Small businesses seeking to establish and maintain a digital presence continue to face challenges. While customers expect to find you on both Web and mobile and on a variety of social sites, updating this information can be time consuming.
Hosting and registrar giant GoDaddy is attempting to offer one solution with announced acquisition of San Francisco-based Locu this week. Exact financial details of the deal have not been disclosed.
More About Locu
Locu says it helps more than 30,000 restaurants, spas, salons, accountants, photographers, home-remodeling companies and other small businesses to “get found” digitally.
Essentially the company offers its clients a digital shortcut to update information like menus and other details about their businesses across many sites. The company boasts partnerships with sites like Yelp, YP.com, Foursquare, TripAdvisor and Facebook.
Locu allows its clients to update their business information in a single place and then publishes those changes across multiple Web platforms. The company even lets you send out Twitter and Facebook updates right from its dashboard to let your customers know about the changes. Get a glimpse of Locu in action by watching the video below.
How Locu Fits In
GoDaddy has already integrated Locu into its Website Builder tool. And Locu allows clients to link their accounts to their main websites and mobile pages for updating. So the idea here seems to be for GoDaddy to provide a seamless way for small businesses to update their business information on Web, mobile and a variety of social and other sites all at once.
“Last year’s acquisition of Outright.com (accounting and bookkeeping application for SMB businesses) indicated that GoDaddy wants to provide more than domain registration and hosting to small businesses,” said Vedran Tomic, president of Local Ants LLC, a local Internet marketing company. “Locu’s acquisition confirms that GoDaddy has big plans for the small business market, spanning beyond accounting solutions.”
This is a great acquisition and I can see exactly where GoDaddy is going with this. As the biggest name in the domain registration industry they are in a position of having contact with customers during the earliest phases of business formation. Why not continue to deepen the relationship with upsells?
The digital world is becoming the key component to develop relationships with customers.
That is interesting. Since Google is already known for its local services, I think that this will be a great addition to the bunch of integrated apps with Google. But we’ll see. I hope that this will not be one of those apps that closed down because it lacks a purpose.