LR Marketing Company Uses Technology to Speed Growth

When Chris Hackler moved back to the state in 1998, he had a hard time finding out any information on Vilonia. Working with Vilonian Barbara Castle, he established a Web site on Vilonia that still exists at Vilonia.com.

It was the beginning of Visit USA Communities Inc., a growing Little Rock-based marketing company.

Today Hackler is CEO of the company that uses proprietary technology to bring Internet traffic to a local marketplace.

Co-founder Castle is the chief design officer. Other principals in the company are Ralph Frye, president; Ken Bryant, executive vice president; and Ray Thomas, chief technology officer. Hackler’s wife, Patty, does computer work for the company.

“No one else is doing what we’re doing,” said Hackler. “We’re working toward a patent” for a system that allows anyone to reach what they’re looking for on their sites in just three mouse clicks.

Hackler and the other principals are convinced Visit USA Communities could be a billion-dollar company in the next five years. He wouldn’t disclose current revenue other than to say the company was breaking even after spending five years doing a lot of research and development to “make sure what we’re doing is right.”

In a nutshell, the company builds local Internet directories, not unlike a telephone company’s yellow pages directory. It sells ad space on a localized site linked to other city sites throughout the state and a growing number of places outside the state.

The company first goes to businesses that already have Web sites and shows them how a presence on one of the Visit USA Communities domains could help their business. A basic ad is a flat $199 yearly fee for one city location, regardless of the size of the business. There are no other hourly costs or setup fees.

Some companies, like big auto chains such as Landers Auto Group, who want to link their Web sites to every community in the state, can pay out thousands.

Even if a company says it doesn’t want an ad, Visit USA Communities offers a free link that contains basic contact information to show the business owner what kind of traffic can result from being on what Hackler calls the most complete and broad-based Internet site in the state.

Thomas said Visit USA Communities potentially could be a billion-dollar company in several ways.

One way is through selling ads directly to businesses in the communities. It would only take 2 million businesses buying the average of $500 in ads to add up to $1 billion.

That’s a lot of businesses, especially considering that the company now has only 4,000 businesses signed on, but Hackler said it’s just now ramping up the training of salespeople for the expansion.

The company currently has localized Web sites in 180 cities in six states, but by the end of the year plans to nearly double that to 300 cities, operating in 12 Southeastern states.

Another way to reach the billion-dollar threshold is through selling ads to large national chains, allowing them to post targeted community-based advertisements.

The company can also make money as a media operation that allows real-time delivery of targeted marketing content and as a data services company by selling consumer information obtained from e-mail links.

Thomas gave this scenario: One sales representative will visit 20 businesses each day, normally making a deal with two or three. But even those who say no are asked for an e-mail address so the company can send them further information on how it works.

Those companies also are enrolled in a Shopper Alert system, an e-mail blast sent out daily to targeted consumers to improve business. Hackler gave an example of a restaurant opening for business. The sales representative, who will have the e-mail addresses of other business owners he’s visited, can send e-mails to those addresses. If the restaurant owner wants, he can offer a special discount to those who respond to the e-mails. The goal is to quickly build traffic to a new restaurant in an area.

If the company sells to 1 million businesses, Thomas said, it will also be picking many more millions of e-mail addresses that can be sold to data management companies.

The beauty of the system, Thomas said, is that as one area, say direct ad sales, increases, all the others areas also increase.

The goal of Visit USA Communities, like any other company, is to make money, but Hackler said it’s committed to helping local businesses gain traffic.

“In every community that we’re in,” Hackler said, “people feel like it’s their site.”

As a result, domains such as Arkansascommunities.com get more page views than most sites.

An average site might get four page views per user per day. Eight page views would be very good, Hackler said. Arkansascommunities.com’s one-week average is 9.1 page views per user per day.

Alexa.com, an Amazon.com company that ranks Web traffic, puts the daily traffic, based on a three-month average, on Arkansascommunities.com at No. 60,105 out of the 8 billion URLs on the Internet. Yahoo is No. 1; Google is No. 3. Arkansasbusiness.com ranks 150,000th. The state’s Parks and Tourism Department’s Web site, Arkansas.com, ranks 76,700th. Arkansas.gov, the state government Web site, ranks 64,000th.

Visitlittlerock.com, one of the company’s separate domains, ranks 69,500th.

All of those numbers can vary widely from day to day. For instance, Visitlittlerock.com last Wednesday was ranked 8,145th, putting the company in the top 1 percent of all URLs on the Internet, while on the same day Arkansascommunities ranked 13,358th.

Alexa also demonstrates the value of the interconnections as it shows that people who go to Visitlittlerock.com also visit Arkansascommunities.com and other links under the Visit USA Communities umbrella, such as Visiteasttexas.com and Visitfloridacommunities.com.

While much of the retail sector has been experiencing very slow growth, if any, Internet sales have grown dramatically with online consumer spending up 26 percent last year to a record $117 billion. Many of those consumers said they preferred to shop with a retailer that had both Internet and brick-and-mortar stores, according to ComScore Networks.

Hackler, citing an article in Fortune magazine, said that while 69 percent of Americans go to the Internet for information, half of them are looking for products and services in their local community and usually wind up making the purchase within 40 miles of their home.

“We want to keep as much business as local as is possible,” Castle said.

The localized Web sites allow Arkansans to find what they’re looking for in Arkansas and then buy in Arkansas, where they can get better and more personal service, Hackler said.

The various local community sites are not just about selling ads. They also provide city government information and chamber of commerce links as well as the business categories of real estate, insurance, shopping, restaurants, lodging, automotive, entertainment and legal.

FindLaw.com, the highest-trafficked legal Web site, has taken note note of the high Internet traffic recorded by the company and the fact that it offered legal listings. FindLaw.com approached Visit USA Communities about a partnership in which each city site’s legal category direct the person to FindLaw.com, Bryant said. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The lean years of developing the company have helped it, Hackler said. “We have staying power and in the long run I believe we’ll be well-rewarded.”

Hackler said the company is looking for investors now that it has reached the stage where it is training salespeople to expand its reach.