RootsRated Media Says Goodbye Chattanooga, Hello Atlanta

The start of fall brings a new season where anything is possible. Though the hot weather is dissipating, RootsRated Media is bringing some serious heat to Atlanta, focusing on a new brand, city and way of thinking for lean marketing teams.

RootsRated Media, a content marketing SaaS solution for small businesses, recently made the move to Atlanta from Chattanooga, Tennessee, as the organization prepares for a rebranding set to launch in early October.

The move and rebranding align with their announcement earlier this year about a Series A investment of $6.5 million, led by Southeast-based venture capital fund TechOperators. The investment will be used to further product development and investments in their collection of tech-enabled content marketing services.

"In our space, marketing teams are typically one to three people, which means they're often generalists who must wear many hats to drive marketing performance," Fynn Glover, founder and CEO of RootsRated Media, said. "This is further challenged by the fact that they're often working with very limited marketing budgets and almost no time to do everything on their to-do list---that makes content marketing a particularly difficult form of marketing to use well to create strategic business advantage."

RootsRated Media was originally founded in 2012, in Chattanooga as a publishing business---a B2C website and application that provided users with curated information about the best outdoor and adventure travel-related experiences around the country. This brand was born from the founders' love of backpacking, trail running and dogs. Three years later, the organization recognized their strengths in content creation, distribution and measurement. This led them to develop a content marketing platform, Compass, which helps lean marketing teams incorporate content marketing in order to achieve a competitive advantage.

"We moved to Atlanta because we believe that Atlanta's talent ecosystem around marketing SaaS is essential for continued growth," Glover said.

About 25 people currently work at RootsRated Media, with the company looking to add 15-20 more employees over the next year. The team just moved into their new offices on Krog Street, across from the always bustling Krog Street Market.

Jasdeep Garcha, COO, and Glover met while studying abroad and playing soccer at McGill University in Montreal; the two stayed in touch as friends throughout their 20s. In 2015, Garcha moved to Atlanta, which coincided with RootsRated Media's transition from publishing to SaaS. Given that Garcha had an operations and high-tech background in San Francisco and Microsoft, he said it only made sense for him to join the company at the time.

Though most of RootsRated Media's customers are small businesses, a few larger entities include the Utah Office of Tourism, Chattanooga Convention and Visitors Bureau and Osprey Packs. RootsRated Media's recent investment will help expand capabilities, allowing clients to track content across new channels, analyze influence, add image-based content and streamline service deliveries.

"Most of the innovation in the content marketing category has occurred in the enterprise segment of the market," Glover said. "We believe that the SMB segment of the market is underserved, and our goal is to build the content marketing platform that helps lean marketing teams and small businesses leverage content to create competitive advantage."