You can't risk a click on the internet without triggering some kind of marketing deluge, but that hasn't soured investors' taste for more. The latest startup to get some cash for boosting your company's image is LocalVox, a marketing outfit for small and medium-sized local businesses that raised $7.4 million from Talus Holdings, an affiliate of Blackstone.
LocalVox co-founders Trevor Sumner and David Pachter started the company after they noticed that small local businesses where overwhelmed with marketing options and clueless about which ones worked. "Local businesses used be at a point where all they had to do was buy a Yellow Pages ad," says LocalVox co-founder Trevor Sumner. "Now, they have to worry about Facebook, Twitter, Google+ Local, websites, SEO – you get the picture."
Many of these small and medium-sized business owners are fairly unsophisticated users of technology, says Sumner, and they get buried by the sheer number of individual services that can market their business, from social-media dashboards like HootSuite, to advertising services like Google Adwords. "There are a lot of point solutions for individual services, but they just add another headache for small business owners," says Sumner. "They are really just looking for a hug, and for us to tell them we're taking care of all of it."
Which is exactly what LocalVox does. Let's say you are a clothing store that has an upcoming sale or a visit from a popular designer. With a few simple fields filled out with the correct details, LocalVox sends out notices to social media networks, updates any ongoing marketing campaigns, and makes sure the company website also reflects the latest news.
Though Sumner acknowledges that LocalVox isn't the only comprehensive service that combines multiple marketing techniques, he says his company is unique because it goes after a smaller market that others don't want to touch – businesses that don't want to spend more than a thousand dollars per month. "LocalVox is affordable for a market segment that most won't go after." Plans range from $200 to $550 per month for media broadcasts, website updates, social media posts, and company directory optimization. For some perspective, competing local marketing company ReachLocal charges $3,000 for similar services. Larger companies with greater marketing needs can expect to pay up to $1,500 for LocalVox's services.
LocalVox has attracted local business customers in major cities in the U.S., though most of LocalVox's clients are based in Hartford, Connecticut, and New York City, which is where the startup is based. The next step is to go national, says Sumner, starting in early 2013. Who knows? Going big with small businesses might just pay off huge.
