Deluxe Corp. took a significant step in developing its interactive marketing services for SMBs capability with its recent $27 million acquisition of Vertical Response, an email and social media marketing provider. Deluxe’s origins are in providing business checking services. The company in recent years has expanded to offer a suite of marketing services.

Gordon Henry, VP & GM of Small Business Services, explained that the Vertical Response deal filled an existing gap in its IMS service offering to SMBs. Henry sees the SMB offering as having three essential elements: digital presence (websites), communications (email, social), and customer acquisition (SEM).

Deluxe has acquired  a presence solution (Hostopia) and a customer acquisition platform (Orange Soda). Vertical Response fills in the communications piece. Vertical Response is a 12-year-old company, based in San Francisco, with about 50,000 customers, according to Henry. The company has been broadening its offering to include social marketing capabilities, which was one of the key attractions to Deluxe.

Vertical Response CEO  Janine Popick  offers her take on the deal on the Vertical Response blog.

“It is a world class platform that will be significantly improved over the next three to six months,” Henry said.

As with Orange Soda and Hostopia, Vertical Response will continue to service its customers though its existing brand.

In related news, Deluxe recently brought in Todd Leeloy, a former VP of Digital at Dex One (now Dex Media), to serve as general manager of Orange Soda.

The post Deluxe Fills Out SMB Capabilities with Vertical Response Acquisition appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

As local businesses increasingly transition their advertising dollars online, they expect agencies and publishers to furnish them with simple, consolidated solutions supported by tangible, trackable ROI. MerchEngines built its white-label “relationship generation” system to enable online marketing providers to do just that for their SMB clients.

In a crowded online marketplace, where bigger firms such as ReachLocal, Yodle and WebVisible also compete to service SMB agents, MerchEngines’ value proposition is the comprehensiveness of the toolkit that publishers can implement and local merchants can benefit from.

There are eight key features in the suite, including a “SocialStream” layer that tracks activity across four prominent social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Buzz).

PPC search campaign management is fundamental to online search offerings, and MerchEngines is no different, supplying a single interface to customize, amend and track campaigns across multiple search engines. Tied to both SEM and social is CallAnalytics, the branded service that allows SMBs to establish call-tracking numbers and monitor traffic from both search and social.

Also of note is OneList, which disseminates a local merchant’s listing across more than 40 business directories (Yelp, Superpages.com and many more). The eight-tool portfolio is encompassed in a single online dashboard that agencies and publishers can conveniently access to monitor and change campaigns.

MerchEngines was founded in 2005 by longtime Internet executive Andy Steuer. In 2009 it sold to Hostopia, the Web site hosting unit of Deluxe Corp.

The post MerchEngines Unveils 8-Tool SMB Marketing Platform appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.