A few years ago, Merchant Circle pushed the boundaries of SMB marketing,– getting claimed profiles from over one million SMBs with just minimal staff but the latest in social marketing (and telemarketing) techniques. The site has continued to develop after it was acquired by Reply!, Inc. in 2011 — it continues to gain new profiles — but it may have the perception of fading as a top local play.

Reply! is now relaunching Merchant Circle with an eye towards making it “the best directory site on the Web.” The relaunch focuses on leveraging the 1.6 million member merchants with speedy searches, and more of an emphasis on user experience — especially, Reviews and Expert Answers, and the mobile experience. In general, merchant profiles will become more of a “showcase” rather than a flat listing experience.

The site is a major improvement, with a slick, updated design. We especially like the globe-like local maps highlighting reviewed businesses.

The consumer-facing design launches this week. An updated dashboard with self-managed Merchant Circle profiles including blogs, images and Q&A — will be launched at the end of January. A dedicated mobile app will come later in 2014.

With the relaunch, “the merchant’s persona is front and center,” CMO Chris Mancini told BIA/Kelsey. “This relaunch will continue pushing that mission forward. Our research shows that SMB’s need simple solutions for their online marketing and we are dedicated to providing that without breaking their bank account or their timeclock.”

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In the diverse yet confusing local advertising ecosystem, the new mandate calls for media companies to engage local business clients with holistic solutions that engage their customers in new ways. Deals and mobile optimization have received the lion’s share of attention, but targeted lead generation is another vehicle through which publishers can connect with local merchants.

Reply.com is pursuing more cost-efficient and effective lead gen models through its real-time auction marketplace for multi-targeted (intent + location) leads. Now it is introducing a white-label platform for publishers to fuse “competitive quote buttons” into their directories that deliver advertisers enhanced clicks from prospective customers.

The first publisher to enroll is MerchantCircle, which will integrate the technology to pair category-specific local service providers with online customer prospects. Other media companies are expected to partner soon. Reply’s marketplace serves leads across several verticals, predominantly auto, real estate and home improvement, but also moving into education and insurance.

Reply.com also works with a variety of channel partners to service SMBs, in addition to its telesales force and self-service option.

Reply.com COO Sean Fox will address the evolving local leads marketplace in a presentation at ILM East, March 21-23 in Boston.

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Reply.com has carved out a niche among online marketing companies by offering an auction marketplace for locally targeted consumer traffic for various verticals (home improvement, autos, real estate, insurance, etc.). Now, it is set on building a mobile strategy. The company recently announced that it has acquired AdHubs, a mobile app developer that sees vertical apps as a major new source of lead generation and advertising.

The small start-up, cofounded by former Yahoo Infrastructure Technologies head Reza Hajebi, focuses on “commuter apps,” such as games, as well as apps such as recipes and sports. It has already built 1,200 apps and is seeing 30 percent growth every month.

AdHubs is now set to ramp up quickly. It expects to have 95 developers on board by the end of the year, and create an assembly line for apps. It expects to add 25,000 apps in 2011 alone.

“A closed network gives better results,” says Hajebi, who has been made Reply.com’s CTO. “Mobile is the best way to measure user behavior.” Hajebi says AdHub quantifies up to 28 touch points for mobile users.

Reply.com COO Sean Fox is set to discuss leads and vertical marketplaces at ILM East March 21-23 in Boston.

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Leads for home and trade and real estate come in many flavors. Some come from intuitive URLs. Reply.com, a marketplace for local and category specific leads, reinforced the latter today, acquiring FastRoofingBids.com, FastRoofingLeads.com and LeadToRealty.com.

Reply.com CEO Payam Zamani, in a release, said the acquisitions are consistent with the firm’s strategy to scale within its existing verticals, and also to enter “new emerging categories.”

The company, which filed for an IPO last year, has been developing leads for local advertisers and national firms in such areas as autos, auto loans, B2B, real estate and insurance. It also has launched a new “Leads Exchange.” Zamani added that the firm is looking for similar acquisitions as it plots its growth.

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While 2010 has been lauded as “the year of local,” it has also seen an influx of interest and spending by national brands to drive neighborhood-level store traffic. These initiatives have taken diverse (and sometimes highly publicized) forms: Gap’s deal-a-day offer through Groupon, Best Buy’s mobile check-in experiments with Shopkick, and a host of real-time inventory providers (Google Product Search, Milo, NearbyNow) allowing retailers to engage customers at the apex of purchase intent.

Geomentum VP Casey Squier told the ILM:10 audience that, as a byproduct of this hyperlocal focus, national brands are “turning to large agencies to put together a local program that can be understood by C-level execs that resonates throughout the entire organization.”

That’s exactly what Geomentum hopes to do for its clients when it officially launches the new technology in March 2011. Spawning from traditional agencies, it allows its client to do store-level planning by layering their sales data on top of Geomentum’s 2,000 data points about local neighborhoods. Retailers can then alter their media mix accordingly to better reach customers where they live and buy.

