Local ID Raises $1.9M To Help Big Chains Get Smarter About Their Local Marketing

Marketing startup Local ID is announcing a $1.9 million seed round.

The company was founded last year and, according to CEO Alex Nocifera, aims to help large businesses manage their marketing across many individual locations. He said that even for a large chain, it’s often the local data that matters: “Major chains love local.”

For example, Nocifera (pictured above) suggested that Peet’s Coffee wants to be “the community coffee shop” for hundreds of communities. That means creating campaigns that are relevant to each community, which creates challenges. To use another example, Nocifera noted that Walmart has thousands of locations, and that means thousands of “different layers of context that they need to stay ahead of.”

This isn’t his first experience with local marketing. Before Local ID, Nocifera founded local subscription startup Circle Street (acquired by Valassis) and in-store TV service Ripple Networks (acquired by TargetCast).

He said that brands manage all of this through a regional marketing manager, who’s usually tracking things with Google searches and spreadsheets. Local ID gives those managers better tools, and it also gives their bosses a clearer sense of what’s happening at a local level. And once a regional manager leaves, a lot of their knowledge and practices are saved in the system, so their replacement doesn’t have to start at square one.

Features include a profile of every store and its activity, profiles of every employee involved in marketing, a list of relevant local marketing opportunities and a task management system. For example, a regional manager could use Local ID to see that’s there’s a big local sporting event, and they could create a campaign around that event, then track whether that campaign succeeded in driving people into the store.

As Local ID adds more features, Nocifera said the goal is to offer “all the local context that these large brands need.”

The funding was led Crosscut Ventures with additional investment from Technicolor, TenOneTen, Baroda Ventures, Double M Partners, Tallwave, Wavemaker Partners and Queens Bridge Venture Partners. It was first disclosed in a regulatory filing.