In today’s digital age, where customers are spoilt for choice and demand personalized experiences across engagement touchpoints with the brands, companies are left with no option but to tailor their business strategies to appease every customer demography. But in a country geographically vast and culturally diverse as India, it is truly a herculean task for brands, especially multi-location retailers, to craft tailored experiences across each of their stores & retail outlets as per the local demographics. Emerging as the true lifesavers in this regard are companies such as Vicinus whose deep tech prowess and profound marketing knowledge are helping businesses enhance their stores’ visibility across online mediums.

Based in Gurgaon, Vicinus was incepted in 2021 by Saurabh Kumar with a vision to bring-in the much need edtech-driven hyperlocal marketing to help retail D2C/B2C businesses with multiple physical storefronts or branches servicing customers boost brand visibility across all their stores and acquire more customers, from their locality. Today, with reputed names such as Reliance Trends, Uniqlo India, Canara HSBC Life Insurance, Metro Shoes, Campus Shoes, IndusInd Bank, Crocs, ORRA Fine Jewellery and Hertz Car Rentals (Europe) as its clientele, the company is positioned among the most sought-after technology partners for diverse hyperlocal marketing requirements.

Redefining Marketing via Tech Integration

Vicinus’ AI-driven hyperlocal marketing platform enables multi-location businesses to enhance visibility of each of their stores across every channel the customers engage with them through online searches. Some of its prominent features include Listing Management (listing and citation manager), Conversion (landing page manager), Reputation Management (review monitoring and response), and Analytics (keyword ranking, sentiment analysis and more).

The platform firstly looks at all the potential issues that the brand’s stores or listings might have, such as inaccuracies, duplication or cannibalization and automatically suggests remedial measures to each store in order to enhance its overall visibility among the local customer base.

Vicinus platform also auto-creates microsites for each of the stores with SEO-rich content and AI-driven optimizations to improve rankings in local searches and to provide store-specific information. Further, it ensures that any change – be it store images, address, timing or any other – is auto-updated across all channels. The platform is also equipped with an AI bot that responds to customer reviews on various channels and provides detailed information such as NPS score, common customer complaint/appreciation about every store, and areas of improvement (sentiment analysis). Lastly, Vicinus platform’s citation manager feature enables brands to have a unified presence specifically for each of their stores by ensuring that their listings remain correct and complete across Google, Facebook and all other mediums.

“The primary factor that has enabled us to maintain a competitive edge in the market is the 15-20 years of deep domain expertise that we possess. This has helped us garner unique insights into marketing problems and address them with utmost efficiency through our integrated approach of performance measurement and optimization”, states Saurabh Kumar, Founder, Vicinus.

We envision each of the brands that are utilizing our platform to be available across every possible touch point for their customers to engage with

Best-in-Class & Customer-friendly Tech Capabilities

Built using highly advanced levels of coding and data protection practices, the entire code base of Vicinus is developed and hosted on AWS, securing customer data from any data leak or other related incidents. AI-driven automation being its core foundational pillar, the Vicinus platform strives to automate as much of marketing function as possible – right from performance monitoring, process optimization, insights-driven suggestions to gathering inputs and responding to customer reviews. Further, the company also practices a unique approach called ‘Be Uniquely Human’ where all content for the landing page on the microsites of each store is written by a local human who’s well-versed with AI and SEO optimized content with necessary keywords.

“One of our esteemed clients Campus Shoes has around 200 stores across 115 Indian cities. Thanks to our platform, customers looking for men’s shoes in any of those cities were able to find Campus Shoes in the very first page of most of their search results. Overall, we were able to increase their brand visibility by 66 percent, customer reviews by 27 percent, and user action by 70 percent – all within the first year itself”, proudly asserts Saurabh.

Exploring Beyond Horizons

Going forward, Vicinus envisions making its platform more relevant for multi-location businesses through voice & LLM search as well across Google and other search engines. Thus, it plans to develop a marketing assistance solution where every store manager gets an AI assistant that’ll provide a detailed overview of their respective stores and suggest the necessary steps to improve their visibility across all mediums.

This will greatly enhance their overall performance in terms of map and search impressions & clicks and call-to-action clicks such as call, directions or website, in turn impacting the footfall and sales. Additionally, it has built a social media assistant for stores that will auto-generate content, schedule it for multiple locations and show it to the store managers, who can then edit & localize the content and make it live online.