For businesses that plan on expanding to new locations and successfully managing each, multi-location marketing is everything. These campaigns can help your business thrive and sustain your current business while driving long-term growth.
Multi-location business marketing has grown increasingly complex over the years, with increasing competition across industries and evolving technologies changing the landscape, along with higher quality standards from Google and other platforms. Multi location marketing is also considerably different from traditional marketing, requiring more attention to different nuances for each location, including target audiences and geographical considerations.
In this blog, Mark Hite, Director of Franchisee Sales & Marketing, will provide an overview of multi-location marketing and discuss some strategies that can help you get the most from these campaigns.
What You’ll Learn:
- What Is Multi-Location Marketing?
- Why Multi-Location Marketing Matters
- Multi Location Digital Marketing Tactics
- How to Choose a Multi-Location Marketing Platform
- The Role of a Multi-Location Marketing Agency
My Expert Opinion on Multi-Location Marketing
If a business wants to cover new ground and ensure each location contributes to sustained success, effective multi-location business marketing is a must.
Recent statistics support this need, with 94% of high-performing brands developing a dedicated local marketing strategy over 60% of brands with average performance, according to BrightLocal.
In addition to growing competition across industries, many multi-location businesses face certain challenges like maintaining brand consistency across all locations and earning the public’s trust as issues like sustainability and data security become even bigger concerns among consumers.
Personalization is also critical to connect with all audiences across all locations.
Knowing how to develop effective multi-location marketing campaigns will help you stay ahead of the competition while building trust among your target audiences, equipping your company for long-term growth.
What Is Multi-Location Marketing?
Multi-location marketing is a type of business marketing strategy that involves tailoring campaigns to each location based on that particular community and its customers’ needs and wants. At the same time, multi-location business marketing balances personalization with a consistent brand identity across all locations.
Multi-location marketing campaigns work for any business with two or more locations, offering numerous key benefits, such as:
- The ability to attract local customers
- Improved brand consistency
- Increased customer loyalty
- More engagement and sales
- Increased overall reach and brand awareness
Whether you own a retail chain, franchise, or another type of organization with multiple locations, a solid multi-location marketing strategy will be the key to your success and growth.
These campaigns will help you cater to each target audience and make your brand a true beacon among other competing businesses.
Why Multi-Location Business Marketing Matters
Multi-location marketing is critical for businesses with multiple locations to connect with both prospective customers and franchisees. A recent Annual Franchise Development Report from Franchise Update Magazine confirms the importance of effective marketing, with one quick-service restaurant franchise implementing a website with a 7.87% conversion rate and a 15.73% Google Ads click-through rate via a strong franchise development strategy.
The following are some of the specific benefits of multi-location marketing:
- More Brand Exposure: With the help of multi location marketing, you can establish a stronger connection with each community where your business is located. In the process, you can use local SEO, event marketing, and other hyper-targeted marketing efforts to maximize your brand’s visibility.
- Increased Trust and Loyalty Among Customers: Fully localized multi-location marketing can also help you align your brand with your audience’s values and needs. In turn, local audiences will be more likely to trust your business over more distant competitors as they feel a stronger connection with your brand.
- Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness: The right approach to multi location business marketing can also keep your marketing efforts efficient and profitable. Using high-quality creatives, effective and consistent brand messaging, and other reliable resources will help you get the results you want while maximizing ROI.
- Improved Competitiveness: Strong local marketing for multi-location businesses will help you stand apart from local competition in each location, especially if competitors are relying on more generic approaches.
Challenges of Multi-Location Marketing
There are certain challenges that businesses often need to overcome with their multi-location marketing, including:
- Brand Consistency: Maintaining uniform messaging and visuals across locations is crucial for a recognizable brand identity. Inconsistency can erode trust and weaken market presence.
- Adapting to Local Markets: Tailor marketing to regional preferences and cultural differences to ensure relevance and engagement in each location.
