Unleashing digital growth: LocalEdge’s $19 million success story with Vendasta
It is part of the Hearst Corporation, which operates 33 TV stations, 76 newspapers, digital services businesses, and 200+ magazines worldwide.
The Challenge:
Amid the evolving digital marketing landscape, LocalEdge wanted to seize on the first-mover opportunity presented by addressing local advertisers’ online presence needs with reputation management, listings registration, and social media management software.
Unlock new revenue streams with tailored digital solutions for local advertisers
$19M
Gross marketplace
revenue
Diversify your digital revenue streams with digital solutions designed for local advertisers
97%
Account
retention
Receive support from a dedicated growth manager arming you with the resources you need to offer incredible experiences to your advertisers
3,200+
Products
sold
Build a repeatable digital sales process that allows you to transform your salesforce and sell digital with ease
Background
Recognizing the need to expand beyond traditional print directory marketing solutions, LocalEdge, like many media or media-owned companies, embarked on a journey to diversify its offering.
Around the time of partnering with Vendasta in 2010, LocalEdge had a keen foresight regarding the increasing significance of reputation management, social media, and listings solutions for small and medium businesses. This trend was fueled by the growing recognition of social proof and the impact of Google star ratings.
To avoid the complexities and costs associated with developing a proprietary solution or integrating multiple providers, LocalEdge aimed for a streamlined approach while still maintaining a white label offering.
“Choosing Vendasta as our partner has been a game-changer for us. Not only were they far, far ahead of their competition for their online presence solutions, but their all-in-one platform also enables us to offer comprehensive online presence solutions and white-label services to our clients while simplifying our tech stack and operations.”
Vendasta’s platform became the centralized hub for managing LocalEdge clients’ digital marketing needs, encompassing crucial elements such as client data and billing, all in one convenient location.
Objectives
- Resell comprehensive online presence solutions, including reputation management software and a social media management platform.
- Collaborate with a partner capable of developing seamless integrations to ensure consistent data and order management across LocalEdge’s entire tech stack.
While these goals have remained paramount, LocalEdge has also embraced the opportunity to leverage Vendasta’s dynamic white label software marketplace, which offers over 250 products. This has allowed LocalEdge to expand its digital offering and cater to a wider audience.
By utilizing the Marketplace, we have positioned ourselves as the go-to solution for our advertisers’ evolving needs, including SEM and SEO. We have the flexibility to package and enhance our marketing bundles as our client relationships grow,” says Carver.
The approach
LocalEdge takes a comprehensive approach to address the needs of local advertisers, combining traditional and digital advertising solutions.
In collaboration with Vendasta, they have designed marketing bundles that cater to these needs, offering a range of services such as search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), social media management, and website development. One of the key components of their bundles is reputation management, which has been integrated seamlessly thanks to Vendasta’s development work.
“We focus on SEM, SEO, social media management, and websites as our core services. We have packaged reputation management into almost all of those bundles. The development work done by Vendasta has made it incredibly easy for us to integrate our systems, making the process of ordering, canceling, and making changes much more efficient. It’s the perfect mix of products that our advertisers are really happy with, addressing their specific needs,” Carver says.
By offering bundled online presence solutions and integrating reputation management seamlessly, LocalEdge empowers its clients to efficiently manage their online presence and respond to reviews. This strategic approach gives LocalEdge’s clients a competitive edge, especially in industries where customer reviews play a crucial role. Through Vendasta’s support, clients receive timely notifications and valuable insights, enhancing their online presence and reputation.
LocalEdge has emerged as a trusted partner for local advertisers’ digital marketing needs, delivering a unified and streamlined experience. This enables clients to navigate the path to online success with ease, achieving higher visibility and driving business growth.
Execution
Through their collaboration with Vendasta, LocalEdge has discovered valuable upsell opportunities, particularly in the realm of reputation management, especially for industries with a high volume of review activity.
