketing in Chicago Sept. 17-19.

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Explaining the basics of local and social marketing to clients and prospects is a tough task for companies, which might come off as patronizing. Why not give them a book?

A couple of years ago, Yodle CEO Court Cunningham wrote Local Online Advertising for Dummies, which did a great job explaining local advertiser options. Now, Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman has done the same for social media. Goodman calls it: “Engagement Marketing: How Small Business Wins in a Socially Connected World.”

As industry analysts, we look to Goodman for all kinds of insights into SMBs at every level. This book is more geared toward the basics of the engagement marketing cycle — as a means of managing good word of mouth. Goodman defines the cycle as providing the “Wow! Experience”; enticing customers to stay in touch; and engaging customers via social media. She emphasizes that SMBs really need to develop nuance when they are applying messaging via email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and G+. Each has different strengths.

While a lot of SMBs don’t think they really have much to say — a real problem in working with them for social media — Goodman provides insights into possible subjects, and case studies on how and when to apply social media techniques, including discussions, promotions, events, polls/surveys, shared information, and news and announcements.

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The arrival of Groupon and LivingSocial four years ago appeared to be a no money down, fail-safe way to get a hold of small-business accounts. But the followup hasn’t been easy, and the race to win SMB accounts is still anybody’s to win.

In fact, there is no single “disruptive” door into the marketplace, says Constant Contact Founder Randy Parker, who has been watching the transition of SMB marketing since 1995. Parker believes the richer opportunity is in SMB platforms that plug in “presence,” social and mobile opportunities from best-of-breed providers. He’s currently trying to do that with SMBApps, a start-up that he’s been incubating for a couple of years.

What you have today is a bunch of SMB solutions that typically rank below aggregators such as Google, Yelp and Twitter on search pages, he says. SMBs, to their great consternation, have to work with each platform.

Where does the “feature creep” stop? he asks. Moreover, as it gets more and more complex, Parker fears that the vendors are overwhelming their customers. Meanwhile, the severe fragmentation in the space keeps driving the costs of merchant acquisition up.

Parker says the ideal solution manages three things: an SMB’s data (such as deals and menu items), the content side, such as blogs, social media and copy points), and visual presence. The best way to “future proof” the Web is to build a single Web presence with “pre-made building blocks” for social, email, click-to-call buttons, delivery tabs, promotional links and mapping.

What won’t work is the extension of new platform after new platform. All that does is result in under-performing and marginalized channels, he says. Take mobile, for instance. Mobile is extremely important, and results in 1 of 3 leads, he notes. But the people pushing dedicated mobile apps for SMBs instead of universal HTML pages are “in la la land. The typical SMB may get 35 installs of their app,” he says.

Parker appears at ILM East March 26-28 on the “Local Business Success” summary panel, along with AT&T’s Maria Kermath and Schedulicity’s Dave Galvan. You can register here.

The post Constant Contact Founder Randy Parker: ‘Stop the Fragmentation, SMBs Can’t Cope’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Constant Contact, an email marketing company, announced its acquisition of mobile app developer CardStar this week. CardStar developed a mobile app where consumers are able to store all of their existing loyalty cards, rather than having to carry multiple, physical cards. Constant Contact will continue to operate CardStar’s free mobile loyalty application, which is available on major mobile platforms, including iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. Retailers can also offer coupons and special deals through the app. Terms of the deal are undisclosed.

Constant Contact’s acquisition is part of its makeover into an all-purpose marketing platform for SMBs. At the end of last year, Constant Contact launched a new offering, Social Campaigns, aimed at helping SMBs grow their fan base and drive engagement on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Mark Schmulen, general manager of social media at Constant Contact, is scheduled to speak at ILM East in March about local social media, customer engagement and the direct connection to sales.

CardStar’s employees will join the Constant Contact team, including CEO and Founder Andy Miller and CTO and Founder Danny Espinoza. Miller will serve as the director of mobile products. Espinoza will join Miller’s team to lead future product direction.

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