Leads are coming from everywhere, and the digital marketing firms have adjusted to this reality. ReachLocal, for one, has now opened up its ReachEdge lead conversion and marketing automation software. It now has the capability to track leads and other activity from a wide variety of unassociated marketing sources.

Chief Product Officer Kris Barton briefed BIA/Kelsey on ReachEdge’s evolution, noting that the company’s efforts to increase transparency and simplicity will ultimately boost conversion rates. Barton says that “decoupling” the software is the direct result of customer input. Some customers, for instance, had invested in redesigned website and didn’t want to have to abandon it in order to sign up with Reach.

The new version of ReachEdge is $149 a month and includes a free trial. It also features plug-ins for publishing systems such as WordPress and Drupal. The software has also been enhanced for mobile. Customers can use their phones to receive emails and text alerts. It also has integrated reports that are “focused entirely on ROI” and are much clearer than Google Analytics, says Barton.

The post ReachLocal Now Captures SMB Leads from Across the Web appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Matt Booth hasn’t let any grass under his feet since taking the helm at Solfo/Yellowbot last year. The company has closed a $6.35 million Series A funding round, build up its team to include more focus on marketing and business development, expanded the product portfolio and, finally, changed its name to Connectivity.

As Solfo/Yellowbot, the company was known for its reputation and presence management solutions, and was known as a strong engineering-centric company. One of Booth’s objectives has been to expand the marketing and business development focus. He has grown the team to 27 (from around 20 when he joined) and plans to expand to 65 by the end of the year, adding both engineering and marketing/business development talent.

On the product side, Booth said Connectivity plans to focus on three core products — reputation management, listings management and a new piece, which is building automated customer lists. The latter works from the premise, supported by BIA/Kelsey data, that most small-businesses don’t have a very clear idea who their customers are. Building lists from unique identifiers (most commonly through a phone contact), puts a powerful tool in the SMB’s hand that they can in turn use to do more on the retention/remarketing side of the equation.

“Most small businesses don’t spend any money on retention because they don’t know who their customers are,” Booth said. His premise is that having a better way to capture and engage with customers will spur more investment in retaining and growing existing customers.

“Products have to be great in order to be part of what a business does every day,” Booth said. The standard he cited was OpenTable. Once a restaurant installs OpenTable it is very rarely uninstalled.

Connectivity currently has 92,000 paying SaaS customers, acquired largely through self-service and resellers. Most of these are smaller merchants, but recent growth has come from from the franchise and multilocation side of the equation. Going forward, Connectivity’s efforts will focus on working with agencies and directly with brands to bring in more multilocation businesses. Booth see what everyone else sees — there is no way to scale an effort at acquiring very small businesses other than self-service or working with large resellers. Direct efforts have to focus upstream.

The recently closed Series A round will fund the company’s expansion and product development efforts. The financing was led by Greycroft Partners, with participation by Rincon Venture Partners, Daher Capital, Double M Partners, TenOneTen Ventures, Eytan Elbaz and SLP Ventures.

The post Solfo Raises Money, Becomes ‘Connectivity’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Matt Booth hasn’t let any grass under his feet since taking the helm at Solfo/Yellowbot last year. The company has closed a $6.35 million Series A funding round, build up its team to include more focus on marketing and business development, expanded the product portfolio and, finally, changed its name to Connectivity.

As Solfo/Yellowbot, the company was known for its reputation and presence management solutions, and was known as a strong engineering-centric company. One of Booth’s objectives has been to expand the marketing and business development focus. He has grown the team to 27 (from around 20 when he joined) and plans to expand to 65 by the end of the year, adding both engineering and marketing/business development talent.

On the product side, Booth said Connectivity plans to focus on three core products — reputation management, listings management and a new piece, which is building automated customer lists. The latter works from the premise, supported by BIA/Kelsey data, that most small-businesses don’t have a very clear idea who their customers are. Building lists from unique identifiers (most commonly through a phone contact), puts a powerful tool in the SMB’s hand that they can in turn use to do more on the retention/remarketing side of the equation.

“Most small businesses don’t spend any money on retention because they don’t know who their customers are,” Booth said. His premise is that having a better way to capture and engage with customers will spur more investment in retaining and growing existing customers.

“Products have to be great in order to be part of what a business does every day,” Booth said. The standard he cited was OpenTable. Once a restaurant installs OpenTable it is very rarely uninstalled.

Connectivity currently has 92,000 paying SaaS customers, acquired largely through self-service and resellers. Most of these are smaller merchants, but recent growth has come from from the franchise and multilocation side of the equation. Going forward, Connectivity’s efforts will focus on working with agencies and directly with brands to bring in more multilocation businesses. Booth see what everyone else sees — there is no way to scale an effort at acquiring very small businesses other than self-service or working with large resellers. Direct efforts have to focus upstream.