- Data Management & Reporting: Use analytics tools to track, organize, and report performance data, gaining insights for continuous optimization.
- Budget & Resource Allocation: Regularly assess budgets to allocate resources effectively, prioritizing locations that need greater marketing support.
By implementing the right strategies and the right location marketing platforms, multi-location businesses can avoid these issues and get the best results.
Core Components of a Scalable Multi Location Marketing Strategy
Want to get the most from your multi location business marketing efforts? Here are some of the essentials to consider before developing your next strategy:
Brand Governance and Guidelines
First, you must be in complete control of your brand across all locations, even if your approach to multi-location marketing differs for each location.
In maintaining that control and building a strong brand, you need to unify your brand voice, tone, and visual identity, all of which will work together to form a collective identity that’s unmistakably yours, wherever you are.
Managers and staff at each location should adhere to your brand guidelines to maintain uniformity of operations, products, and services, but you should also give each business its own level of autonomy. Different locations will have different audience segments, making it important to tailor multi location digital marketing and other strategies to speak more directly to each community.
Budgeting and Resource Allocation
You must also allocate your budget and resources properly to get the best results with every national-to-local campaign. While you should have a central budget to establish your national strategy, consider local spend models for each location to give your franchises sufficient funds for more locally targeted multi location marketing.
It’s also critical to have a contingency budget in place for market-specific opportunities, which could help every location pivot as needed, such as when a local event pops up or seasonal marketing opportunities arise that might demand a bigger budget.
Selecting Your Location Marketing Platform
When developing a multi location digital marketing strategy, there are plenty of reliable location marketing platforms to use for developing and managing campaigns.
Some of these platforms include:
- Google Business Profile: This platform is essential for maximizing visibility in Google Search and Maps, with in-depth details about your business that are potentially more prominently featured than other search results.
- Moz Local: Meanwhile, this location marketing platform provides you with a comprehensive local SEO tool to manage your listings and overall business reputation with efficiency.
- Semrush: Another solution to help you conduct keyword research, analyze metrics, and manage marketing campaigns across locations is Semrush, which now boasts AI-powered marketing.
- BrightLocal: To supercharge your SEO, use this local SEO software, which can help you build citations and boost local rankings.
Multi Location Digital Marketing Tactics
To experience long-term success with your multi-location marketing campaigns, develop the following strategies in a comprehensive plan.
Multi-Location SEO
One major component of successful multi-location digital marketing is local SEO. This process entails optimizing each location’s website and online platform to rank for locally targeted search terms on Google and other search engines, helping you climb on top of competitors.
There are a couple of primary components that can really give your local SEO a boost.
1. An optimized Google Business Profile (GBP) for each location.
This profile summarizes all relevant business information for every location, including service or product offerings, address, hours, phone number, and more.
2. Having a variety of location-specific landing pages that correspond to search results and ads.
3. Targeting location-specific keywords that work with those landing pages and other localized content.
Each page should have locally targeted keywords that your audience is likely to search, such as “best italian restaurant in [city]” or “grocery store near me.”
4. Well-structured URLs that incorporate local keywords, with domain names that are easy for your customers to remember.
While not every location needs to have its own domain, there should be location-specific branches of your site that cater to each location.
5. Building multi-location citations that help your business grow its presence online, which you can easily do using tools like BrightLocal.
Multi-Location PPC and Programmatic Advertising
To supplement your local SEO efforts, it’s also important to have hyperlocal display and search ads that connect with audiences around every location.
To maximize your reach and engagement, use a mix of advertising platforms that your audiences use, to reach them where they spend their time most.
Platforms include:
- Google Ads
- X
Like your SEO campaigns, you should optimize paid media ads with keyword targeting for specific locations. While it can be costly to bid on high-volume competitive keywords, you can go for less competitive options that still have a decent amount of search volume for good results.
