SAN DIEGO – Marketing platform SOCi, Inc. has reached a new milestone by achieving $100 million in annual recurring revenue while also being named one of the fastest-growing companies for the seventh straight year.
“It’s worth celebrating,” said SOCi CEO Afif Khoury. “We were very proud of it. We have incredible customers all over the world, and we were serving them well, and we got great investment partners and we have capital to grow even more.”
According to Bessemer Venture Partners, only 160 private cloud companies in the world have reached $100 million or more in annual recurring revenue, making them about seven times rarer than unicorns, the term for startup companies valued at more than $1 billion.
Also in August, SOCi was recognized by Inc. as one of the 5,000 fastest growing companies for the seventh consecutive year, coming in at No. 1,542.
Khoury said the recognitions were great milestones for the company, but also said they are not looking back but focusing on new and recently released products.
Beyond Local Searches
SOCi was founded to address an issue that was happening when consumers began doing internet searches on their phones, Khoury recalled.
“What happened was, everything went local,” he said. “All those experiences started to happen at the local level. People were searching for the local stores, they were interacting with the local social pages, they were leaving reviews about the local restaurant.
“What that did for these national and global brands that had a lot of locations, they really, really put the scale of what they had to manage out of reach,” he said.
With customers leaving reviews or interacting in other ways online about different locations of a national brand, trying to manage the content had become impossible. Any one location might have 20 or 25 digital marketing pages, Khoury said.
“So if you’re someone like the No. 1 retailer in the world, you have 5,000 locations, you now have 125,000 digital marketing pages that have your logo on it that are interacting with consumers,” he said. “And so if you think about that scale, and you know, the teams at corporate don’t have that human capacity to manage 125,000 pages.
“SOCi built out that process,” Khoury said. “SOCi is that fundamental operating system, backbone engine to help them scale marketing across all of the locations.”
Using artificial intelligence and other tools SOCi’s line of products manages content and even responds to reviews left by consumers, making a more uniform message from a company and content that likely would have been impossible to create by employees.
“And so, instead of asking thousands of managers to spend hours on marketing, we take on all of that, we train the system, we save the organization thousands of hours that can go into other things that are really important,” Khoury said.
“And then we deliver, frankly, a much better, more on-brand, more accurate, more timely marketing strategy,” he continued. “So now the system understands, based on digesting the data, what should it go post, what should it update on the search, how should it respond to this review, and it does it automatically and in real time.”
SOCi Search
The company released its latest feature, Genius Search, earlier this year as a way to tackle local search optimization.
The new tool is constantly tuned to local search behaviors and trends rather than relying on historical data and manual updates like traditional tools.
Its AI technology analyzes real-time data from local consumer activities, real-time events, search behavior, business reviews and social media engagements.
“We’re not just connected to your social media networks,” Khoury said. “We’re connected everywhere to your search networks and your review networks. And so we’re getting all of these signals that are telling us what does the local audience around you want to interact, what are they searching for, what are they engaging with, what are they asking questions about.
“That’ll help us tailor the content location by location,” he continued. “Again, what I’m describing would take humans forever to do.”
SOCi, Inc.
FOUNDED: 2012
CEO: Afif Khoury
HEADQUARTERS: Downtown San Diego
BUSINESS: Business-to-business software firm offering an all-in-one marketing platform for localized marketing.
REVENUE: $100 million ARR
EMPLOYEES: Nearly 700
WEBSITE: www.meetsoci.com
NOTABLE: The company has been on a list of 5,000 fastest-growing companies for seven consecutive years.
