Balihoo, provider of local marketing automation technology, announced last Friday that they have secured an additional $5 million in venture funding from OpenView Venture Partners. The new funding, according to the official announcement, will be use primarily to fuel the continued growth of both the company itself, and the expansion of the marketing platform. The funding comes on the heels of an extremely profitable 2012, in which the company posted more than a 60% year-over-year growth rate.

So what exactly is Balihoo?

Balihoo’s proprietary platform allows large national and multinational brands and companies to maintain the integrity of their branding and marketing through a wide variety of local channels. What does that jargon mean? Basically, a large company begins by defining and building their brand/marketing guidelines and various ad templates. Once the branding guidelines and templates are ready to go, Balihoo automatically begins serving up the ads and marketing through their huge network of local channels – things such as local websites, local PPC campaigns, email marketing, and various other traditional and digital mediums. On top of their marketing automation platform, Balihoo has built a detailed analytics platform to track the ROI of their ads.

Who uses Balihoo?

Balihoo’s automation platform is used by many of the top US companies to maintain brand integrity across a huge variety of local channels. It makes sense. BAI/Kelsey – a local marketing research and advising firm – forecasts local media advertising revenues to climb from $132.5 billion in 2012 to $148.8 billion in 2017. As local advertising and marketing continues to become an ever increasing component in the marketing strategies of nationwide brands, more and more brands are turing to automation platforms like Balihoo.

Check out Balihoo’s explainer video below, and @Balihoo