National brands, franchises and multi-location outlets often lose business by only providing standard name/address/phone number information, instead of focusing more on discovery search, says Local Market Launch CMO Gideon Rubin. “Name, address, phone information only represents 15 percent of searches. If you know ?Subway,? you can look it up,? he says.

But the real market opportunity is in the discovery market, which constitutes 85 percent of searches. ?What we do is add keywords and categories that increases the likelihood of showing up in non-branded searches,? he says. ?We?ll add the name of the sandwich or other menu details. That creates additional revenues for merchants. It is a really large opportunity.?

Listings, LAT/long information, pictures and reviews are other key data points that national brands must keep up to date across all the search engines, adds Rubin.

Local Market Launch primarily works with digital agencies and certified marketing reps that have national brand accounts. It wins accounts after finding missing information for national brands during search audits of local locations. It all comes down to ?completing the process of delivering products,? Rubin says.

The company also does a lot of work helping large, multi-location businesses claim listings. Many have locations that never show up, says Rubin. LML will work on them individually, adding them to sites such as Yelp, Bing and Google.

LML has just raised a new $1 million round led by former ValueClick execs Jim Zarley and Steve Umberger, adds Rubin. The revenue will help fund the Santa Barbara company?s expansion effort.

Rubin is speaking on search issues, along with LocalVox CEO Trevor Sumner and YP VP Chuck Lee at LIL: The National Impact May 7-9 in Atlanta. Register here

The post Local Market Launch's Push on Discovery for National Brands, Local Marketing appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

National brands, franchises and multi-location outlets often lose business by only providing standard name/address/phone number information, instead of focusing more on discovery search, says Local Market Launch CMO Gideon Rubin. “Name, address, phone information only represents 15 percent of searches. If you know ‘Subway,’ you can look it up,” he says.

But the real market opportunity is in the discovery market, which constitutes 85 percent of searches. “What we do is add keywords and categories that increases the likelihood of showing up in non-branded searches,” he says. “We’ll add the name of the sandwich or other menu details. That creates additional revenues for merchants. It is a really large opportunity.”

Listings, LAT/long information, pictures and reviews are other key data points that national brands must keep up to date across all the search engines, adds Rubin.

Local Market Launch primarily works with digital agencies and certified marketing reps that have national brand accounts. It wins accounts after finding missing information for national brands during search audits of local locations. It all comes down to “completing the process of delivering products,” Rubin says.

The company also does a lot of work helping large, multi-location businesses claim listings. Many have locations that never show up, says Rubin. LML will work on them individually, adding them to sites such as Yelp, Bing and Google.

LML has just raised a new $1 million round led by former ValueClick execs Jim Zarley and Steve Umberger, adds Rubin. The revenue will help fund the Santa Barbara company’s expansion effort.

Rubin is speaking on search issues, along with LocalVox CEO Trevor Sumner and YP VP Chuck Lee at LIL: The National Impact May 7-9 in Atlanta. Register here

The post Local Market Launch’s Push on Discovery for National Brands, Local Marketing appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Call Based Marketing Automation provider Invoca announced today that it received $20 million in Series C funding led by Accel Partners. Following a recent rebranding (formerly RingRevenue), Invoca will use the funding to scale operations and tackle the enterprise opportunity, such as call centers.

This also comes amidst lots of strong growth for Invoca. Launched in 2008, more than 3,000 marketers now use its call marketing software to generate leads and optimize conversion rates. It also boasts 200 percent revenue growth for the past four years and $1 billion in transactions completed over its platform in 2013.

This all comes as calls are given more recognition as a form of inbound marketing. That has a lot to do with increasing smartphone use — especially for high intent mobile search. Completing phone calls has proven to be a seamless consumer use case, leading to lots of opportune inbound marketing.

Invoca is a big proponent of this opportunity, particularly for large enterprises that thrive on incoming calls. This applies to advertising but also to making sure that operations run smoothly and leads are managed and routed within large call centers.

