Business Need
Every year, millions of dollars are invested in building consumer awareness by national brands and franchises such as Donkin’ Donuts, Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, and Subway Restaurants. However, actual customer touch points actually occur at the local storefront level. Often local marketing efforts are difficult to coordinate at the local level, and control and efficiency is lost because local affiliates lack the experience or knowledge to execute effective campaigns. This contributes to lost opportunities and consumer knowledge resulting in over $50 billions of lost revenue each year in potential sales by US-based national brands due to problems in localization.
SimplyEngage offers an integrated, online marketing platform for national brands with local stores. The solution provides for a website, content manager, email, social media, SEO, reporting, analytics and a recommendation engine based on advanced data mining and AI technology. The target audience for the sophisticated platform is franchises and companies with multiple store locations (multi-units). The solution is a self-service tool that enables a local business owner to create and manage their own websites, media assets and customer engagement interactions (social media, search and email) via a software-as-a-service (Saas) platform that connects directly to their website.
Technology Solution
The Zettalytics team architected and built the SimplyEngage Platform, working with a group of initial customers including Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and Subway Restaurants to create a robust cloud-based tool that would provide the ability for a national franchise to manage multiple online touch-points to engage with their local customers on behalf of multiple franchisees.
The platform allowed a local franchisee to set up a professional-looking website quickly, using approved media assets from corporate office in order to adhere to brand standards. The social media, blogging, search, and email campaign capabilities are all integrated into the single SaaS platform, allowing the business to use one tool for all online customer engagement needs.
As an integrated, easy to use media management and audience engagement SaaS platform for businesses such as franchisees and independent small businesses with a need to have a digital reach program, our tools provide easy to use website and webpage creation and hosting, a powerful CMS, integrated social campaign, email campaign, and search optimization, as well as performance tracking and analytics via an affordable monthly subscription model. The powerful analytics screen tied all the information together, enabling the business to gain overall insight into the audience across all online channels.
Technology Stack:
- jQuery/Bootstrap for web front-end
- Objective C for iOS and Java for Android
- PHP for back-end
- MySQL for RDBMS
- Drupal (highly customized) for core CMS
Benefits
The SimplyEngage platform provides an easy to use yet powerful digital reach and CRM tool kit for national franchisees and independent small businesses. The platform benefited businesses that has many national clients with local presence, including Subway Restaurants, Donkin’ Donuts and Ruth’s Chris Steak House.
