Main Street Hub, the Austin-based marketing platform for small business, announced a $25 million Series C equity round today.
The funding, led by Vista Equity Partners, follows a $20 million debt round last February and brings the total raised to $65 million.
Main Street Hub wants to be the one-stop marketing arm for small business, giving the mom and pop store access to the power of the internet, whether that’s Twitter, Yelp, content marketing or email marketing.
As I wrote in a February article, Main Street Hub does the work for these companies:
For a monthly fee, Matt Stuart, co-CEO at Main Street Hub says his company does all the heavy lifting across online channels for these businesses. “We deliver a combined product using existing communication channels including marketing automation, CRM, social media, reputation management and mobile, web and email marketing,” Stuart explained.
The company is focusing on using the power of analytics and data to improve the quality of every aspect of the business, Andrew Allison, company co-CEO told TechCrunch. “Our offering is unique because we create authentic and effective content at scale,” he said.
The company is using the data and learning to apply industry-specific content strategies for local business customers, Allison explained. “Getting great customer engagement is a function of inputs like post structure, topic, timing and great writing,” he said.
For instance, for a pizza joint, the content might include restaurant-specific news like a new beer on tap and fun news like the Guinness world record for the largest pizza. The idea is to keep people interested in the business to maintain existing customers, while finding ways to attract new ones.
Allison sees the data-science approach as being a key to his company’s growth and intends to use some of the money from this round to increase the investment in engineers and data scientists. As the company grows, the content database and the insights they can cull from it also grow and they believe with more data, the more accurate the targeting can be.
The company has customers in all 50 states, although its offices are in Austin and New York City. It uses a lot of cold calling to get the word out and needs to continue building the sales team to build the company.
Most mom and pop stores simply don’t have the time or the ability to do what Main Street Hub does for them by monitoring internet and social traffic and directing customers to their business. With $25 million, Main Street Hub has the resources to get the word out.