RevLocal and the business of being found

At a Hammer & Nails grooming location in Upper Arlington, Ohio, a small number became a much bigger one. Google Business Profile clicks to its website went from two in August 2021 to 126 in May 2022. RevLocal, the marketing company behind the campaign, put the figures in a case study. It is an irresistible little before-and-after. It also leaves a business owner with the question that matters: how many people booked a haircut?

That distance between being noticed and being chosen is where RevLocal’s story gets interesting. A neighborhood business needs strangers to find it, trust it and act. Each step can happen on a different screen. Each can also go wrong.

A neighborhood problem with too many passwords

RevLocal began in 2010. Its founders include Marc Hawk, Michael Hawk and Aaron Boggs. Marc’s route into marketing ran through accounting and commercial banking; his official biography describes an earlier ambition to win the Heisman Trophy at Notre Dame. He graduated with an accounting degree instead. There are worse preparations for explaining a marketing bill.

The company’s audience is specific: small and medium-sized businesses, plus brands with multiple locations. Think automotive services, hospitality, retailers and professional practices. By the time Hibu bought it, RevLocal served thousands of businesses across the United States. Its specialty was helping a business become visible in the particular places where its next customer might look.

The menu covers local search, organic SEO, paid advertising, websites, social media and review marketing. The connecting piece is a dedicated digital strategist. A busy owner can delegate the coordination and have someone interpret the results. Compared with assembling separate specialists or running everything personally, that relationship is a substantial part of the purchase.

The bill needs a denominator

Hammer & Nails makes the offer concrete. The Upper Arlington location used Local Search, Targeted Ads and Brand Expander Ads. Its published spend level was $1,250. The same case study lists $1,250-$2,000 for Westerville and New Albany. Those are historical campaign examples; they are not a current price list, and the document does not separate management fees from advertising spend or establish the billing interval.

Westerville’s form submissions rose from 194 in 2020 to 219 in 2021. New Albany’s tracked calls went from 19 in May 2021 to 113 in May 2022. These are different locations, periods and measures. Put them together carelessly and you get a spectacular-looking statistic with very little meaning. Keep them separate and you have useful questions for a strategist.

An owner can copy the discipline: establish a baseline for each location, choose a business outcome and follow the inquiry through to a purchase. Judge a campaign against gross profit from customers acquired, alongside the time and fees involved. A full calendar, low margins or poor follow-up can make additional traffic much less valuable.

The first bottleneck was inside the agency

RevLocal’s own operations offer a smaller, revealing story. A call-tracking supplier was acquired, prompting a vendor review. Manual account setup consumed hundreds of hours. In Marchex’s case study, RevLocal describes choosing an integration with Salesforce Flow to automate that work.

The attraction was maintainability as well as features. RevLocal wanted a partner willing to question custom requests. The reported result was roughly 400 setup hours saved monthly. Call transcripts and lead signals also helped staff spot unanswered calls and inquiries that were not becoming sales.

“You can go get a tech solution pretty much anywhere.”

Zac Herr, RevLocal senior product manager, in a Marchex case study

The lesson is practical: automate repetitive setup, then use the recovered time to examine customer outcomes. A better handoff can be worth investigating before buying another advertisement.

A basement contractor walks into Amazon

One of RevLocal’s more unexpected moves involved Amazon. Its Sponsored Display collaboration opened advertising opportunities for businesses that did not sell products in Amazon’s store. A service provider could reach relevant audiences across Amazon properties and third-party destinations. The company announced the collaboration in December 2023 and introduced its plans in March 2024 after a pilot.

The examples have a pleasingly literal logic. A crawlspace repair and basement-proofing business could appear before people shopping for dehumidifiers and box fans. A local brewery promoted its wedding venue. RevLocal reported more than 138 million impressions across hundreds of pilot campaigns. An impression records an appearance of an ad; it does not establish a booking or profitable customer acquisition. This was an expansion of where a local business could be seen.

One provider, a larger promise

In June 2016, Columbus Business First reported $3.5 million in outside investment from Mutual Capital Partners. Eight years later, Hibu announced its acquisition of RevLocal. The August 22, 2024 deal gave RevLocal a larger platform and Hibu a broader presence among local businesses. The purchase price was undisclosed.

Hibu described the appeal as integrating core marketing services through one provider. Its subscription offering included digital presence, performance marketing and customer relationship tools. RevLocal’s public LinkedIn profile now directs readers toward Hibu. For prospective customers, the practical step is to evaluate the current proposal, service responsibilities and reporting rather than assume a historical RevLocal package remains unchanged.

There is a modest idea beneath all this machinery. A business owner should be able to see the route from discovery to inquiry to sale. RevLocal’s story is useful because it exposes those separate steps. The website click starts the conversation. The appointment book gets the last word.