This Atlanta Startup Wants Local Creator Marketing To Drive More Than Likes.

ATLANTA, June 25 (Hypepotamus) – Micro influencers — online creators with smaller but active follower counts — are having a moment, as brands look to unlock more opportunities to stand out and get in front of people in digital and physical spaces.

But local businesses like fitness studios, med spas, salons, restaurants, and cafés have struggled to take advantage of the power of micro influencers.

“Local has never had real attribution the way e-commerce does, because there’s no cookie following someone from a post into a brick-and-mortar door. So historically brands were flying blind, judging campaigns on reach and vibes,” Atlanta-based entrepreneur Jackson Ford told Hypepotamus.

Ford, alongside his co-founder Allie Stolte, saw an opportunity for a brand-creator marketplace.

And that is exactly what the team behind Atlanta-based Roeme have created.

At its core, Roeme connects brands to local creators who can help them get the word out to potential customers. It does this by helping brands run organized, trackable creator campaigns. Those campaigns tie visits and bookings back to the exact local creator who drove the action, making it so that content drives results and not just online likes and comments.

“It’s the performance model e-commerce has had for years, finally built for businesses you have to walk into.” Ford added. Its commissionable campaigns are designed to solve the attribution problem for brick-and-mortar retailers that can’t rely on e-commerce cookies.

Who Works Well On Roeme?

Ford said that the Roeme team looks for creators who are “genuinely embedded” in their city.

“Local creator marketing only works when the audience already trusts that person as a real voice for where to go in their city, so we care far more about that than raw follower count. A creator with 8,000 deeply local, engaged followers will drive more real visits than someone with 200,000 scattered across the country,” he told Hypepotamus.

Creator applications are judged based on their audience concentration in a specific market, whether their traffic creates actionable metrics, and the creator’s aesthetic and tone online.

The Roeme platform has also rolled out The Local Edit, a living page of the places, partnerships, and links that creators are working with. This creates a digital space that feels “natural rather than transactional,” Ford added. Roeme also is rolling out an AI creator-marketing expert that helps local businesses figure out who to work with and how to run campaigns that actually drive returns.

Brands that do well on the Roeme platform are the ones that have a “physical experience worth showing and the operational capacity to host people,” Ford said. The size of the business is less of a factor, he added, saying that “a single-location studio or cafe can run a fantastic campaign if the in-store experience is dialed in.”

Brands have already seen success using the Roeme platform. CULT Aesthetics, a med spa in Atlanta and Dallas, said its team is saving over 20 hours a month that had been spent chasing down creators and coordinating posts through DMs. Other Southeast-based brands leveraging Roeme include ChopShop, The NOW Massage in Austin, FACE FOUNDRIÉ in Charlotte and Charleston, and Pure Glow Nashville.

Creating In Atlanta

Roeme’s focus on creator collaborations came from the team’s own experience building their initial idea in the fitness space before pivoting last year.

While Roeme has grown its reach across the country, Ford said that Atlanta has “been the right place to build” such a platform.

“The local business density here (the food scene, the fitness and wellness studios, the med spas) gave us a live testing ground from day one, and it’s a market where you can actually get to know partners and iterate quickly without the cost and noise of building in New York or San Francisco first,” Ford added. “The ecosystem has been genuinely supportive too. There’s a real community of operators and founders rooting for each other, and a lot of that local-first energy is exactly what Roeme is built around, so it’s been a natural fit.”