Social marketing SaaS player SOCi announced today that is has raised $15 million in an oversubscribed series C funding round that the company will use to fuel its efforts to solve the localized marketing challenge for enterprise businesses.
This latest round was co-led by Vertical Venture Partners, Grayhawk Capital, and Ankona Capital, with participation from Blossom Street Ventures. SOCi last funding round was its Series B in 2018. The company has raised roughly $35 million since launching in 2012.
”Businesses that have a localized marketing strategy in place grow up to three times faster than competitors. That’s an incredible competitive advantage, and yet localization is still often overlooked,” SOCi CEO Afif Khoury told us.
“For multi-location marketers, this is the biggest opportunity they have not yet fully embraced. SOCi is here to help them do that. This new round of funding will help us continue to build out new products and expand existing offerings so our customers can further reap the benefits of an optimized localized marketing strategy.”
SOCi’s focus is on helping multi-location brands do localized social marketing at scale. This is a particularly big challenge for enterprises, which often lack the tools, processes, and expertise to do authentic social marketing for individual locations. It’s one of the few aspects of digital marketing where small, independent businesses have held an advantage.
SOCi has also been fighting an ongoing battle to convince brands that localized social marketing is something they need to invest in and prioritize. Hence SOCi has been an aggressive content marketer, putting out study after study showing that there is a correlation between a brand’s emphasis on localized marketing and its overall performance. SOCi’s 2019 Brandmarking Report, for example, found that franchise companies with a benchmark score of 80 or higher (the average score was 43) were growing revenue at three times the pace of franchise businesses overall.
Last year was an eventful one for SOCi. For example, in December, the company announced a “platform of record” deal with Self-Esteem Brands, operator of health and fitness brands that include Anytime Fitness, Waxing the City, Basecamp Fitness and The Bar Method.
SOCi will have a prominent presence at the upcoming Localogy 2020 event, March 16-18 in San Antonio. On the event’s opening day SOCi VP Richard Lumsden will address “Who’s Winning at Localized Marketing.” And on Day 2, Associate Marketing Director Olivia Starr will reveal the results of the “2020 Benchmarking Study”, a joint effort with Localogy.
