Multi-location marketing firm SOCi last week announced that it’s now the marketing platform of record for Rent-a-Center. This comes after the lease-to-own retailer rolled out SOCi’s platform across its 401 franchised-owned locations in the U.S.. You could say that it ‘leased to own’ SOCi’s services.
Now, with the formalized platform-of-record designation, Rent-a-Center doubles down on SOCi’s capabilities. These include the ability for franchisees to optimize their localized social presence, paid social advertising, reputation management, and search marketing (e.g., Google Business Profiles).
But the key isn’t just a set of tools for multi-location brands to manage all these marketing channels: it’s the ability to do so in a decentralized manner. In other words, these marketing channels are best optimized at the local level, so franchisees need to be empowered to execute in their own backyards.
At the same time, the national brand’s support offers franchisees standards and best practices. If each franchisee were to be on its own for tools and tactics, it becomes a fragmented mess of suboptimal marketing. That’s where SOCi steps in with a common platform to raise a brand’s multi-location game.
“For a business like Rent-A-Center which has more than 400 franchise stores, they needed a streamlined solution that would empower individual operators to own their local digital presence from a social and reputation perspective,” said SOCi CMO, Monica Ho. “With SOCi, operators can access and manage this with one single login, while ensuring the corporate team has brand oversight as well.”
https://www.localogy.com/localogy-2021-a-fireside-chat-with-soci-ceo-afif-khoury/
Fire Tested
The Rent-a-center deal is notable on its own, but panning back reveals a larger trend. This is the third brand that SOCi has landed in the past few weeks. Before Rent-a-Center, it announced deals with Ford Direct and Taco Johns – joining 600+ total brands and 3 million+ locations under management.
Starting with Ford, SOCi has likewise become its platform of record for localized marketing across all U.S. Ford and Lincoln Dealerships. Prior to this, SOCi helped the automaker achieve triple-digit month-over-month growth in Facebook impressions (240%), post volume (288%), and engagements (414%).
And for Taco Johns, SOCi is now its global platform of record for localized marketing across the chain’s nearly 380 locations. Taco Johns is mostly using SOCi to standardize and optimize its local listings, local pages as well as reputation management. The latter is housed in the SOCi Listening product.
For all the above, the common thread is that fine balance between local customization and national standards. The centralized vs decentralized balance is different for every multi-location brand, so the name of the game for SOCi is a fire-tested platform that adjusts to various points on that sliding scale.
“By taking the guesswork out of local marketing through easy-to-use tools, these local operators will now be able to not only see each local community and customer interaction, but turn each of these into a more positive customer experience,” said Ho.
