The current round has been led by led by Georgian Partners along with Spark Capital, OpenView Venture Partners, Scout Ventures and Jason Calacanis’ Launch Fund. The company has raised $36.5 Million since its founding in mid-2010. Earlier funders included Google Ventures.

Signpost’s evolution has been a dramatic one, fully reflecting the changes in local online marketing. The company launched as a provider of sales agents for local SMB deals, then evolved into an SMB-oriented SAAS company with offices in New York, Austin and Denver. In its case, deals gave way to a broad range of marketing services, including analytics, marketing automation, loyalty marketing, referrals and review acquistion.

The company now serves over 10,000 customers, and says it is eyeing a large customer set of six million very small businesses with 2-10 employees. Most of these have not previously had access to CRM and are unlikely to subscribe to pricey CRM tools such as Salesforce. Monthly fees are around $189.

The inclusion of financial transaction information provided by a third party is something that is increasingly being added to marketing services. Google, ForwardLine and others similarly incorporate financial transaction information.

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Fifty plus industry leaders will grace the stage at Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing Sept. 22-24 in New Orleans. We’re looking forward to a great show. Want to do some research before the event? Here’s some recent BIA/Kelsey blog coverage of the featured speakers (Click on the hyperlinks).

Acxiom: Scott Howe, CEO (Keynote, Day 2)

Alignable: Eric Groves, CEO (Future Stars, Day 2)

Booker: Josh McCarter, CEO (Scheduling ,Day 2)

Facebook: Joe DeVoy, Product Manager, Local Ads, Facebook (Social Media Shift, Day 2)

First Data/Perka: Mike Lazarro, Head of Planning (Beyond Advertising, Day 3)

ForwardLine: Craig Coleman, CEO (Cultivating SMB Success, Day 2)

Groupon: Dan Roarty, VP, Product Development (Keynote, Day 2)

Local Media Association: Nancy Lane, President (Local Media Heavy Hitters, Day 3)

Radius: Megan Austin Karlen, VP (Smart Data, Day 2)

ReachLocal: Sharon Rowlands,CEO, (Keynote, Day 2)

SignPost: Stu Wall, CEO (Beyond Advertising, Day 3)

Verve: Tom Kenney, President (Brass Tacks Mobile, Day 2)

Wanderful Media: Doug Kilponen, COO (SMB Retail, Day 2)

Yelp: Darnell Holloway, Sr. Mgr., Community Outreach (SMBs On Stage with Yelp, Day 1); Peter Curzon, Business Development ( Brass Tracks Mobile, Day 2)

YP: Jeff Federman, SVP, Digital (Brass Tacks Mobile, Day 2)

The post Useful Research for New Orleans: Recent Blog Coverage, SMB Digital Marketing Speakers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Deals and coupons remain anchors for local business promotion. But they can now be customized based on customer behavior and better marketing automation tools.
Signpost is eager to leverage these developments. While the 200 person company launched in 2011 as a “Deals Scout” and promotions manager — initially supporting Google Offers and others — it has increasingly gotten into software development.

Today, the company — which has raised about $15 million from Spark Capital, Google Ventures, OpenView Venture Partners and others — announced a new strategy that measures SMB interactions with customers (calls, email and credit card transactions). That data is then used it to drive a number of automated marketing solutions (coupons, reviews, referrals). It can also be used to generate real time reports on spending behavior, and rank customers by transaction activity, transaction size and recent interactions.

Pricing for the service is set for $199 a month, which represents a $50 increase from the earlier, promotions-oriented effort.

The question for Signpost is whether it can effectively carve out a niche for itself. Other companies, ranging from Marketo and HubSpot to Groupon, First Data and ForwardLine, are also delivering a wider range of SMB targeting services based on customer behavior they are tracking.

Signpost CEO Stu Wall is a featured speaker at Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing, which takes place Sept. 22-24 in New Orleans. You can get more information here.

Signpost CEO Stu Wall

The post Signpost: CRM, Marketing Automation Enhance Promotions appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

If you are a major aggregator of daily deals and the industry seems to be slowing down, what do you do next? That’s the question faced by 8coupons, one of the original aggregators. As founder Landy Ung tells us, “we used to get literally an email a day from a daily deal” site seeking a partnership. “Now it is one a week.”

