SOCi, Inc. Review: One-Stop Shop for All Local Marketing Needs

Management at Anytime FItness faced a problem. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the operator of 24-hour gyms to shutter its 4,700+ facilities in an effort to limit social contact.

The company needed to know what people were saying about its brand online. However, 96% of online conversations aren’t directed at brands or company pages.

Anytime FItness teamed up with SOCi to manage its reputation in cyberspace. The company used social listening to gather insights that would ultimately lead to better customer service and a superior business strategy.

In fact, Anytime Fitness listened to more than 3 million conversations about its brand. In response, the company created free virtual classes as a way to serve customers.

“As a franchisor with multiple brands, we need to be attentive to all customer conversations to stay competitive, best serve our members, and innovate against our digital strategy,” says Christian Betancourt, Director of Digital Marketing at Self Esteem Brands, the company that operates Anytime Fitness. “The ability to listen to critical feedback and questions on our social accounts and beyond helped us provide virtual classes during the pandemic and allowed us to maintain members during a time when mass cancelations were occurring across the industry.”

The results speak for themselves:

• 300,000 positive brand mentions
• 190,000 mentions of #anytimefitness
• 9 million mentions of Anytime Fitness on Twitter

That’s what SOCi can do for your company as well.

In this SOCi, Inc. review, I’ll go over all the features of the platform. Then you can make an informed decision to determine if it’s what you need to take your business to the next level.

A Local Marketing Solution

In this complete review of SOCi, Inc., I’ll start by giving you an overview of the platform.

It’s a one-stop shop for all your local marketing needs. That’s especially true if you have multiple locations.

And it gives you the ability to handle all of that work from a single interface.

Further, SOCi, Inc. helps you at every stage of the customer journey, from awareness all the way up until purchase.

It’s used by popular brands including Hertz, Ace Hardware, and, as we’ve seen, Anytime Fitness.

In the next several sections, I’ll cover specific products offered by SOCi.

Listings

If you’re into Local SEO then you’ll want to dominate the local search results. One way you can do that is with accurate listings.

Listings are just what they sound like: your company’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) on various web properties throughout cyberspace.

You can take it upon yourself to manage placing your company’s NAP all over the place, but that’s a tedious, time-consuming process.

SOCi streamlines the process so you can focus on more important things, like building your business.

Further, the company also provides a Professional Services team to help you get the word out about your brand.

Ads

In this complete review of SOCi, Inc., I’ll also cover how the platform helps you with online advertising.

SOCi empowers you to create and deploy highly targeted digital ads. It does that with a product called SOCi Ads PLUS.

The platform employs a patent-pending Dynamic Image technology combined with a Dynamic Text feature that enables you to deploy a single ad that will auto-populate with location-specific text and imagery.

SOCi Ads PLUS also supports pre-set ad content, automatic placements, lead gen forms, geo-fencing, and custom targeting for social ad platforms.

Further, you can use another product called Boost PLUS to boost high-performing ads in under 30 seconds.

And, of course, the tool provides outstanding reporting so you know which ads to boost and which ones to eliminate.

Local Pages

In this SOCi, Inc. review, I’ll also go over how the platform helps you optimize your local pages.

If you want people to find your local business online, you’ll need to optimize one or more pages on your website for local search. SOCi helps you do that.

The platform enables you to create pages with schema markup and keyword-optimized URLs so your pages get discovered by people doing local searches.

Even better, SOCi also delivers responsive local pages.

If you’re unfamiliar with responsive design, it’s a way to style your web pages so that they look great on any device: a desktop monitor, a laptop, a smartphone, a tablet, or a phablet.

SOCi also enables you to deploy hundreds or even thousands of local pages in less than two weeks.

Chatbots

In this part of the SOCi, Inc. review, I’ll cover how the platform helps with Chatbots.

Chatbots improve customer service by providing responses to live users after normal business hours. That’s because they’re automated.

Deploy SOCi SmartBot to your website and let it answer questions posed by customers who find one of your web pages at midnight. It will handle common queries and even deliver a call to action at the right moment.

The chatbot also uses machine learning and natural language processing to facilitate a localized and conversational experience for potential customers.

And you can deploy chatbots to Facebook Messenger, Google My Business, local websites and even email.

Social Management

In this section of the SOCi, Inc. review, I’ll explain how the platform streamlines social media management.

The tool makes it easy to publish localized content, respond to brand mentions, answer queries, and manage content libraries for various social media channels.

Additionally, SOCi will also enable you to discover the top-trending content on cyberspace. Then, you can use that content as inspiration to produce some brand-boosting social media posts.

The platform also ensures that you deliver consistent messaging across posts and social sites.

Reviews

In this part of the SOCi, Inc. review, I’ll cover how the platform handles reviews.

And let’s face it: good reviews can make your business just as easily as bad reviews can break your business. That’s why you need to stay on top of what people are saying about your products and services online.

The SOCi platform pulls all reviews for your business into one centralized interface. You can give both local teams and the whole company access to that UI.

Your team members can use the platform to respond to reviews and quickly handle low-star rankings. That’s how you’ll ensure you maintain a positive reputation online.

Also, SOCi consolidates your reviews with social media management to create a central point to oversee all aspects of the company’s reputation.

Finally, the tool gives users the power to view every action taken on reviews and monitor every mention on social media.

The Cost

So how much is SOCi? Well, to get an answer to that question you’ll have to reach out to the company. SOCi is one of those services that doesn’t advertise its prices.

However, if you look at the list of features described above, and consider all it does for you with a single point of contact, you can be pretty sure it’s going to cost a lot.

So do yourself a favor, contact a sales rep with the company and find out how much you need to fork over depending on your business needs.

Then make the decision about whether or not it’s a good investment.

Wrapping It Up

There you have it: a complete rundown of SOCi.

If you’re still on the fence about the tool, get a demo and see what it can do for your business. Also, read the case studies from the website.

However, I think you’ll find that if you’re into local marketing, there aren’t too many tools on the market that can do a better job for your brand.