Fidzup Raises New Funding to Bring Mobile Marketing to Brick-and-Mortar

These days, it’s harder than ever to run a brick-and-mortar retailer. With just about anything in the world available at any time of the day or night online, and shipments directly to the door within a matter of days now a fact of life, it’s harder than ever to get people to walk in that door and lay down their money.

Fidzup, meanwhile, recently raised $3.7 million to help drive better experiences at the physical shop by using mobile marketing.

With venture capitalists like Turenne Capital and Cap Horn coming in, as well as previous investors coming back, Fidzup may be onto something here.

Since physical stores are interested primarily in sales and physical store visits, the things they value are wholly different from what online and mobile stores value.

Fidzup, meanwhile, offers a slate of tools geared toward providing a “mobile programmatic advertising” option to physical stores, providing the means to not only analyze foot traffic, but also provide a point of contact between businesses and their customers, as well as a means to directly target mobile users who haven’t yet become customers.

This multi-pronged approach allows for a nice wide swath of potential customers to be brought in the door. Built around a central tool known as a Fidbox, it allows stores to track users with smartphones that have Wi-Fi enabled, and thus allows for a clean track from the entrance to the exit, providing data that can be analyzed from there.

Moreover, Fidzup currently works with several different clients. It’s got a lot of French brands on its side, like Renault and Peugeot, but it’s also working with big US brands operating in France, like KFC and Ford. That level of involvement is a sort of tacit endorsement; who would use these tools if they didn’t work on at least some level?

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen technology like this come around, and for the most part, it’s delivered value on at least some level. The number of firms that have already used it successfully is certainly encouraging, and suggests that Fidzup will likely be a major part of the landscape to come, giving physical stores some formerly mobile-only advantages.