Author: Tierra Carpenter

Spoke Locally is a new app that allows you to cut through all of the noise online and find out what’s happening in your community in real-time.

Matt Baggott, co-creator and chief marketing officer of Spoke Locally, and Mel McMahon, co-founder of Indiana Owned, joined us today, to share more about his app that will help you never miss another local deal or event.

In May of 2020, during a global pandemic, local businesses were being tested like never before. Closing their doors, limiting access to customers, losing employees, shortages in inventory and more continued to challenge the ways local businesses operate and succeed.

Matt Baggott and Aaron Miller were conflicted about the problems local businesses were facing due to the pandemic. So, they decided to launch Spoke Locally, a solution that’ll reinvent the way local businesses and the people around them connect. The idea is to focus on real and measurable engagement (foot traffic and revenue), all the while offering local businesses a direct line of communication to their most valuable audience; the residents and visitors around them.

Matt and Aaron came together to figure out how they could build a solution for the local businesses in this trying time. Matt (a Junior at Hanover College at the time) focused attention on his family’s local restaurants. Seeing firsthand the challenges of constantly updating the community on menu changes, hour changes, hiring, capacity limits, and more, he connected with Aaron regarding his perspective on a solution. Aaron (Depauw University, 2019) had previously launched an app called CHOP (Community Heightened by Original Posting). Think of the app Yik Yak, there are no followers, just local content from the people in your community. Together they forged the community/proximity ideals with the concept of local digital marketing, and voila, Spoke Locally was born.

The idea was simple, provide a solution for local businesses to target the community as a whole (residents & visitors) with their content. As a consumer, you could navigate any community like a local by engaging with personally curated, proximity-based content (deals, specials, features, announcements) directly from the local businesses around them on the Spoke Locally app. The concept is simple: no followers, no complicated content creation and no stagnant lists. As a business owner, you are targeting customers around you rather than people sitting on a couch scrolling from anywhere. There are also no public forums, no reviews and no crowded feeds. The focus is on analytics and boosting revenue.

Indiana Owned is proud to partner with Spoke Locally and helps Indiana Owned members find and use another tool to help them grow their business. Spoke Locally is only at the beginning of a long and fruitful journey to empower local businesses and local people, all the while boosting local economies starting in their hometown of Indianapolis. Indiana Owned is proud to have them as a member and foster the growth of this tool to better connect local businesses and consumers.

Original Source here.