PromoRepublic: A Cloud-Hosted Social Media Marketing Suite Helping Brands Connect with Local Audiences

TL; DR: PromoRepublic is a cloud-hosted, white-label social media platform focused on content automation. The company helps SMBs, agencies, and enterprises thrive on social media by engaging audiences, nurturing sales, and measuring return on investment. Ultimately, PromoRepublic gives brands a competitive advantage in the crowded social space by empowering them to manage their social media marketing efforts in one place.

Social media marketing is an intimidating subject for many business owners. After all, not everyone grew up on Facebook and Twitter. But as a brand, shying away from the topic could result in a significant business disadvantage.

Consider this: There are 7.8 billion people on the planet today, and more than 3.6 billion of them use social media. That’s 46% — nearly half of the human population.

And research shows that trend is only poised to continue. According to Statista, 4.41 billion people will use the popular online medium by 2025.

Fortunately, businesses of all sizes have multiple tools available to them to help get in on the social media action, and many of them are conveniently hosted in the cloud.

PromoRepublic, for example, is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that empowers users to grow on social media through automated content creation, among other tools. The white-label solution can be used by small and medium-sized businesses as well as enterprises and marketing agencies to help engage audiences, boost sales, and measure return on investment.

“The primary goal of PromoRepublic’s founders was to make social media automation and marketing available for everyone, especially small businesses, like local restaurants, cafes, and shops,” said Daria Davis, Marketing Team Lead at PromoRepublic. “And then our biggest point of differentiation, both back then and right now, is our focus on content. We help brands create and store editable content for social media, schedule it, run local ads, manage clients or locations, and monitor their results.”

Co-Founders Maksym Pecherskyy, Mikhail Baranovskiy, and Valeriy Grabko built the first version of PromoRepublic via Startup Wise Guys, a leading B2B accelerator in Europe. The company’s founders all had strong backgrounds in marketing.

Max Pecherskyy, for example, has vast experience crafting external communications and marketing projects for well-known companies like Henkel, Huggies, Johnson & Johnson, and Kimberly-Clark.

In 2015, after gaining traction in Europe, PromoRepublic opened its office in Helsinki, Finland. Max transitioned to the SaaS world and co-founded PromoRepublic, then a social media automation solution for small businesses. By 2016, the company opened a U.S. office for sales and customer service teams there and continued to enjoy rapid growth.

“We began to examine our customer segments and discovered that marketing agencies were the most loyal and willing to go all-in with the platform,” Daria said.

So, in 2018, the team at PromoRepublic designed and introduced products specifically for marketing agencies.

“They require more complicated workflows when working on social media — they have the client side, internal teams, contractors, freelancers, social media managers, and designers, and require collaboration between them,” Daria said. “So we started solving more complex business models and fulfilled the need for a white-label social media marketing platform.”

By 2019, PromoRepublic also entered the enterprise market with cloud-hosted social media marketing tools designed for franchises and direct sales companies. In 2020, the company announced it had raised $1.5 million to help enterprises streamline their messaging.

Also this year, amid the ongoing pandemic, the company launched an Emergency Marketing Center and Transformation Program. It includes news, articles, webinars, and interviews designed to help customers — many of whom are in the hard-hit restaurant industry — cope with the crisis and prepare for a financial rebound.

“We also help customers with things like brand consistency, launching your products across the network, publishing posts at scale, and reporting analytics across all business locations,” Daria said. “We call ourselves a social media marketing solution right now, but with an enterprise solution, we’re entering a brand management category for businesses with through-partners sales models. We’re looking forward to developing in that space.”

PromoRepublic offers ways for small businesses to streamline workflows and stretch tight budgets through automation. The company’s suite of tools allows users to automate posts, schedule within time slots suggested for each industry, recycle successful content, and reuse evergreen materials. The company also delivers editable content templates created by professional designers for your business.

“We grew our following from 300 relevant fans to over 15,000 in under months,” said Carl Dorvil, CEO at GEX Management, in a testimonial on the PromoRepublic website. “Before discovering PromoRepublic, we were spending 10 or 15 minutes per post — and that was just for basic visual content — using Canva for design and Hootsuite for scheduling finished posts. Once we started working with PromoRepublic, we were suddenly spending no more than 5 minutes on it.”

On the franchise side, the company’s social media solutions also include cloud-hosted tools for content distribution across regions and locations, centralized ads, and campaign management. Users can schedule on-brand content to be posted on the websites of multiple locations, split advertising budgets to improve the flow of campaigns, and access a single dashboard for an overview of each franchise’s performance.

PromoRepublic’s social media solution for direct sales, on the other hand, includes pre-scheduled social media campaigns, on-brand content suggestions, automated sales communication, and tools for interactive online shopping.

Finally, marketing agencies use PromoRepublic’s white-label solution to provide clients with a slew of customizable service offerings that align with each agency’s brand story.

Daria told us that it’s not always easy to measure business impact in the world of social media.

“For small businesses and marketing agencies, it’s mostly about saving time managing presence,” she said. “For marketing agencies, it’s also saving time for workloads with clients, as well as reducing back-and-forth approvals and discussions about content plans, images, and copy.”

For enterprises, of course, it’s all about the bottom line.

“For enterprises, it’s more about the revenue because that’s what marketing directors and CMOs are interested in. We have data for some of our clients that we can use to correlate the amplification of their social media message with sales results.”

All PromoRepublic users can access an overview of the social media performance of their brand using the company’s Reporting Provider. The tool provides metrics on multiple social media pages, clients, and locations in a single pane of glass. The data in Reporting Provider can then be used to adjust social media strategies, report on the results of marketing campaigns, and identify areas for improvement.

PromoRepublic is currently anticipating the release of exciting new products in its development pipeline.

“The next few months will be pretty interesting in terms of new features and marketing initiatives, Daria said. “We have an inbox for managing private conversations and comments coming soon, as well as an asset manager.”

After that, the company plans to release additional cloud-hosted resources for managing content and marketing campaigns over social media.

“It’s essentially project management for marketing,” Daria said. “It’s one place for your campaign, timeline, calendar, and assets. We’re launching the first iteration next month.”