SOCi Local Visibility Index 2024

Wondering How Your Company Measures Up?

A Look Into Localized Marketing

If you’re not familiar, localized marketing is the process of creating and implementing a marketing strategy distributed at the local level. For financial services companies, corporate-level employees must work with local agents, loan officers, financial advisors or branches to create a cohesive localized marketing strategy and deploy localized marketing tactics across all locations.

The three main areas of localized marketing are local search, local social, and reputation management.

In order to obtain top visibility and performance in local digital marketing, marketers must understand the interconnectedness of the three pillars of localized marketing. If any of these three pillars is lacking, a company’s overall marketing success can be impacted. For instance, reputation can be diminished by a low volume of positive reviews, which also tends to drive down local search rankings, in turn reducing local conversions.

This year’s report demonstrates that companies are continuing to neglect many of the key priorities in localized marketing. Too many firms ignore their local reviews, fail to claim and consistently update their local store profiles, and neglect the priority of building local audiences on social platforms.

Financial services must also pay close attention to emerging trends in search and social, such as those outlined below.

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Top 50 Financial Services Companies

SOCi Local Visibility Index 2024
Local Visibility in Financial Services: Charting the Course for Growth

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Top Takeaways

What We Measure

The SOCi LVI does not assess a company’s visibility at the national or regional level; its focus is exclusively on local channels and markets, where over 84% of commerce happens. We apply over 100 measurements, looking at the most important factors that drive discoverability and overall online visibility, such as local ranking, star ratings, review response, onsite and offsite SEO, local followers, and local engagement.

All of these factors are weighted and scored in order to produce two results for every business:

1. An Optimization Score that measures to what extent a business has put into practice all of the tactical optimizations that experts agree should drive better local visibility and performance

2. A Performance Score that judges how highly ranked and rated a business actually is and how successfully they’re engaging with local audiences

Key Trends in the Most Influential Digital Channels

Search Tightens Its Focus

In the last year or more, Google has deliberately decreased the volume of search results that include a Local Pack (also known as a 3-Pack), in an effort to dial back cases where local results did not match user intent. Correspondingly, the local packs that still appear are likely more relevant to the searcher’s needs; but competition is fiercer for fewer opportunities.

Thus, it becomes more important to provide both base-level accuracy of information and depth of optimization to ensure that online profiles address all consumer needs.

Our sixth annual SOCi Local Visibility Index, our biggest report ever, includes the digital channel performance of 346 financial services companies.

Financial services companies that fail to engage with consumers digitally and build audiences in local markets are leaving millions of dollars on the table. In total, financial services companies lose out on $10.1B in revenue every year by not fully leveraging their localized marketing opportunities.

The key to achieving optimal results is strong local search optimization, effective reputation management, and a localized social media strategy.

Financial services companies can use our industry-specific benchmark metrics to focus their strategies and set goals to outperform the competition.

Social Expands Its Reach

A recent Forbes study revealed that one in four of all consumers only or primarily use social for search. Consumers, especially in younger age groups, are increasingly turning to social platforms over search engines, for local as well as many other search needs. SOCi’s Consumer Behavior Index (CBI), released in February 2024, found that consumers aged 18-24 were more likely to use Instagram (67%) and TikTok (62%) than Google Search (61%) when looking up a local business. Additionally, 75% of millennials and Gen Zers use social media as their primary source of financial education.

Even Facebook, which tends to attract more older consumers, was third overall in the rankings of local platforms for all age groups behind only Google Search and Google Maps. Businesses looking to market themselves locally must have a robust social strategy.

SOCi LVI Benchmarks for 2024

Search Benchmarks

Reputation Benchmarks

Social Benchmarks

The Role of AI in Local

AI is changing the game in financial services marketing as in so many other industries. The impact of this still-emerging technology is already significant in three areas related to the LVI: data analysis, search interfaces, and marketing automation.

AI Transforms the Search Interface

As we know, Google and Bing have both been hard at work incorporating AI into their search interfaces. Most significantly, Google launched AI Overviews (AIOs) in May 2024, after a year of experimentation with Search Generative Experience (SGE). Microsoft, early in 2023, had already rolled out an integration of Bing search with ChatGPT.

Google, Bing, and similar AI platforms like Perplexity and Meta.AI, all handle local queries at a deeper level of granularity than we’ve been used to in the past, requiring local marketers to up the level of specificity and the richness of information they provide to consumers.

The High Cost of Invisibility

We’ve developed a model that quantifies the opportunity cost of inadequate performance in search, reputation, and social. We attribute the cost of poor search performance to the loss in conversions when firms fail to appear prominently in search results. For reputation, opportunity cost is attributed to lost conversions when brands ignore their reviews, especially negative reviews. In social, when companies fail to build audiences at the local level, they lose value in both repeat and new business.

It’s clear from our analysis that companies are leaving millions of dollars on the table by failing to engage with local audiences and provide them with the information and feedback they need to make local buying decisions. Missed opportunities in localized marketing are costing financial services firms a combined total of $10.1B every year. (See more about our calculations in the Methodology section below.)

Annual Opportunity Cost of Localized Marketing

Methodology

The 2024 LVI includes 346 financial services companies. To produce the rankings and scores in the LVI, we analyzed a statistically valid sample set of approximately 350,000 store and office locations (including FA, LO, agent, and branch representatives), applying more than 100 metrics to each location in the categories of search, reputation, and social. Data for the report was gathered by our analytics partner Places Scout.

