Clickable Announces Platform for Local SEM

Clickable wants a piece of the local SEM spend and thinks it has a good shot at becoming a major player and platform provider. Today the company formally announced its platform, which can be white labeled for partners and vendors. (Clickable says it doesn’t want to be a direct sales channel.)

The claim that Clickable makes is that it brings greater efficiency and automation to SEM and “Apple like simplicity” to the experience of managing these campaigns. It also offers professional services to help sales channels and marketers optimize their campaigns.

From the press release:

Clickable Platform includes a variety of integrated white-label components tailored to the needs of each partner company:

• Client Center – A centralized administrative dashboard, enabling display, management and reporting of individual and groups of clients.
• Business Systems – Central infrastructure that powers customer support, billing and operations for thousands of customers.
• Platform API – The ability to leverage Clickable Platform in partners’ own Web sites and client interfaces.
• Leads – A “set-and-forget” lead-generation solution that is both click and call based, and delivers local-business customers simple tracking of their investment.
• Pro – The award-winning Clickable Pro dashboard can be white-labeled to empower businesses to self-manage online advertising, with simplicity and transformational return on investment.
• Assist – A managed service for businesses that delivers just the right amount of professional services to ensure success, often in conjunction with Clickable Pro.
• Support & Community – World-class customer support via live chat and phone, as well as community learning resources.
• Marketing & Sales – Pre-built and perfected marketing assets so partners can promote and sell local advertising services most effectively.

The company will be going head-to-head with Marchex, MatchCraft, WebVisible and others for sales channel deals. But interestingly it says will also work with anyone who wants to white label its platform. So a Yodel for example or, presumably, a WebVisible could adopt Clickable’s platform. As proof of its greater efficiency and capacity to reduce churn the company points to successful relationships with Lexis-Nexis and Franchise Company Solutions.

I am unable to evaluate the accuracy of many of the claims in the segment because I’m not managing campaigns in a hands-on way. I saw an early demo of Clickable roughly two years ago and was impressed by it. But the proof will be in the actual on-the-ground campaign management experience. No doubt Clickable will be a top-tier competitor, however.

Anyone who has used the platform please let me know your experience.

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Related: Here’s a blog post on the platform release from Clickable CEO David Kidder. Here’s a “day two” piece on MediaPost.

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