Multi-location businesses’ marketing efforts are extensive — which makes them both expensive for their organizations, and time consuming for their teams. Managing local search, social, and reputation management efforts across hundreds or thousands of locations is a massive undertaking, and maintaining brand consistency across all of the marketing channels, messages, and markets that organizations’ efforts touch is an ever-growing challenge for them.
With roughly 84% of retail sales still happening in brick and mortar stores, driving local market visibility remains highly important for multi-location businesses.
“Your local visibility directly impacts that brick and mortar revenue,” says Ashley Browning, Partner Marketing Manager at SOCi. “If your customers can’t find your information, or if it’s not accurate or engaging, they’re definitely less likely to actually end up in the store.”
As customers continue making location-based decisions, multi-location businesses can use AI agents as a digital extension of their workforce to conquer their challenges in search, social, and reputation management while driving more powerful marketing outcomes — and those AI agents are accessible to enterprises through the AWS marketplace.
SOCi, an AWS marketplace partner, offers multi-location businesses access to three Genius Agents capable of doing their local marketing work for them — from responding to reviews to posting social content and updating search listings. The SOCi Platform’s accessibility through AWS simplifies procurement and deployment for organizations, and helps ensure they have the reliability they need to optimize their efforts at scale.
Local marketing challenges
Multi-location businesses come up short when they underestimate the importance of local marketing, the complexity of managing multi-location marketing, or both. When businesses fail to appear in local searches or neglect to maintain a presence on social and review sites, they miss out on opportunities to engage with their customers.
“Ignoring online reviews or leaving questions unanswered gives customers the impression that a business is disengaged or maybe not even open to the public,” says Browning.
Multi-location businesses may simply lack the bandwidth to keep up with multi-location marketing, given that managing search, social, and reputation across hundreds or thousands of locations requires juggling a variety of platforms, tools, and logins — which can lead to inefficiencies and make it difficult to maintain a cohesive, consistent brand message.
Local marketing is a powerful opportunity for advanced AI
Multi-location businesses are not just competing against each other — they’re also up against digitally savvy e-commerce brands that are available 24/7.
Keeping up with both their online and brick-and-mortar competition — and meeting their customers’ rising expectations for always-on availability from their favorite brands — requires multi-location businesses to differentiate themselves through local marketing.
“Customers rely heavily on local search and social media to make decisions, so brands really need to optimize those channels or they’re risking losing customers to competitors who do search and social a little bit better than they do,” says Browning.
SOCi Genius is an artificial intelligence (AI) solution purpose-built to help multi-location businesses manage and optimize their efforts in local marketing channels effectively and efficiently. SOCi offers three Genius Agents, each simplifying and scaling local marketing across all your locations while transforming disconnected tasks into unified, impactful strategies: A Search Agent for managing and improving listings, a Social Agent for automating and optimizing social strategies, and a Reputation Agent for handling and responding to reviews and feedback.
With SOCi’s brand-trained Search Agent, Social Agent, and Reputation Agent handling their reviews, search, and website listings, multi-location businesses can spend up to 55% less time responding to customers and drive up engagement and views.
Using SOCi Genius AI empowers multi-location businesses with automated analyses of their social and search data and recommendations for local marketing optimization, all in one centralized place. And since SOCi Genius and other SOCi offerings — such as chat and advertising tools — are available on AWS Marketplace, multi-location businesses can put the power of AI to use quickly and confidently, enjoying subscription pricing, consolidated billing, and a seamless integration.
“SOCi’s integration with AWS ensures seamless procurement and a straightforward, cost-effective adoption process for businesses,” says Browning.
Conclusion
As brick-and-mortar retail continues competing with e-commerce, the lines between online and offline customer experience will continue to blur — making it more and more essential for businesses to integrate their local marketing efforts with their broader digital strategies.
As they look to streamline and enhance local marketing, multi-location businesses can benefit from pursuing AI that delivers on scalability across channels without sacrificing brand consistency.
“Businesses’ old, manual approaches can’t keep up with modern multi-location marketing,” says Browning. “The marketing landscape is always changing very fast, and businesses that embrace AI sooner rather than later will be better equipped to adapt to future trends and challenges as AI gets stronger.”
Multi-location businesses can get started with SOCi Genius AI — and begin optimizing their local marketing efforts at scale — through the AWS Marketplace.
The SOCi Platform is purpose-built for multi-location enterprises. For more information, visit SOCi.ai.