We assessed the online profiles of each store or office location on Google, Yelp, and Facebook, measuring factors in these categories:

To calculate the opportunity cost of localized marketing, we relied on SOCi research including Top Ranking and Conversion Factors for Local Search and The State of Google Reviews; a commissioned study from Localogy on typical transaction values by industry; earned media values from the Ayzenberg Social Index; and internal SOCi data.

The SOCi LVI and Your Business

Charting the Course for Growth in Financial Services

The most visible financial services firms know how to appeal to local consumer needs and turn every branch, FA, LO, or agent into a local favorite.

Our chart defines four quadrants for measuring performance:

Low Visibility: Companies are working to improve their local visibility, but more work remains to be done.

Limited Visibility: Firms are doing a lot of the optimization work required to compete, but haven’t yet achieved top performance on all platforms.

Moderate Visibility: Businesses are performing well on some platforms, but haven’t yet done all the work required to optimize their online presence everywhere.

High Visibility: Firms are effectively combining strong optimization with high performance.

What Defines a High Visibility Company?

Here are some of the notable stats that differentiate financial services companies in the High Visibility quadrant from the competition.

High Local Visibility = High Local Traffic and Revenue

Strong visibility in local platforms equates to local dollars. SOCi research has shown that companies in the top LVI rankings grow year-over-year revenue at 2-3X the rate of the average company.

This makes sense: consumers spend money with companies who treat digital channels as their virtual storefronts, offering helpful information, useful content, and meaningful engagement.

At the heart of the LVI report are the benchmark metrics that identify the minimum level required to outperform the average competitor. We benchmark a broad range of performance metrics for local stores and offices across search, local reviews, and social, with only a selection of top metrics featured here.

As you’ll see, we’ve segmented the data into four different types of financial services companies: banks & credit unions, financial planning, insurance, mortgage companies, and tax services.

According to our search benchmarks, financial services companies are doing a reasonably good job of claiming and optimizing their profiles on Google, with some room for improvement on Yelp and Facebook. Competition is stiff to achieve high rankings in the Google 3-Pack, on page 1 of Yelp, and especially on page 1 in Google organic results.

2024 SOCi LVI Search Benchmarks

On Google, less than half of reviews get a response from the business, and response rates on Yelp and especially Facebook are significantly lower (here we are looking at all reviews published in the last 12 months). Response times need improvement as well, with the average response time on Google coming in at a rather slow 5.2 days.

2024 SOCi LVI Reputation Benchmarks

Financial services companies are successfully building audiences on Facebook, and making a reasonable effort to share content with those audiences by posting an average of 7.6 times per month. We see a healthy mix of photo and video content, but audience engagement at just 0.71% on average is low. Facebook does limit the reach of business content, but firm representatives can still do a better job of sharing content that is useful, informative, or entertaining, rather than merely promotional.

2024 SOCi LVI Social Benchmarks

The Struggles of Low Visibility Firms

In contrast with High Visibility companies, many companies in the Low Visibility quadrant in our overall dataset have yet to master the priorities of localized marketing. Here are some of the features that define lower-performing companies.

Search: Visibility on the platforms consumers use to seek out information about local businesses.

Social: Presence in local markets on social platforms and ability to build and engage with local audiences.

Reputation: Consumer ratings and reviews and the responses attentive brands provide to local consumer feedback.

Local search result for "banks near me" on Google

Our scoring system allows us to uncover specific factors that may be diminishing or boosting visibility for certain industries, offering marketers a concrete set of opportunities for improving digital presence and, ultimately, revenue.

Google displays a Local Pack or 3-Pack (here shown at the top of the search result) when it determines the user is searching for local financial institutions

The Biggest SOCi Local Visibility Index Ever

This year marks the sixth anniversary of the SOCi Local Visibility Index (LVI). We established the report to benchmark the performance across the most important and influential digital channels for driving foot traffic and sales at the local level.

This year’s report marks one of the most significant steps in the SOCi LVI’s evolution, as we expand the report's scope to include the majority of multi-location businesses in the United States.

This year, with the help of AI, we examined business locations across North America for approximately 346 companies, 4X the number of companies we’ve ever included in the LVI.

AI Automation and Compliance: A Powerful Partnership

As businesses grow, the need to optimize local profiles becomes increasingly complex, particularly for national enterprises managing hundreds of locations. The scale of operations amplifies the challenges of monitoring, optimizing, and safeguarding local presence across multiple platforms.

To address this, we’ve launched Genius Search, our AI-powered platform that adapts to over 130 unique keywords and Google’s frequent search ranking updates. It’s like having a data scientist and SEO specialist for each location, analyzing real-time local data and making search optimization recommendations with the click of a button.

However, as AI becomes more deeply integrated into local marketing efforts, the financial services industry faces growing concerns about regulatory compliance and maintaining brand integrity. This is where SOCi Shield steps in to alleviate those concerns. SOCi Shield is the only all-in-one, proactive compliance solution specifically designed for multi-location businesses. By integrating compliance and marketing tools into one platform, SOCi Shield ensures that every piece of content—whether created by corporate, local teams, or even AI—meets regulatory standards and brand guidelines.