Also, consider using geo-targeting and geofencing to connect with local audiences through your advertising. While geo-targeting can push ads to customers in a specific geographical region, geofencing can push more hyper-local ads within a particular radius or geometric area within a region, notifying potential customers via mobile devices as soon as they’re in this space.
Geofencing can be great for retargeting people when they’re in the proximity of one of your locations.
Keep in mind that while your ads should be unique for each location, they should feature creative designs that are specific to your brand and universally recognizable. Also, messaging should generally be unique to your company while incorporating local nuances, keeping your brand consistent but adaptable.
Social Media Management
You’ll also want to use the right social media marketing channels to connect with audiences both nationally and locally. As such, you should have a centralized brand account that represents the entire company, sharing nationwide updates and other content that applies to your company as a whole.
Meanwhile, develop regional sub-accounts that each franchisee can manage based on your brand guidelines, posting about local updates such as community-related promotions or involvement, events, grand openings, job openings, and more.
To keep your posting schedule consistent, be sure to use a content calendar, ideally posting on average around once per day. As with other media, social posts and ads should also use a consistent brand voice, visual identity, and messaging in adherence to your brand guidelines.
In your posts, you can also use location-based hashtags and geotags to boost local visibility, ensuring more people find you.
To further establish a local connection, consider working with local influencers. Many nano- and micro-influencers tend to have loyal followings who will come to trust you if the influencer genuinely endorses your brand.
Customer Reviews and Reputation Management
To encourage local customers to patronize your business in their locations, try to get your existing customers to leave reviews.
Platforms like Yelp and Google make it easy for people to review various businesses, and you can incentivize people to leave reviews with a discount, an entry into a raffle, or another offer.
Each location should have plenty of reviews to show what kind of quality you bring, which can go a long way in enticing people to buy your products or services.
Not only should you try to get reviews for your locations, but you should also try to manage your reputation at each.
Encourage management at each location to respond to negative reviews with thoughtful and considerate replies. Even if a review is scathing and potentially false, it’s best to address it with a response that makes your business look like it truly cares and values all input.
Of course, you can also respond to positive reviews with a “thanks” and a message of gratitude to further show that you listen to your audience.
Content Marketing and Localization
To elevate your multi-location marketing, you must also personalize all of your online content to speak directly to your target audiences at every location.
Consider what events or cultural differences there are in every location and how you can incorporate these elements into content that resonates.
Local marketing for multi-location businesses can use all types of content, including:
- User-generated content from social media users, such as posts showing how people use a product or service to enter a contest
- Behind-the-scenes storytelling giving people an inside look into your operations, which can really help embed your brand in local communities as you highlight the people working at each location
- Dynamic content blocks that showcase local promotions
There are plenty of multi-location businesses that have used localized marketing to inform their content marketing strategy, such as:
Nike – Own the Floor
Athletic shoe brand Nike has attempted to touch on many of the cultures it serves, including New York City’s.
In its “Own the Floor” campaign, Nike showcased dancers making the entirety of the city their dance floor. The result was a beautiful illustration of the city’s love of freedom of expression and performance art.
McDonald’s Local Menus
Another great example of successfully appealing to cultural wants and needs is McDonald’s. The company has an expansive global menu that changes based on cultural and even more hyperlocal preferences.
While its menu remains recognizable across all countries and continents, it maintains a versatile menu across all of them, optimizing its content design and messaging accordingly.
Source: McDonald’s
Airbnb’s Personalized Local Experiences
To ensure all of its users can connect, including hosts and travelers all over the world, Airbnb has a dynamic website and app experience that makes it seamless and easy to use, regardless of location or language.
Depending on where the user is, Airbnb will translate content to tailor it to the user, including the website’s language, currency, date formats, and measurement units.
How to Choose a Multi-Location Marketing Platform
Here are some key features to look for in the ideal multi-location marketing platform:
1. Scalability
Look for software that offers flexibility or multiple tiers to give you what you need when you need it. Ideally, you should be able to pick and choose which features you purchase as part of your subscription, tailoring your tool to your needs just as you tailor your marketing to local audiences.