Some of its Fortune 1000 customers include Liberty Mutual Insurance, OpenTable, Answer Financial and DirecTV. And it’s integrated with partners such as Salesforce Adobe, Kenshoo and Marketo, further positioning it for growth and penetration of the enterprise opportunity.

We’ll continue watching Invoca’s growth closely, and the application of funding to accelerate that growth. It’s an opportune time for call monetization, shown by two large funding announcements within one week, among lots of other telling signs.

The post Invoca Raises $20 Million to Continue Enterprise Push appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

As briefly mentioned earlier today, voice based marketing automation provider Ifbyphone has secured a $9 million series D funding round. It was led by River Cities Capital, and it brings Ifbyphone’s total funding to date to $30 million.

This is one telling sign among many of growth in the broader call monetization space. Our data indicate that $68 billion is spent annually across media on localized ads to generate calls to businesses and 61 percent of SMBs consider phone calls the most valuable form of incoming lead.

According to Ifbyphone’s press release:

It’s why even though today’s fastest-growing new economy companies, such as SaaS (software as a service) and other high-performing businesses, may market their products online, they generate revenue over the phone using inside sales and telemarketing teams. These companies use voice-based marketing automation to measure marketing effectiveness and optimize ROI by not only tracking each inbound call back to the specific online, mobile or offline source that originated it, but also by routing calls automatically to the right sales agent no matter where they are or what phone device they use.

Ifbyphone’s product suite is emblematic of a holistic approach meeting today’s enterprise demand, a la Salesforce’s model. This includes four main areas (mapping to several individual products): Call tracking, routing, management (i.e. virtual call centers), and customer notification.

“Tracking the call is not enough,” Ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro told me. “You need tools to route that call to the optimal party to close a sale; and a third set of tools manage the call once it’s routed. The last leg is outbound customer notification. If you’re running a business engaging customers by phone, we think you need all four.”

Ifbyphone is on a steady growth clip, and has been able to capture lots of business around the above call monetizaiton growth trends. Now, with the new funding it will accelerate this growth by taking a more aggressive sales push.

“Historically we’ve been selling to early adopters that find us,” said Shapiro. “That worked well, reaching 4,000 organizations and hundreds of thousands of customer end points. With funding we’ll deploy a sales force to push the message.”

The post Ifbyphone Lands $9 Million Series D To Accelerate Growth, Sales Push appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

While the volume of deals (acquisitions and capital raises) in the local media space hasn’t really grown much this year, the volume of these deals exploded, according to BIA/Kelsey’s deal tracking effort called Local Media Investment Watch. Deal value across the local categories LMIW tracks grew by 65 percent to $10.2 billion year to date.

Today at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media conference, BIA/Kelsey analysts Jeanne Datillo and Jed Williams, architects of Local Media Investment Watch, shared some compelling data points that draw a picture of where the local media energy and investment interest lie.

Online was one of the fastest growing categories in terms of deal value (deal volume actually declined), expanding 150 percent so far this year. What drove this? According to Williams, the activity centered around digital services that drive engagement, upsell and retention — think CRM, online scheduling and merchant services. Examples include Open Table’s acquisition of Urbanspoon’s Rezbook reservation management system, and Hotel Tonight‘s ability to raise a $45 million funding round.

“This will accelerate over the next year,” Williams said. “As more investment, more agencies pushing into this space.”

Datillo also noted the home services space (which includes real estate) continues to attract deals. Examples? Trulia bought market leader, a tech platform for the real estate industry, for $335 million. “There is continued green space in the home services sector,” Datillo said. Other verticals are getting investment as well, noting recent deals involving Zoc Doc (medical records) and Wedding Wire.

“If you can innovate and be creative around niche verticals, you will get money,” Williams said.

What about social? Williams asked, “Consumer facing asocial networks, when does the door close?”

“If a social platform is creating a niche for a target audience, there is a good chance to get some investment.” Examples? NextDoor (raised $60 million), Path (raised $50 million), and Snapchat, which reportedly turned down $3 billion from Facebook.

The post At Leading in Local: ILM 2013: Where’s the Money? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.