Underlying Perch is a very powerful new business graph that we’ve begun to refer to as the SMB Marketplace Graph! As Perch is used, the application is capturing the network relationships between a local business and their business neighbors, their competitors and their influencers.  In doing so, we’re capturing what and who is fundamentally important to each individual business.

The SMB Marketplace Graph

This composite sketch that Perch creates for each business will become increasingly critical as marketing becomes more and more diverse, more mobile and more real time.  It can be used to tailor campaigns and products that best respond to what the business owner/manager considers relevant and important.

What does Perch capture for the SMB?

1. Competitor Marketing Actions.  Simply, whenever one of the businesses you watch posts to their social networks, runs a promotion, or announces an event, it will be instantly available.

2. Consumer Reviews and Postings About Businesses. Consumer commenting, reviews and photo sharing are now critical decision signals to consumers as they shop and compare businesses.  Staying aware of this pulse for your competitors and neighbors is one of the core utilities of Perch.

3. Best Practices Activities. Businesses often have a few peers that they hold in high regard – a cafe in Denver admires a upscale coffee roaster in SOHO, an organic cleaner in Boise looks to the best peer shop in Berkley, and so one.  By following these businesses, the business owner can stay in touch with the social marketing, promotion and consumer pulse of the businesses, giving them a continual flow of marketing ideas.

4. Marketplace Activity Monitoring. Marketplace activity is a multidimensional category that we’ll be experimenting with a LOT in Perch.  There are always nearby businesses or places that drive the pace of foot traffic to an area – a highly popular restaurant, an event facility, a sports arena, a health club that holds classes.  These represent signals that help a business owner with tactical decision support, and trigger opportunities for marketing actions.  Perch aims to deliver these signals and help you be better armed to staff properly and exploit new “everyday demand” opportunities.

The Watchlist – Making the Marketplace Personal for SMB’s

Central to the design of Perch is the personal Watchlist – a collecting container for your personal priority stream.  Businesses add to and prune their Watchlist  continually to make it more relevant and valuable as an everyday tool.

Perch is a tool for businesses to create their personal picture of signals and activities that should inform and trigger marketing actions.  The product is capturing a very unique contextual picture of how the business owner looks at their market.

On top of this graph, marketing can be more effective, more relevant and move us closer to the nirvana of yield management that ever before.

Getting a new product out into the “real world” is an exhilarating time!  On October 24th we announced the open availability of our new mobile app for small business owners and managers, Perch. It follows a heads-down dev period in Closed Beta that we previewed at Where 2.0 in San Francisco.

We wanted to share our favorite press and blog coverage of Perch, as key industry and small business press viewed, downloaded and chatted with us about the shiny new app!

We embedded the 90-second video story coverage by Mashable TV below.

You can read the official release here.

Closely has been working for some time with the great folks at hibu, the small business mega-artist formerly known as the Yell Group.

As many know, hibu is one of the world’s largest providers of small business commerce, operating across many countries and serving the marketing needs of 1.2 million small businesses.

The exciting thing about this partnership is how synchronized our visions are about today’s shifting marketplace model and the importance of rethinking how to deliver digital marketing services.

About Our Partnership

Closely focuses on Everyday Promotion Marketing – creating simplified and effective ways for a small business to manage the content, targeting and distribution of promotional messages to today’s mobile, socially connected consumers.  Promotion marketing was propelled to the forefront through the surge in daily deals over the past 3 years, which has carved out a place as a key marketing tool for about one quarter of small businesses, according to BIA Kelsey’s current research.

Everyday promotion marketing is a much broader concept representing a fundamental shift in SMB marketing.  Recently, Greg Sterling captured this very succinctly.

…partial demand-shift in the local market away from “ads” to a suite of services that focus on presence, organic customer acquisition and retention/loyalty.

As businesses witness the consumer activity pace of mobile and social shopping, they feel the need to actively engage with local consumers in new everyday ways.  This doesn’t map onto the old models of ad campaigns – and it signals the need for new marketplace services, employing simplified tools with distribution, placed into the hands of the business owners and managers.

At Closely, we’re very excited to be working side-by-side with hibu in pioneering the scaled delivery of a new generation of everyday promotion marketing services to their customers – who rely on them for digital marketing solutions, every day.

DENVER, CO – Sept 17, 2012 – Closely, a Colorado-based technology company dedicated to helping small businesses succeed with everyday social and mobile marketing, has entered into a partnership agreement with hibu to offer innovative digital promotion tools to hibu’s small business customer base in the US.

