This week, marketing tech startup Evocalize announced that it raised $12 million in fresh Series A funding. Move Inc., which operates popular real estate marketplace Realtor.com, led the round.
Although the digital marketing space has been booming, especially amid the pandemic, smaller businesses have largely been left behind, and are continuing to spend money on antiquated, offline marketing techniques. Of course, most of these businesses would love to have access to the top-notch tools large companies use, but the barrier to entry is often high, explained Evocalize co-founder and CEO Matthew Marx.
“If you try and hand a small-scale or local marketer — your local real estate agent, or your local mortgage agent, your local restaurateur — a new tool to use, and ask them to learn how to do it and wire in a bunch of the require data that’s necessary to make it work, you’re fighting a losing battle,” Marx told Built In.
This is the demographic Evocalize is trying to serve. The startup is on a mission to bring marketing resources to small-scale businesses at the push of a button. It does this by partnering with tools that businesses are already using, and integrating its own paid marketing and demand generation technology to make them even better. This ensures that these small businesses, who already have a lot on their plate, don’t have to fuss with any new technology.
Right now, much of the company’s reach is in the real estate industry, which typically requires a lot of local marketing efforts like fliers, billboards and brochures. However, it’s a bit old school, and Evocalize saw an opportunity to bring it into the 21st century. This is likely why Move Inc., a long-time backer of Evocalize, led this round.
“At a time when digital marketing continues to grow increasingly complex, Evocalize helps simplify and make it more accessible,” Move Inc. CEO David Doctorow said in a statement. “We’re pleased to deepen our relationship with Evocalize with this investment and help them bring collaborative marketing to more businesses that surround the home transaction.”
Looking ahead, Evocalize would also like to do the same for other industries, and plans to use this fresh funding to further innovate its platform.
“Real estate is not unique. The problems that you see with the small-scale marketer — trying to advertise their home listing and get buyers or sellers for the listing — it’s the same problem that exists in the restaurant world getting store visitors into the restaurant, or selling mortgage products, or lending products, or automobiles at your local dealership,” Marx said. “At the end of the day, you need data, you need knowledge, you need time and you need technology.”
Marx added that Evocalize also plans to nearly triple its team in the next year.
“Seattle has the best high-end talent in the world. It really does,” he said. “We’re a software company, we’re a technology company. And we will always be that. So we’re always looking for the best software talent and the best technologists to help drive our tech forward.”