It may have seemed safe for 8coupons, in fact, to continue building as it was. The self-funded site has been profitable for over a year, and has already set up partnerships with 450 daily deal companies and 50 local “non-daily deal companies, such as Goldstar and Restaurant.com. “Each one is unique,” says Ung. It also provides offers from 4,000 other sources.

The site has also avoided being boycotted by major sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial, which generally won’t work with aggregators. 8coupons makes the grade because it includes a variety of content beyond simply listing deals, including deal validation (“Is this deal for real?”) local shopper blogs and maps.

But six months ago, Ung says, the company had a nasty wakeup call when Google changed its algorithms. “We had been riding Google for the last couple of years, but we lost half of our traffic” (and much of its Google-based advertising revenues).

Ung decided the site had to go in some radically different directions, focusing on letting its 2.5 million unique visitors discover services and products. “Now we want to own the lifecycle” of how consumers use deals and offers, she says. “We are more of a service experience,” with a newsletter and other features,” adds Ung. “Even if the deals space collapses today, there is still a need for us.”

The emphasis on discovery has led to the ramping up in importance of such partners as Goldstar, the cultural events site, which is now its third-largest provider of leads after Groupon and LivingSocial.

One step it took was to partner with CityPockets, which tracks deals for consumers. Another step was to ditch the self-serve platform in favor of a deal with SignPost, the social media deal site that allows businesses to create their own coupons. SignPost had been a direct competitor, notes Ung. But “they’ve evolved into a B2B platform. They’ve phased out consumers at a time when we were phasing out B2B.”

8coupons is also de-emphasizing its efforts to aggregate shopping-related content. Instead, the company focuses on local “experiential” deals. “Getting local, shopping related content is extremely, extremely hard,” says Ung. We still have 50 bloggers we work with, but just a handful of them are truly committed. And those tend to have their own affiliate relationships,” which presents an inevitable conflict.

Ung notes that since the relaunch, 8coupons’ direct traffic has been growing 30 percent week over week. “The new 8coupons has gone beyond an aggregation and distribution platform,” says Ung. “It has pulled together the entire local deals ecosystem into a single hub, and is now the only hub for discovering, buying, organizing and even creating daily deals.”

The post 8coupons Relaunches Amid Daily Deal Slowdown appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

SignPost, an eight person New York-based deals company that has received $1 million of seed funding from Google Ventures and others, is banking on “deal scouts” to originate time-sensitive deals with local merchants and services. The company has deals available around the country, but is initially focused on New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Boston. There are 303 active deals on the site today.

There are currently 70 scouts on board. They are equipped with flyers and other collateral, and act like FourSquare’s “Ambassadors,” except they get a healthy chunk of the action. Not only do scouts receive a portion of revenues from deals they help originate, they will continue to receive remittances for as long as their merchant provides deals on the site.

CEO and founder Stuart Wall, who founded the company in 2009 as part of a Harvard Business School competition, says merchants and services can also create deals at any price point. The site is using AdWords to advertise to them. It also sponsors Meetups and other promotional events.

Consumers will be drawn to the deals via deal affiliates, local shopping bloggers and others, he adds. Friend to friend referrals get $10 credits. And deals are tailored via a recommendation engine after opt-in email users fill out an introductory survey. “We are not spending money on email marketing,” he emphasizes. Active Signposters can receive $5 “Karma credits” if they amass enough points.

Wall believes in SMB self-serve to a certain extent, but is really counting on the scouts to act as the site’s evangelists. The vast majority of deals will ultimately come from scouts.

There are basically two kinds of scouts, notes Wall. The first are the college students and homemakers who will do it as sort of a hobby. The second kind are people who sell POS devices to businesses or engage in other B2B or B2C sales. It is easier for the professional group to convert the merchant because they are used to asking for the sale, he says.

Whether deals are originated by merchants or scouts, merchants and services pay a significantly lower commission on sales than other deal sites, he says. Services are especially motivated to use the site because, as a self-serve site, they can better control deal flow. A barber may only have 20 slots in a given time period, for instance.

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