In The News

Marketing Pilgrim: ReachLocal Raises $55.2m in Funding

by Vinny Lingham

ReachLocal announced today that they have received a further round of  funding by Rho Ventures, in conjunction with their original investors. The latest round of funding is $55.2m–which values the company at $305m.

ReachLocal’s target market are Small & Medium enterprises, and they have built a platform that allows smaller companies to easily market themselves.

I’ve just watched the ReachLocal video, and it seems that their real value proposition is that they’ve integrated online and offline touch points (points of contact), and can track and report on this for small & medium businesses, which in most cases do not have high hurdles of integration.

This is particularly valuable, as many companies do not factor in the value of offline conversion, related to search engine marketing–those that do, are able to price their keywords far more competitively.

Given the size of the SME marketplace, ReachLocal’s valuation may not be as astronomical as many would think, albeit very high for a traditional SEM firm.