Following the successful launch of its beta site earlier this year, Bizyhood has just introduced a round of new platform features that are expected to more deeply engage digital marketing small business owners. The platform is for small and local business owners and it helps them focus their marketing efforts on channels that bring the biggest return, while simplifying their online relationship with their customers and community,” explained co-founder Scott Barnett. The latest release presents a range of enhancements to improve user experience.
Since the Bizyhood team sees their platform as a needed innovation in the hyper local business market, when asked to describe how it will stand out from competitors, fellow co-founder Eugene Fabrikant describes it as a cross between Hubspot and NextDoor. A pretty good starting point in understanding what the team’s ambitious vision is for their platform; Hubspot went public just a few month ago.
Barnett who has been involved in multiple startups, including venture capital funded Bluenog, has a great appreciation for the lean startup methodology which encourages new product innovators to engage their target market early and truly learn what is desired by future customers. The new features just introduced are a direct response to the feedback obtained from first users or early adopters of the platform.
Barnett feels the Bizyhood team has identified a critical gap in the market serving small business in how they use online marketing. Barnett observed that almost all of the tools at a small business’s disposal are geared toward new customer acquisition. The majority of their marketing spend goes to advertising. Most of their engagement is done solely on Facebook, and many business owners are realizing their organic reach on social media is dwindling.
The Bizyhood platform suggests an alternative course for how small businesses should manage their time and marketing budget. Small businesses are encouraged to divert a small percentage of their advertising dollars monthly to Bizyhood, as well as re-purpose their time from Facebook to the platform. The advantage touted by the Bizyhood team is that for the same amount of time spent on Facebook, Bizyhood can expose information simultaneously to multiple social networks (Twitter, G+, LinkedIn, Facebook), while also providing local SEO benefits.
All customer feedback is available for display without any filtering. Business owners are urged to reply to feedback, just like they would do in person. The Bizyhood team has already seen that just a small level of engagement, on a regular basis, will enable a local niche business to rank on Google against its competition.
We âre also working on deeper integration with the community by engaging hyper-local publishers such as local newspapers, Chambers of Commerce and local community sites. Many of these sites are looking for the ability to display and promote local directories with the primary goal to sell advertising. One of our recent findings is that there are many hyper-local publishers looking to fill the front end similar to what Patch was doing, but no one is providing the back end infrastructure for business level services. Bizyhood, as a back-end infrastructure, is attractive to local publishers, as they do not have the technical resources to build this out themselves, explained Barnett.
In terms of the updated release,
- Business owners can now add events and promotions to their page – promote your business and share your promotions – not just on Bizyhood, but to social media pages as well.
- A totally redesigned business detail page – a more fluid and intuitive look/feel with the ability to show extended attributes, events, promotions and more.
- A totally redesigned dashboard – this is the “one stop shop” for business owners to manage their business.
- The site is now mobile ready! No native app (yet), but users can go to their favorite browser on their cell phone or tablet and it will work quite well.
Release updates are expected to be ongoing throughout Q4 2014 and the next major release will most likely be ready in Q1 2015, reports the team.
As they are nearing their year-end goal of having their first full community of small business owners using the platform (who are located in Monmouth County, New Jersey), they are now preparing to open up two more communities. They are especially excited since they are seeing businesses remaining active on the site and the number of active users is growing weekly.
To learn more about the Bizyhood platform, visit Bizyhood.com. The company also blogs about tips for small business owners to enhance their online presence and outreach on blog.bizyhood.com.
