September 14, 2021

Ace Hardware Boosts Local Adoption With SOCi’s Community Calendar

Ace Hardware Dominates Local Marketing Results With SOCi’S Social Media Community Calendar

The Challenge

As one of the largest retailer-owned cooperatives in the world, Ace Hardware is no stranger to the unique challenges of creating an effective multi-location marketing strategy. One goal with their investment in SOCi’s multi-location platform was to improve their processes for navigating local social media at scale.

On average, only 3% of a business’ followers will see their posts on social media. Posting frequently and leveraging social advertising is vital to getting in front of existing and prospective customers. While it’s easy to see the value of local social, Ace Hardware retail owners have a multitude of nonstop face-to-face interactions with their customers every day. Any marketing efforts needed to be extremely turn-key so they fit inside of their retail owner’s busy customer-focused schedules.

Ace and SOCi knew, securing a new technology was only part of the puzzle. If they were going to see the success they envisioned with their local social media, they needed local adoption. As a retailer with thousands of locations across the globe, efficiency was the name of the game.

The SOCi Solution

SOCi’s Community Calendar solves the all-too-common local adoption puzzle for enterprise businesses. Ace Hardware was the 1st to pilot this solution and in just 2 months of usage, saw an increase of 66% in the number of locations posting locally.

“I’ve started calling the SOCi Community Calendar our ‘easy button,’ for localized marketing,” said Gary Drummond – Marketing Manager, Local Digital – Ace Hardware.

The SOCi Community Calendar provides corporate administrators the powerful opportunity to create weeks or months worth of pre-scheduled content and ad promotions that local users can utilize for each of their local social accounts. This gives both corporate administrators and local users a quick and easy way to ensure that they always have high-quality, on-brand content and promotions to choose from that consistently drive traffic to their locations. The Community Calendar is one-way SOCi is empowering local retailers and corporate entities to collaborate together on their local social strategies like never before and the results are speaking for themselves.

SOCi Results

“We’re able to provide a full schedule of ads and posts that our retailers can opt-in and out of with just a few clicks. Our retailers love the time-savings and the ability to connect and engage with their customers around the local store.” — Gary Drummond – Marketing Manager, Local Digital – Ace Hardware

Since using SOCi’s Community Calendar, Ace Hardware saw the following areas of improvement…