The big announcement this morning at Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing — The Berry Company has acquired LocalVox for an undisclosed amount. Berry was already an investor in LocalVox and has been one of the leading resellers of the marketing automation firm’s LocalCast product.

Laura Cole, Berry’s VP of Marketing, told us the acquisition was important for Berry, which wanted to own its own marketing automation platform. She said the success Berry has been having in the field selling LocalCast (and its next level product, SearchCast) and LocalVox’s strong team were also determining factors. LocalVox founders Trevor Sumner and David Pachter have agreed to stay on.

LocalVox offers a platform for creating and distributing content for SMBs using a do it with me model. They are at the owned and earned vs. paid end of the media spectrum. They offer a platform that allows SMBs to efficiency distribute content across multiple platforms — websites, social media, directories, email marketing and so on.

“We have been trialing it for the past 18 months in a number of markets,” Cole said. “It’s been very successful. It is among our best performing products retention wise. To own the technology is an important step for us. We are not just sitting still.”

We also spoke with Sumner yesterday and he told us the acquisition will give LocalVox resources move the business forward.

“Berry has been very supportive,” he said. “They will invest to get us to scale.”

The Berry-LocalVox partnership dates back to late 2012, when the two companies announced a deal to offer LocalVox products through the Berry sales organization. Berry was also an investor in LocalVox before making the full acquisition, which closed last week.

Cole said Berry would not prevent LocalVox from seeking new partners and resellers under its ownership. She also said that Berry is open to addition acquisitions if they make sense.

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U.S. directory and local search player The Berry Co. has scooped up defunct search marketing firm WebVisible’s Geneva platform from a liquidator in the wake of that company’s collapse.

“This acquisition will dramatically enhance our presence and capabilities in the digital local search space,” said John Fischer, interim president and CEO of TBC Holdings and Berry. “We plan to take the best of the Geneva technology and create a new platform and leads optimization engine that meets the ever-changing needs of advertisers across a range of digital products. We are delighted with the exceptional range of software development and product management talent represented by the employees of the new company.”

Berry has set up a separate business, based in Playa Vista, California, to operate the platform. One of the main reasons for the arm’s-length relationship is that the WebVisible business was based on reseller relationships, some of which Berry will maintain, while longer term Berry has ambitions to develop the technology further and possibly seek additional customers for the platform. This would be difficult if the operation were nested within the Berry organization. Essentially, Berry will become a customer of the new entity.

In addition to the technology, Berry has taken on 14 engineers and a few product specialists to help operate the platform.

Eric Owen, Berry’s VP of digital strategy and partnerships, told BIA/Kelsey that the WebVisible platform had several attributes that Berry found compelling, among them its dashboard capability, call tracking network and an order entry and ad insertion system with billing functionality. That latter is critical to helping Berry provision more digital products.

And moving more digital products through the pipeline is key to Berry’s longer term strategy, which involves provisioning multiple lead generating products and tracking the performance for the customer.

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The Berry Co., the SMB sales giant with 260,000 SMB clients, has partnered with Yodle for Web site creation and search engine marketing and optimization. The deal gives Yodle access to Berry’s 42-state reach and 885 print publications. Yodle, which is in something of a horse race with SMB resellers such as ReachLocal, WebVisible, Marchex and others, currently has a presence in 25 markets.

Berry, which calls itself “your local leads expert,” was sold to Local Insight Media last year. It is also an authorized resellers for AT&Ti’s Yellowpages.com, so it is essentially going to be splitting its sales products. SMBs will be offered online listings and video advertising from Yellowpages.com, and Web sites and SEO/SEM with Yodle. Berry is also an authorized reseller for Google AdWords.

Yodle CEO Court Cunningham says the deal with Berry, Ma Bell’s legacy sales company, has been “a long time in the making.” Tests began in May last year, and the arrangement is now live in some markets, with “methodical, region-by-region” rollouts likely to be completed by the end of summer. He also notes that Berry now becomes its largest partner, but that Yodle is private labeling solutions with “four or five” other companies as well.

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