Under this agreement, hibu, a leading provider of digital services connecting local consumers and merchants, will utilize the Closely promotions platform to build an offering that streamlines digital marketing into one simple package. This will enable small businesses to effectively and efficiently connect with their social and mobile customers every day to attract new customers and to drive repeat business from existing customers.   Building on its experience in the local business environment and deep-rooted relationships with local merchants, hibu is uniquely positioned to help small business owners make the transition into the world of digital marketing.

Using the Closely platform, hibu will enable small business owners to tailor their promotions (e.g. offers, events, coupons, or special deals) to their unique needs and distribute them automatically to their social media, online and mobile properties and to premium advertising channels. Under this agreement, hibu may also use the Closely API to add distribution to its own consumer-facing web and mobile properties.

The agreement reflects Closely’s strategy of building simple tools for everyday promotional marketing that give control to the merchant and automate the distribution to existing and evolving social and mobile channels.

Notes to Editors

hibu plc is the new company name for Yell Group plc. In the US, hibu owns the Yellowbook portfolio of directories and related marketing services.

About Closely

Closely is a Colorado based technology company offering a set of web based and mobile applications to help local businesses win new customers and build customer loyalty. Small businesses and their digital marketing providers use Closely tools to monitor their competitive online landscape and create promotions on their own terms. Closely’s technology platform allows partners to distribute their promotion content to multiple distribution networks in a syndication model.

It has become crystal clear that traditional media approaches have to significantly shift to deliver on the opportunity. Our experience has led us, through multiple iterations across several channel types, to a sales and delivery model that is really starting to hit stride.  For lack of a better term, we’ve begun using the label “Promotions-As-A-Service” to describe this packaging, building off the familiar SAAS paradigm.

The Campaign Trail

Promotions have historically been packaged, sold and delivered as Campaigns.  A business signs up to run a specific promotional program, the offer is constructed, the distribution is agreed upon, and everything flows into an Insertion Order for scheduled completion.  We think about promotions as discrete individual ad activities.

This Campaign model, an artifact of an old media era, is a terribly inefficient sales and delivery model. It’s also a fundamental roadblock to the incredible future potential for adaptable and live marketing to mobile consumers and for delivering sensible merchant services that integrate lead and loyalty together smartly.

Blather, Convince, Repeat

The merchant decision, content creation and distribution management have all been treated as discreet events that are constantly repeated. Today’s competitive landscape further accentuates the problem.  Every business is being constantly pitched on running their next promotion using (yet another) deal or promotion channel.  And, again, the process of sales, design, distribution and reporting repeats itself – commonly from scratch.

This event centric approach is out of touch with today’s living marketplace filled with customers and prospects that are enabled to connect and transact with merchants anywhere, and now!  It also makes no connection to the everyday promotions such as Happy Hours or Seasonal specials that businesses have run “by themselves” forever.

Promotions-as-a-Service

A recurring service solution approach to Promotional Commerce dictates a clean re-think of every component in the food chain of sales, content creation, scheduling, reporting and distribution. PaaS rethinks the processes as a continual service for improving how the business stimulates demand, interacts with and learns from customers and local leads.

Promotions-as-a-Service (PaaS) encompasses several elements.

Onboarding Service. Capturing the business’ promotions once, and creating the foundation to turn them on/off and increase/decrease their volume is an efficient model for establishing a recurring Promotion Plan.

Distribution Hook-up. Today’s merchant can smartly leverage their own media via social media synchronization, customer list integration, and website integration. However, we all know this is never enough, and is too narrowly cast to deliver fresh new customer activity. So, behind this layer, we construct a cloud of premium distribution choices, delivering ways to pump up the volume when the business needs more demand.

Live Redemption. Campaigns create disjointed connections between consumers and businesses.  PaaS delivers a foundation for turning every redemption event into a critical new way to tag, rate and enrich your customer information.

A Live Control Panel. Redesigning promotions as a continual service, we give the business a dashboard and report foundation to observe, tune and test promotions – continually improving and adapting to their own unique market and business dynamics.

Monthly Plan & Report Processes. A simplified model of scheduled promotions, supported by recurring posts and live control is key as we deliver the right balance between “set-and-forget” and higher involvement optimization.

