Small- to medium-sized businesses are natural customers for automated marketing tools that emphasize word of mouth.
That’s why local marketing suite LocalVox’ acquisition of social monitoring service MarketMeSuite and its launch of a simpler social response tool -- both announced today -- make sense.
Buzz created from user-created reviews, for instance, can have a large impact on a local business, LocalVox president and CTO Trevor Sumner told me.
“A one star difference in a Yelp review can mean a 5 to 9 percent difference in revenue” for a small business, he said, citing the Harvard Business Review.
“Social is fundamental” to those businesses, he added.
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Sumner said LocalVox’s previous social management tool, like many others, had streamed “all your mentions [in social media] into a single inbox, which generally becomes overwhelming.” The company’s marketing suite also provides email management, organic search engine optimization, Google Maps ranking, syndication of promotions, web and mobile sites creation and management, and directories like Yelp or Citysearch, among other features.
The integration of Waltham, Massachusetts-based MarketMeSuite’s technology into LocalVox has changed that, he said, creating “a simple to-do list” called the Social Inbox.
It highlights which social posts from Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and others mentioning your business are waiting for a response. Once you have responded, the post drops out of the Inbox.
“It just requires five minutes a day,” he said. For Facebook and Twitter, businesses can also get the social notices in their email inbox, and reply from there.
The local business user also gets new analytics that allows them to “see where my active customers are,” he said, so they can focus attention on those networks.
MarketMeSuite, purchased for an undisclosed amount at the end of last year, will remain a standalone brand under a new name, LocalVox SocialCast. The small staff of six people will stay in Waltham, and founder Tammy Kahn Fennell “has exited as part of the acquisition,” he said.
While there are a growing number of marketing software tools and services for SMBs, Sumner pointed to two -- ReachLocal and Yodle -- as offering the range of features that LocalVox does. But they are focused on pay-per-click ads, he said, while LocalVox emphasizes owned and earned media.