SOCi Grows 149% YOY as Covid Continues to Highlight The Importance of Localized Marketing

SOCi drives record customer engagement for multi-location brands through its localized marketing solution, and sets sights on data-driven automation.

SOCi, the marketing platform for multi-location brands, has announced record revenue growth of 149% YoY for 2021 as well as a 116% increase in ARR YoY. SOCi also doubled its employee base last year to support more than 600 multi-location brands managing over three million business locations through its platform. SOCi’s technology platform helped reach more than 25 billion local consumers across hundreds of thousands of digital channels spanning search, social, reviews, ads, and more, making SOCi the largest enterprise platform for localized marketing.

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The impressive growth for this four-time Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies in America honoree comes at a time when Covid has changed the way brands and their locations interact with consumers. “Covid has driven consumers inside and online, and has forced a shift to digital channels, fundamentally changing how consumers communicate and engage with brands,” said SOCi CEO and founder, Afif Khoury. “For multi-location brands to thrive in this new environment, they must leverage technology to manage their presence in local digital marketing channels. In 2021, SOCi delivered that technology to hundreds of national and global brands. In 2022, we will expand our offering to provide strategic recommendations and automate the steps brands must take to fully optimize those channels.”

With an expanded workforce and solution set, SOCi has further strengthened its core competence in providing marketing solutions tailored to multi-location verticals such as restaurants, retail, multi-family, fitness, healthcare, and more. Moreover, SOCi is setting its sights on further boosting the success of brands and their locations by applying data science and machine learning models to predict customer behavior and recommend actions that SOCi users, or the platform itself, can take to optimize results. “We’ve amassed a mountain of customer interaction data across all major marketing channels, and we are developing tools to analyze that data to determine customer reactions to various marketing campaigns, in order to make recommendations to a local marketer of what to do to gain the best return for their time,” says Alo Sarv, SOCi’s CTO. “And since these recommendations are generated by the SOCi platform, we can simply automate those tasks to drive massive local adoption, optimization, and engagement numbers for the brand.”

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The localized marketing tech sector is maturing as brands become more proficient in using digital tools and analytics to empower and strengthen local connections with their communities. SOCi’s accelerated and expanded product roadmap will make it the first platform to effectively marry best-in-class tools with big data and business intelligence to deliver a data-driven marketing automation platform focused on local engagement.

SOCi has taken several steps toward achieving this vision. In 2021, the company expanded its product offering to better help brands with thousands of locations efficiently monitor customer feedback and assess performance. With the release of SOCi’s Smart Review Response tool, multi-location marketers gained the ability to use machine learning to auto-generate customized review responses based on what customers have written. The tool helps businesses to respond to reviews efficiently and personally at scale, strengthening brand reputations at the local level. SOCi’s Listening tool enables brands and their locations to track customer sentiment across social channels, aggregating millions of conversational data points and transforming them into actionable insights. The SOCi Reporting Suite allows corporate managers to track performance across locations, quickly identifying areas in need of improvement and high performers whose tactics could be replicated to increase overall success.

SOCi’s triple-digit year-over-year revenue growth led The Financial Times to recognize it as one of America’s Fastest Growing Companies. The company’s achievements in product development have also been recognized by two of the top peer review networks for B2B Technology companies: Capterra placed SOCi on its shortlist for both review management and brand management; and SOCi was recognized as a Gartner Software Advisor FrontRunner in Brand Management.

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