The recently closed Series A round will fund the company’s expansion and product development efforts. The financing was led by Greycroft Partners, with participation by Rincon Venture Partners, Daher Capital, Double M Partners, TenOneTen Ventures, Eytan Elbaz and SLP Ventures.

The post Solfo Raises Money, Becomes 'Connectivity' appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The company may break $100 million in annual revenues this year, and is not yet profitable (which may — or may not — matter to tech investors).

Zendesk has a CRM product suite that is particularly appropriate to SMBs. Their suite is a cloud-based CRM platform that runs off extensive inputs from social media. Their suite is action-oriented, designed to help SMBs dialog and engage with their customers. So, here we have the new model for CRM for SMBs: Cloud-based, fueled by social media, bi-directional communications (consumer, SMB).

They’re also using a new approach to pricing plans. Their starter plan is $1 per seat/month.  Although this is close to a true “freemium” model, it is NOT freemium — there’s an actual cost incurred, even if it’s only nominal (at first).

Zendesk is betting this pricing model will produce superior results, net, than a “free” or “fremium” model.

— Scenario A: A customer starts with a free version of a product. Soon enough, the vendor tries to upsell that customer into a paying product. But the customer sees the product as inherently “free,” and is resistant to moving to a paying model. (We saw a lot of this in the early days of Internet Yellow Pages).

— Scenario B: A customer starts with a product version that has a nominal cost — $1 per seat/month. Although there isn’t much difference between $0 and $1 in economic terms, PYSCHOLOGICALLY there’s a big difference. Putting a price on the starter package, even a nominal one, establishes the concept in the SMB’s head that this is not a free service — there’s tangible economic value to it.

Their bet with this pricing model is that it’s easier to move a customer from $1 per seat/month to a meaningful price than it is to move a customer from free to a meaningful price.

In any case, Zendesk has put several business model elements together in a creative way with their CRM offering for SMBs. The ways of Zendesk bear watching. Mindfully, of course.

The post The Ways of Zendesk appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

1. Traditional Media rule… and will continue to do so.

2. Content (generation, discovery, distribution) as ever stronger nexus among brands, media, audiences.

3. Omnichannel, transmedia campaigns for greater lift.

4. SMB “Operating System” – mobile commerce, CRM, analytics, card linked offers, transactional marketing, etc.).

5. National Reach, Local Activation – national agencies and brands by geo-targeted local media.

A bit of a spoil sport perhaps to be saying this at a digital conference, but based on our forecast of spending in local markets out to 2017, BIA/Kelsey sees the traditional media segments of the pie retaining by far the majority of ad spend with only $41B of $148.8B overall being spent in online/interactive. As we are fond of pointing out to the digital literati, even tech companies use traditional media to get their messages out. Traditional media work and are a vital part of many media allocation plans.

The role of content continues to morph with different actors in the local ecosystem casting content in different roles. Media (editorial, scripted, news), brands (content marketing), retailers (advertorial) and audiences (reviews, blogs, likes, shares) are all content producers in an increasingly interrelated ecosystem. Content is becoming the glue that binds brands, media, audiences and retailers into an unified experience variously referred to as cross-platform, transmedia or omnichannel that seamlessly continues the user engagement across dayparts, devices and milestones along the journey to purchase.

Brand managers, agencies and media executives are beginning more seamless planning and execution around cross-channel or omnichannel campaign management. For example, there’s strong evidence that display ads significantly increase search conversion. We also see that TV ads can increase online revenue per click. This points to importance of campaign planners and media buyers to integrate the campaign strategy and creative with the innate capabilities of not only individual media channels but also their synergistic effects.

We’re also seeing Small-Medium Businesses (SMBs) evolve a grab bag of tools into a more effective use of cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) functionality ranging from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to ad tech and marketing tech solutions for managing in-bound leads; lead generation; bidding for programmatic search and display ads; and leveraging big data in card linked offers and other transactional marketing solutions that leverage the power of customer data. This provides even very small businesses the same kinds of tools and functionality and affordability that once were the exclusive province of Fortune 500 firms.

Finally, another big trend we’re seeing is the increasing role of the national brand in local markets. BIA/Kelsey’s advertising revenue forecasts illustrate that national advertisers play a significant role in the purchasing of advertising opportunities across many different local media outlets. In 2012, our estimates are that national brands spent $45.2 billion dollars in local media advertising such as direct mail, television, print yellow pages, radio, out-of-home and more. This amount accounts for more than a third (33.6 percent) of all spending in local media.

We’ll be covering these five themes in great depth at our upcoming Leading in Local conference, December 10-12 in San Francisco. Be there and join the conversation!

The post Digital East 2013: Traditional Media Continue to Rule appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.