Ultimately, this should foster higher-quality lead generation, which is exactly what Marchex is touting to agencies through its performance-based pay-per-call platform. Scott Greenberg, Marchex senior VP of strategic development, stressed that as online and mobile advertising becomes more complicated, merchants of all sizes still demand the simplicity and measurable quality of phone calls.

Marchex’s platform allows resellers to create and distribute ad content for its clients across a pay-per-call network. Because performance governs the business model, businesses pay only when the phone rings. While Greenberg reports that the platform is largely being sold to larger brands to enable them to track store-level leads, he also hopes that it continues to move down market to SMBs.

Marchex is placing its bets on calls, but Reply.com CEO Payam Zamani thinks that search and display can still be effective as long as these clicks, or leads, are “enhanced” to account for consumer intent and location. Otherwise, driving targeted traffic is both expensive and imprecise.

The pledge to businesses through the Reply Marketplace is simple: “sign up and receive locally targeted and intent specific prospects” based on particular customer actions being sought. Echoing Marchex, he noted that two-thirds of the company’s business comes from bigger businesses looking to locally target.

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Reply.com this week announced plans to raise $60 million in an IPO. ReachLocal had earlier announced similar plans to go public. The success of one or both companies’ efforts will have a major impact on other local-themed companies’ efforts to raise funds and/or go public.

Looking at Reply.com’s SV-1, we see that the company has 127 full-time employees, including 103 in sales and marketing, 14 in technology and 10 in general and administrative. It has raised $27.5 million since its inception, and last year grossed $34.3 million in revenues from more than 5,000 advertisers. It also delivered 700,000 leads.

The brainchild of AutoWeb Cofounder Payam Zamani, Reply.com was founded in 2001 primarily as a lead generation service for autos, with real estate added in 2003. In 2005, the company acquired Connecting Neighbors, which builds sponsored neighborhood Web sites for real estate professionals.

In 2006, Reply.com’s strategy made a sharp turn. It announced plans to sell Connecting Neighbors, which recently only contributed 5 percent of its revenues; and added “enhanced clicks” generated from auctioning inventory for a variety of local categories from the search engines and ad networks. The company reasoned that the search engines and ad networks had a massive amount of left-over local inventory that needed to be specially targeted.

The online auction marketplace was introduced in 4Q 2008 with auto and real estate components. Since then, it has added home improvement and has just added insurance.

In the SVI, Reply.com noted that 65 percent of its income comes from locally targeted national accounts, aggregators and channel partners. But an emerging sales focus is on channel partners offering white-labeled versions of its system. Traditional media companies with a large installed base of advertisers are being specifically targeted.

Reply.com COO Sean Fox is a featured speaker at Marketplaces 2010, taking place in San Diego March 22-24.

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Vertical businesses that have relied on Yellow Pages and newspapers and other classified channels aren’t always seeing the same performance-based results that they might expect in the Google age. But many of them also aren’t likely to become keyword experts, or spend a lot of time managing their accounts. That’s always the SMB dilemma, right?

That’s what Reply.com is focused on. The two-year-old, 125-person company, backed by $17 million of venture capital, provides vertical advertisers with “enhanced click” packages and validated leads, complete with leads scoring. In addition, advertisers using Reply.com’s auction-based system can filter locations, and put caps on spending and cost-per-click rates.

Vertical segments targeted by Reply.com include key leads categories, including home insurance, health insurance, life insurance, education, auto finance, mortgage, used cars and auto insurance. Auto and real estate segments make up the biggest segments, with 60 percent to 70 percent of Reply’s customer base. Under Reply’s system, each category is customized for the particular aspects of a vertical.

One key differentiator is that the targeted categories are typically not “inventory based.” They may be new cars, rather than used cars; mortgage, or pure relocation leads, rather than search-based rentals leads.

Reply CEO Payem Zamani suggests that Reply’s clicks and lead offers are more efficiently processed than typical ad exchanges, in part due to narrowing the market base with geotargeting and a system for discerning consumer intent. The company is processing 9 million clicks per month, and 1.58 million leads, with customers for its auctions including auto manufacturers, major media companies such as Hearst Newspapers, and vertical sites such as RealEstate.com and Autobytel. The company also works with several of the search engines, SEO sites and e-mail providers.

The basic idea is to create a “Google-like” platform for acquiring traffic, says Zamani. Reply’s knowledge of user intent and location — driven in part by the installation of a pixel to track users — really streamlines the process and drives higher conversion rates, he says. Conversion success depends on how deep the advertiser wants to go. Information that goes all the way through to consumer credit cards for purchase will be a small fraction (maybe 0.1 percent) of more general conversions (30 percent to 40 percent) that provide additional information.

Reply.com COO Sean Fox is a featured speaker at Marketplaces 2010, March 22-24 in San Diego.

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