Signpost, the cloud platform that makes marketing simple and effective for local businesses around the country, today announced that it has raised $52 million in a late-stage financing from HighBar Partners and the Bank of Montreal with participation from previous investors Georgian Partners and Spark Capital. The new investment will let Signpost scale its footprint and extend its leadership in technology for local businesses. Already, thousands of local businesses use the Signpost platform to engage with their customers, improve their online reviews and drive revenue.
“While large corporations have used powerful marketing technology to drive extraordinary growth for years, local businesses — which make up 99.7% of all U.S. businesses, accounting for nearly half of the GDP — have been left behind,” said Stuart Wall, founder and CEO of Signpost. “Signpost puts the power of the world’s largest marketing departments in the hands of local business owners and empowers them to instantly capture their customer data, get better online reviews, and win new and repeat business — automatically and effortlessly.”
Businesses rely on customer reviews in local searches on Google Maps, Facebook, Yelp, and others to drive new and repeat revenue. Today, at least 82% of smartphone shoppers conduct ‘near me’ searches and 90% are likely to click on the first set of results (Search Engine Land, 2018); of those, 76% call or visit the business within 24 hours (Google, 2016). Local businesses without reviews may not show up in these results and lose critical revenue. At the same time, business owners struggle to get customer contact information, manually input it, and market to them effectively. Only half of all local businesses survive to their fifth birthday, with 82% of small business failures related to cash flow (VisualCapitalist, 2017).
“Local business owners struggle to manually create and maintain customer databases and to send consistent marketing communications,” Wall added. “Too often, they don’t have the time or resources to devote to marketing, which can make the difference between the success and failure of their business.”
Signpost Builds on Recent Success
The funding comes following a period of intense focus and strong performance for Signpost. The company achieved cash flow break-even in early 2019, well ahead of schedule. Their core business serving local businesses saw 43% year-over-year growth. And customer retention hit an all-time high, with customers of their newest product retaining at 99% monthly. Building on the growing sense of optimism, Signpost will move its New York headquarters to 275 Seventh Avenue in early July 2019. Signpost expects to add employees in all three of their office locations: New York, Austin and Denver.
In Signpost, Brian Peters of Highbar Partners saw the right approach to applying technology to level the playing field for local businesses. “Local business owners are often deluged with pitches from companies selling solutions that do a fraction of what Signpost does,” he said. “The level of automation in Signpost’s platform and their ability to follow through on reviews and more revenue really sets them apart. When we consider the strength of the team and the magnitude of the market opportunity, we couldn’t be more excited to partner with Signpost.”
“The decision to support Signpost was an easy one,” said Justin Lafayette of Georgian Partners. “They’ve identified key challenges facing local business owners – specifically, the lack of time to collect customer data or engage their consumers. Signpost has a best-in-class tech team and technology platform. They’re able to leverage a massive consumer data set to deliver outstanding results.”
“Signpost has brought to market an innovative solution for local businesses who need more reviews and revenue.” Said Devon Dayton, Managing Director of Technology and Innovation at the Bank of Montreal. “This round of funding will allow Signpost to continue to scale and further their technology advantage.”
Marketing Intelligence Comes to Main Street
Using Signpost’s smart CRM and automated text and email marketing, local businesses improve their ratings by 34%, increase their revenue by 14%, on average. After 5-minute onboarding process, Signpost connects seamlessly to local businesses’ phone, email services and key business platforms and gathers all their customer contact information without business owners needing to lift a finger. Having gathered behavioral data from over 70 million US consumers across all its local business customers, Signpost has unprecedented insight to send automated, personalized messages to local businesses’ contacts throughout their purchase journey and convert prospects to become new customers, drive repeat business, and generate new reviews.
Signpost enables small business owners to:
- Capture customer contact information – Grow your customer list automatically (330% on average!) whenever prospects and customers call, text, email, or buy your products or services
- Engage customers – Automatically send texts and emails to drive more feedback, new customers, better reviews, referrals, and more repeat business
- Make payments effortless — Supercharge performance with Signpost Payments, a complete card payment solution, with free equipment
- Set marketing to autopilot — Get the benefits of better reviews and more revenue automatically without any data entry or manual marketing
- Consult with experts — Equip your business with digital marketing expertise from Signpost’s Customer Success Managers to drive more reviews and increase revenue
For more information or to schedule a demo, please visit www.signpost.com.
About Signpost
Signpost is the complete solution used by thousands of local businesses to get better reviews and grow revenue. Since its founding in 2010, Signpost’s powerful CRM and marketing automation technology has delivered results for local businesses. Powered by automated data collection and cross-channel marketing, Signpost’s platform drives new customers, new reviews, repeat business and referrals. As one of Forbes’ “Most Promising Companies” Signpost prides itself on a nearly perfect customer retention rate thanks to its industry-leading Customer Success team. Learn more at www.signpost.com.
About HighBar Partners
HighBar Partners (www.highbarpartners.com) is a private investment firm focused on strategic growth capital investments in enterprise and infrastructure software companies. The firm invests in companies undergoing significant change or transition and provides patient, long-term capital to build successful businesses. HighBar is a creative and engaged partner with resources and relationships to assist management teams with financial, strategic and operational execution. HighBar’s principals have founded, operated or invested in over 100 companies in the technology sector.
Canaccord Genuity acted as exclusive financial advisor to Signpost for the transaction.