Maintaining visibility online is critical for local small business owners, but who has the time, energy or the bucks to keep up with Facebook, Google+ and now Pinterest?
A fast-growing New York-based tech startup says it has a solution.
LocalVox is an online marketing tool that lets small business owners who lack the budgets of the big guys reach customers across a variety of online platforms with the click of a button.
“We took something complex and made it simple and affordable,” said LocalVox co-founder and CEO David Pachter, 45.
Launched in May 2011, the digital marketing service is catching on: It currently has 400 New York City customers, including City Winery, B&H Photo, Sushi Samba and Chelsea Piers. Monthly fees range from $199 to $749.
LocalVox just moved from a 2,000-square-foot shared space in SoHo to a 14,000-square-foot headquarters in the Financial District, complete with an educational center that it will use to offer free weekly digital marketing classes to local business owners.
With 100 new customers signing up per month, the startup expects sales to hit nearly $3 million this year. LocalVox has raised $1.3 million so far and is in the process of raising several million more in its first institutional round.
Pachter, a serial entrepreneur, started the company with tech veteran Trevor Sumner, 35, two years ago, after noting his wife’s struggles to market her fledgling invitations business.
“I was amazed at how rapidly the online world was changing,” Pachter said. “How could the average small-business owner keep up?”
The two started by launching a New York City neighborhood online newswire for local businesses called NearSay, where businesses can blast their latest news, events and deals. Over time, they created a technology that offered a broader menu of services.
Let’s say a restaurant owner is having a wine tasting. If he is a LocalVox customer, he can hit a button and LocalVox will email his customers, automatically update his website, post the news to Facebook and Twitter and publish it to a local publishing network that reaches 400,000 New Yorkers. “It’s a one-stop app,” Sumner said.
The key appeal is the relatively low price, said small business expert Scott Gerber, founder of The Young Entrepreneur Council, a nonprofit organization.
“The alternatives can be expensive. It could cost several thousands of dollars to do this,” Gerber said.
Even so, LocalVox faces a slew of rivals in the $26 billion local online marketing business — everyone from daily deal sites like Groupon to search engine optimization firms.
source:-http://www.nydailynews.com/news/money/digital-marketing-tool-helps-small-businesses-limited-budgets-compete-big-guys-article-1.1057272
No comments:
Post a Comment