Central to LocalEdge’s offering is a comprehensive reputation management report seamlessly integrated into user-friendly dashboards. This integration empowers advertisers to conveniently access and monitor their reputation management data, providing a user-friendly experience. Carver calls this feature out as a competitive advantage, given some other tools in the market don’t provide the same or same level of monitoring and AI-powered response capabilities.
In addition to their core services, LocalEdge provides supplementary labor support that complements their reputation management solutions. These additional services aim to offer comprehensive assistance to advertisers, further enhancing their experience and maximizing the value they receive.
“Working with Vendasta has been absolutely amazing, and both LocalEdge and Hearst have benefited greatly from this experience. They have great quality products and are a true partner to us – they truly want us to succeed. We appreciate all the integrations that they’ve worked on with us over the years and how that’s allowed us to become much more efficient and streamlined. Overall I absolutely love Vendasta and greatly value their partnership.”
Carrie Carver
Vice President of Information Technology, Hearst Media Services
LocalEdge’s best-selling products
Reputation Management
White-label online review management software for businesses and multi-location brands.
Wordpress Hosting
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Social Marketing
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The conclusion
The collaboration between LocalEdge and Vendasta is a win-win partnership that brings significant advantages to local advertisers. By bundling and packaging comprehensive online presence solutions, including reputation management and social media tools, LocalEdge has enabled their advertisers to monitor and respond to reviews, giving them a competitive edge in their industries.
This is what partnering with Vendasta feels like
195 Reviews
4.4 out of 5
191 Reviews
4.8 out of 5
120 Reviews
4.4 out of 5
“Vendasta makes it easy to provide full-service solutions to clients. The best feature is the breadth and quality of providers that they have attracted to the Vendasta Marketplace. You can build a business confident that you’re offering ‘best of breed’ solutions to your clients. Plus, the Vendasta platform allows you to pull it all together and present an impressive single dashboard presentation. In addition, Vendasta provides partner support to help you continually grow and innovate.”
Bill B.
Principal
“Vendasta is an amazing company and the platform is better than any other on the market. They provide world leading training and support. Their lead generation tools are very intelligent and work to get signups for your agency. This is a company that you can trust and create a truly unique and powerful marketing agency in partnership with. The support is second to none and they do what they do with passion, focus and expertise to ensure that you succeed.”
David R.
“What I appreciate most about the platform is the broad choice of tools and customization. But in truth, it’s the people. SaaS is trash. Add great people to a solid platform and it turns into a solution. Vendasta account team, product specialist and executives [are] all here to support their agency clients, makes it my go-to choice.”
Mathew
CEO in the US
“I love Vendasta because the entire software system is so streamlined. Everything is incorporated into one platform that helps agencies grow and scale. Their software platform gives your clients a portal to manage everything related to their business marketing online.”
Mitchel T.
Principle Consultant
“The Vendasta platform helps me grow my digital marketing agency by providing everything I need to succeed, including a Partner Center, Task Manager, Vendor Center and built-in CRM.
Their online marketplace has over 200 digital solutions, allowing me to provide all of the digital tools and services that my clients will ever need. It also allows me to add my own products and services to my online store, enabling me to include up-sells and additional value-added services to my clients.”
Michael K.
Owner
“Having a product offering that is well-rounded and possibly unique from my local competitors definitely gives me an edge. Having more tools also helps me become more confident. Highly recommend.”
Justin
CEO in the US
“I highly recommend Vendasta to anyone operating a digital marketing agency. They help you focus on growing your business by taking over the heavy lifting of doing the detail work for you. You can stay focus on the big picture and not get bogged down in the trenches. Without them, I would never have been able to scale my business, we stayed lean but expanded our offerings.”
Scott K.
“Vendasta’s agency tools have allowed us to provide our clients the tools and services they need to stay on top of their online reputation and social media. We’ve gained market share from our competitors, provided our clients with the latest technology to be successful online and increased our retention of clients to over 97% after their initial contract terms.”
Terry B.
CEO
“The main benefit is that I can run a business without a bunch of employees. Even when I am big enough to need a few employees I will still need far less than if I were to run the business without Vendasta.”
Thomas F.
Agency Owner
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