Boost Campaigns. So no, the concept of a campaign isn’t entirely dead; it resurfaces as a tool for purchasing media (rethinking the Insertion Order as a set of Distribution Management rules).  An efficient sales dialog can occur monthly or quarterly, when the Merchant can order up “Boost Campaigns” to drive demand when it’s most valued, and plan effectively for slow periods and upcoming events.

For More Years?
The shifting buying activities of an increasingly attention-challenged consumer demands that we progress from traditional media and search marketing models. We’re poised to help the local business find new ways to apply and improve the reach and impact from their own traditional everyday promotions.  Today’s promotional commerce products offer potent new tools for the merchant to grab the consumer’s attention and drive impact.

The industry will progress when we stop thinking of discreet media campaigns, and deliver a service model that supports continual interaction with the new live mobile marketplace of consumers and customers.

We can choose to become a campaign reformer, or be stuck banging our heads against the opportunity ceiling that we’ve imposed upon ourselves!

While most people are familiar with the popular Entertainment Coupon Book®, the company has turned its attention to expanding its reach into the online space via a suite of web, email and mobile products. Under this partnership, Closely empowers Entertainment Promotions to expand distribution to a growing array of online and mobile destinations by aggregating, organizing and managing the promotion distribution.

Many technology companies have been working to develop new ways to help small businesses reach customers who increasingly receive their local information digitally, but merchants have been slow to work with unproven partners. With Closely as its technology partner, Entertainment Promotions accelerates its mission to expand customer acquisition and loyalty marketing for its 70,000 local merchants, building on their trusted relationships with busy small business owners.

“There’s an awful lot of attention going on around the consumer, while virtually leaving the small business owner out. We’re powering the other side of that equation.”

Hundreds of millions of consumers spend their time on utility apps in mobile maps, localized search and shopping tools, on specialized social local apps, while waves of new local shopping apps call for their attention: witness Groupon Now, ScoutMob, Yipit, SCVNGR. Mobile wallets are about to increase the noise even further – essentially creating another new localized marketing channel disguised as a convenient payment tool.

But where is the merchant amid all this noise and excitement?

Business Behavior: Leaning forward with a furrowed brow
For the most part, merchants are sitting on the side of the pool, perhaps with one toe in the water, but mostly they are dazed and confused by the pace of change and plethora of choices. The concept appeals, but they are confused about how best to invite this live mobile consumer to visit or transact.

What they are doing is intensely watching the activity, as their competitors and neighbors do Daily Deals, as they adopt social marketing and as they begin to test new location-based specials.

At Closely, we’ve spent over a year working with and watching small businesses iterate their way through first generation deals, loyalty products and mobile promotion. One thing really stood out.

Searching for the Lost Feeling of Control

The consistent emotion that is visible with small business owners is feeling out of control – a lot of this is a function of the limited time they have to learn and keep up, and the often visceral fear that their competitors may be getting a leg up on them.

We took this reality to the product drawing board, and designed a new approach to drive small business engagement with Closely.

Soon, you’ll see us launch the first version of a new merchant mobile application.  The thinking behind how to engage with small business was captured in our recent guest editorial at Street Fight Magazine – essentially is boils down to this…

Deliver a live personalized stream about what is happening in the market and neighborhood of a business, all the time, at their fingertips – create an initial feeling of relief, followed by a growing desire to engage and control their performance.

Reward the user first, and then drive the opportunity for product engagement.

Business owner attention center on everyday interactions in their marketplace – about their customers, competitors and neighborhood activity patterns.  By informing the owner of the live mobile marketplace surrounding them, we start to knock down the barriers to participation.

Businesses need to be able to feel the vibe and get familiar with the everyday flow of promotions and incentives pulling consumers into action. Delivering this as a simple, valuable everyday mobile tool creates instant and lasting value.  From there, we’ll build product involvement.

Stay tuned, it’s going to be a fun new product direction for Closely!

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Closely proposes a model where media channels remain relevant when the small business needs the extra local distribution. Closely founder and CEO Perry Evans explored the big picture for small business in this new distribution environment in a guest column for Street Fight Mag.

Promotional commerce between small businesses and local consumers is undergoing a massive reconstruction. In the process, media channels are being forced to proactively adapt or wither into irrelevance.

In the old world, a business relied on a small number of trusted local media channels to package and deliver their promotions to local consumers, and spent what they could justify to convert these offers into visits and appointments. Media channels no longer enjoy the spoils of having critical mass in consumer reach and limited competition…

Read more at Street Fight Mag