Rio SEO and Forsta have merged in a combination of complementary capabilities for helping brands do local marketing. This pairing creates a new entity that enables brands to engage with their customers throughout the entire customer journey.

Rio SEO is a local marketing platform serving enterprise brands. Forsta, on the other hand, is a platform that offers customer experience, employee experience, and market research solutions. It does this via its HX (Human Experience) platform.

The HX Platform has a number of anaystic-oriented features. For example, it includes a survey tool, data analytics, and visualization. It also has tools to drive actions based on the insights the platform generates.

Meanwhile Rio SEO is best known for its Open Local Platform. This offers brands the ability to drive customer interactions at the local level. Local listings, local pages, and reviews management are key elements of the platform.

Powerful Use Cases

In the merger announcement, the companies emphasized potential synergies around their very different core competencies.

For example, Rio SEO’s Local Reviews, when combined with Forsta’s HX platform creates a more powerful set of capabilities.

Another example involves the combination of Rio SEO’s Local Listings and Local Pages with Forsta Studio. The latter provides visual storytelling features.

“Companies will be able to ingest Rio SEO’s review data from market-leading review sites into their existing Voice of Customer programs on Forsta’s HX Platform, with the added benefit of Forsta’s Genius Text Analytics and action management to build actions in response to feedback in reviews,” the companies explain in the merger announcement.

According to the deal announcement, this combination of features “adds robust data ingestion from Rio SEO’s Local Listings and Local Pages solutions. This includes local landing page performance, impressions, clicks, local search ranking data and more into the Forsta HX Platform. Forsta Studio’s online infographic dashboards breathe color into visual storytelling. This allows companies to create a single, holistic view of a customer’s local marketing and CX programs.”

Keeping Up with Customer Demands

A Rio SEO executive explained that the two companies together will be more competitive in the demanding localized marketing world.

“Consumers today demand seamless and highly personalized experiences throughout the entire customer journey, before and after purchase,” said Mick Wilson, Vice President, Customer Success, Rio SEO, told Localogy Insider.

“Rio SEO and Forsta are bringing to market the industry’s only end-to-end local marketing and customer experience solution for enterprise brands. Together, we are recreating the category. With integrated Local Experience (LX) solutions to power the next generation of connected experiences that are more impactful, deeper, and truly human-centric.”

This deal reminds us a little bit of last year’s acquisition of SEO platform Moz by the email marketing company iContact. So that deal was seen as a way for iContact to increase its value to its customers by integrating the one capability they were asked for most frequently. In that case it was SEO.

While every deal is different, we would expect to see more combinations of companies that see 1+1=3 opportunities in bringing together complementary capabilities that help them stay ahead of rising customer expectations.