Multi-location marketing firm SOCi has announced a new deal with outdoor hospitality brand Kampgrounds of America (KOA). SOCi now becomes the platform of choice for KOA, expanding its customer base of multi-location brands into the sizeable outdoor and adventure hospitality space.
“Today’s consumer expects to find accurate, up-to-date information on locations they are planning to visit when searching online,” SOCi CMO Monica Ho tells Localogy Insider. “By utilizing the all-in-one SOCi platform, KOA has provided campers a true digital representation of what they will experience at each campground as they decide on where to take their next outdoor adventure.”
Specifically, KOA facilitates the rental, management, and guest experience of 520 campground locations throughout the U.S.. These are each franchised, where individual franchisees (some of whom operate more than one location) have autonomous control over their marketing and social strategies.
That’s where SOCi comes in, as decentralized franchisee marketing is its jam. As we discussed with SOCi CEO Afif Koury at Localogy 2021 in Los Angeles last Fall, multi-location brands have a wide range of centralized versus decentralized control. So the platform is optimized to serve that breadth of needs.
Social Chatter
For KOA specifically, its marketing needs likewise align with SOCi’s offerings, given that it is a review-centric business. Sort of like hotels, but different, guest experience is a key component of KOA’s business. To that end, SOCi’s Reviews tool will help the brand respond to camper feedback.
Similarly, SOCi Social will help KOA franchisees communicate with campers before, during, and after their campground stays – all of which are important for the consumer lifecycle. Meanwhile, SOCi Listings will help the national brand keep a high standard of quality and consistency across the board.
Finally, SOCi continues to evolve its platform to ingest all the above signals to be a better operational and strategic tool for multi-location brands. As we discussed at Localogy 2022, this involves SOCi Listening, which can extract insights from reviews to inform key decisions like restaurant menu planning.
In KOA’s case, SOCi Listening can identify trends in the social chatter in and around its guest experiences. Beyond its own social channels, KOA can utilize SOCi Listening to derive insights from social conversations in the broader outdoor hospitality landscape – a key feature of the offering.
Market Headroom
Stepping back, one thing that jumps out from this deal is the expansiveness of the multi-location marketing space. Often conceptualized in narrower terms like chain restaurants, the category includes any brand that serves customers at scale on a local level. This makes it a massive category.
To that end, SOCi continues to grow into that market headroom, which includes a certain degree of vertical expansion. In this case, it cracks into the outdoor recreation market – which also includes things like RV Parks – where it will develop competency in the vertical’s unique marketing playbook.
We’ll watch closely for more signals from SOCi’s expansion in this category, and its execution with KOA. Meanwhile, congrats to SOCi for the business expansion. Time to break out the S’mores.
