SOCi Fireside Chat: AI and Consolidation with Forrester

Brandon Witcher, VP Principal Analyst at Forrester and a recognized expert in market trends and vendor strategies, recently joined SOCi to share insights from his 25 years of experience driving digital transformation. With a career spanning key roles in commerce, marketing, and strategy at organizations like Guitar Center, Harry & David, and the Elbo Room Restaurant Group, Brandon brought a wealth of knowledge to a webinar that focused on achieving excellence and implementing effective local marketing strategies and tactics.

Addressing Real-World Business Needs

One of the key takeaways from the conversation was the importance of addressing the real-world challenges businesses face every day. Consider local managers who are juggling responsibilities like inventory management, staff coordination, and stocking shelves. The priorities of local marketing — managing social media, responding to reviews, maintaining local listings, and running ad campaigns — are often beyond what their packed schedules allow.

During the session, we delved into these pain points, discussed solutions, and explored how AI can elevate local marketing efforts by adding efficiency and scalability.

The Power Trio: Search, Social, and Reputation

A core idea highlighted in the discussion was the interconnectedness of search, social, and reputation management. These elements are at the heart of local marketing, with each impacting the other. Having a well-optimized search strategy is essential for showcasing accurate business details to consumers, and not coincidentally, the same online profiles that must be optimized for search visibility are also the places where local reputations are made in the form of content like reviews. Moreover, many consumers don’t make a distinction between search profiles and social media profiles, using them interchangeably to discover and evaluate businesses online. 

In a time when online presence heavily influences consumer behavior, businesses need to view search, social, and reputation as an integrated whole, rather than isolated entities. 

Navigating Local Marketing and Regulatory Challenges

Local marketing is a priority because it helps businesses get found and drives the clicks, calls, and direction requests that lead to more foot traffic and purchases, but it presents complex challenges, especially for multi-location brands who must create and maintain an informative, engaging presence in multiple local markets. 

Highly regulated industries, such as healthcare and financial services, may fear that local marketing activities create new compliance challenges. The right local marketing solution, however, actually helps companies catch and prevent brand and compliance violations, often before they impact the brand’s reputation. This can be one of the significant benefits that derives from equipping local teams with one easy-to-use solution that brings all local marketing activities under one login. 

Liberty Tax, for example, has optimized its marketing strategy to support 2,200 local offices by providing national content, while still allowing franchisees to easily localize assets for their communities within brand guidelines. They’ve improved customer engagement with AI-generated review responses and simplified localized content creation to strengthen local connections. 

By enhancing data consistency and SEO, Liberty Tax has improved Google rankings, increased leads, and empowered franchisees, driving business growth. All of this would have been impossible if local teams had not been equipped with an integrated software solution, with compliance tools built in at every step.

The Role of AI in Transforming Local Marketing Efforts

Traditional marketing tools often require a significant degree of hands-on work, eating up time and resources. In practice, this can mean that marketing loses the personal touch that drives real connections; or even worse, it may be pushed to the back burner and forgotten altogether. Marketers are stretched thin, stuck in repetitive tasks, and left with little time for big-picture thinking.

But AI is changing the game, and AI agents are the next big step in making local marketing easier and more effective. AI agents are special-purpose experts in a set of automated tasks and can handle the heavy lifting, tackling complex local marketing workflows for you around the clock to accomplish assigned goals. 

For a closer look at what AI Agents are and how they can help multi-location businesses, check out this intro to AI agents.

The Promise of AI: Continuous Learning and Adaptation

As we closed the session, the discussion turned to one of the most remarkable aspects of AI: its ability to adapt, learn, and continually fine-tune its approach to better align with business objectives. AI is transforming how businesses work, streamlining workflows, enhancing customer engagement, and driving growth. In local marketing, it’s redefining possibilities. Autonomous AI agents can handle tasks like boosting search visibility, responding to reviews, and creating personalized social content, delivering efficiency and scalability without the need for constant oversight.

On-demand AI is also available to help for more specific tasks, like drafting a social post, rewriting a review response, or analyzing the search performance of a specific location. Whether you choose always-on automation or task-specific support, AI lets you tailor solutions to your goals and needs.

Embrace the Future with AI

The challenges of successful local marketing for your multi-location business doesn’t have to be overwhelming. When you work with SOCi, an expert in the local marketing space, we’ll guide you every step of the way toward accomplishing your business goals.

Jump into SOCi’s self-guided product tours to get some hands-on time with our Genius products!