2. Ease of Use
Your team should be able to easily pick up and use whatever platform you choose. Interfaces should be intuitive and navigable, with easy-to-access dashboards and data that help you fully utilize the platform.
3. Integration With Other Tools
Good marketing tools will also easily integrate with other tools to help streamline your workflows. Look for features like certain third-party app integrations to ensure the platform fits within your organization’s existing digital framework.
4. Localized Data Reporting
All of the data you collect for each organization should be comprehensible and organized. As a result, you can get in-depth insights into each location’s performance and determine what steps to take for additional optimization and improvement.
Find a solution that can track all of the relevant data you need based on your marketing goals, from ad clicks and click-through rates to page views, website traffic, and conversions.
Popular Multi-Location Marketing Tools
With a better idea of what to look for in the right platform, here are some of the most robust and easiest to use multi-location marketing platforms available:
- Birdeye: This customer experience, social media, and reputation management platform works well for multi-location businesses of all types. It’s AI-powered to optimize social publishing, manage all digital marketing channels, and help improve your reputation online.
- SOCi: Also using the power of AI, SOCi is another of the easiest to use multi-location marketing platforms you can use to optimize scalability, improve customer engagement, and automate various marketing processes.
- Vendasta: Manage social media, local listings, and your online reputation with this content management solution using a convenient dashboard.
These are just a few of the top options you can use to supercharge your campaigns.
Advanced Analytics and Performance Measurement
To get the best results from multi-location campaigns, it’s important to properly capture data and analyze it for every location to gauge performance.
When measuring efforts at particular locations, there are some location-specific key performance indicators (KPIs) to consider, including customer acquisition cost (CAC), conversions, and foot traffic.
At the same time, you should implement cross-location dashboards and Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM) tracking to get a complete overview of your business.
When preparing and launching your campaigns, it’s also important to establish certain benchmarks. Consider your industry and the average results that they get, which could give you a goal to achieve as you compare your performance against competitors.
Also, conduct A/B tests for everything from landing pages to ads, running two versions of each to determine which performs the best.
Over time, as you consistently develop, test, and perfect your content, you can benefit from iterative optimization that helps you maximize efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
The Role of a Multi-Location Marketing Agency
While you may have the best multi-location marketing tools behind your strategy, it’s often ideal to work with professionals who know how to take full advantage of them.
There are several key benefits of working with an agency to build your multi-location digital marketing strategy, including:
- Ample expertise to handle multi-location campaigns
- Access to some of the best tools available for everything from campaign management to analytics
- Regular data monitoring and reporting to measure progress
- Free up more time on your end to grow your business
- Maximize your ROI with campaigns that really work
The right agency will also offer a host of multi-location marketing services, such as local SEO, paid advertising, social media management, content marketing, creative design, email marketing, reporting and analytics, and more.
When looking for the right multi-location marketing agency, the right match will offer the following:
- Sufficient expertise in multi-location marketing management
- A proven track record of success with plenty of case studies
- An understanding of your industry and audience’s unique needs
- The ability to balance the quantity of locations with the quality of marketing efforts
- An emphasis on consistency of all branding to maintain a strong identity
Get Help With Multi-Location Marketing From Ignite Visibility
Want to grow your business and successfully appeal to all of your target audiences with every location? Ignite Visibility will help you get there with strategies that really work.
From local SEO and paid media to reputation management and content creation, Ignite Visibility has the resources you need to excel with your efforts.
Here are just some of the benefits of working with our team:
- Develop effective strategies tailored to each location and audience
- Create high-quality content that resonates while maintaining consistent branding
- Maximize your reach and boost your online reputation
- Engage audiences with marketing that grabs and holds their attention
- And more!
Contact us today to speak with a member of our team and see how we’ll take your campaigns to the next level.
