Why You Need to Localize Your Marketing
The main aim of any marketing campaign is to create the best return on investment and brands are constantly striving to find the best formula to achieve this. Regardless of industry, the size of your business, or your approach, there is one key aspect that creates successful marketing and advertising:
The more targeted your content, the more it resonates.
Initially, marketing a multi-location business seems similar to marketing a single-location business. After all, the goals are the same—building awareness, spark action, increasing sales—so the approaches should also be the same, right? Wrong.
While there is some overlap in methods, there is also a few things that are quite different about multi-location and franchise marketing. In working with clients, we have consistently seen marketing campaigns not reaching their full potential because these differences have not been incorporated.
So, we have produced this article as a resource for you so that your business does not fall into the pitfalls that many other brands commonly do. Specifically, we have found that multi-location firms can be significantly helped by utilising these 6 methods:
1. Localizing Your Web Offerings
We get it: as a franchise you have multiple stores or offices offering the same products and/or services, because of that it is a common misconception that it will be easier to have one single page to that lists all your locations, however this is not the case. Although this can seem efficient, the problem is that search engines and other online platforms do not operate in this way. They are set up to serve consumers information for specific locations, as well as for the overarching business. As social media becomes more and more focused on the individual, national ‘broadcasts’ from large companies are becoming less productive. Local messages directly from the branches your customer knows are having a far greater effect.
That is why developing localized web offerings is so important. This does not mean you have to create a separate website for every location—that can be a step too far—but it does mean that each location should have its own social media page or account that is tailored to the location and includes things like the phone number, address, images, offers, and reviews.
Managing and maintaining multiple social media accounts without dropping your companies’ standards can become a long arduous task IF you are doing it the difficult way. Esemdee offers the solution to this and is the best way to avoid the challenges that come with multi-location social media accounts as it is the most powerful social media creation, management and tracking platform for all companies. With Esemdee you can manage all of your social media in one location making your job much more efficient. Furthermore, Esemdee and its easy use give you the power to effectively manage accounts, build and execute strategies, efficiently schedule posts and quickly construct updates to bring your business profile to the forefront.
2. Keeping Consistent branding
Here’s where things can start to get confusing: while you want each of your locations to have its own presence and relate to the demographic and target audience of each location, it is also imperative that your branding is consistent.
You want to ensure that your brand value is carried across locations. If consumers have good experiences in one place, you also want them to see your name and logo in another place and clearly make the connection.
By delivering consistently on your company’s tone of voice, brand and ethos in a constructive time frame, you have the opportunity to increase customer trust, company value and brand awareness which will have a subsequent positive effect on customer relations, and customer retention.
3. Actively Monitoring and Managing All Your Pages on Review Sites
Keeping track of what is happening on reviews for one location is stressful enough. Doing the same for multiple locations can feel completely overwhelming. Nevertheless, it is important to consistently monitor and manage all your pages across all the different online platforms.
Why? Because the timing and how your customer service is received really, really matters. If someone provides incorrect details about one of your locations or leaves a disparaging review, the damage can be significant to your entire business. The only way to deal with the issues is to be actively engaging so that you are immediately aware and can respond quickly.
4. Segmenting Your Audiences Properly
One of the paradoxes of multi-location firms is that the bigger your business gets, the more important it becomes to segment your audiences into smaller and smaller groups.
This is because consumers respond to relevancy. So, while in the beginning it may be okay to send the same email to all subscribers, that approach will increasingly fall flat as you expand into more areas.
For multi-location businesses, the first layer of targeting is typically geography, since you want to deliver messaging and offers only to the local audiences that they apply to. However, you should not stop there. The more you segment—by behaviour, demographics, etc.—the more likely it is that your marketing campaigns will resonate.
Esemdee’s features a flexible report module is essential for this. Different people want to see different information and with the flexible report module, you have the capability to build and create your own reports and save the format to use whenever you want.
5. Examining Analytics for Each Location
Finally, it is impossible to tell how your campaigns are performing without diving deep into the analytics, but this can feel especially daunting for multi-location businesses. By their very nature, these campaigns are more complex with more offices/stores, more geographies, and more audiences, so it can be tempting to simply look at only top-level results.
It is vital that you avoid that temptation.
Multi-location marketing campaigns yield more data and therefore more potential learnings and chances to increase ROI and success rates. With proper analysis, you could discover if a tactic tried by one location was surprisingly effective or if the wording on a particular geo-targeted ad sparked unexpectedly high conversions. These valuable insights can then be used across further suitable locations.
With Esemdee’s powerful reporting capabilities you can easily see how your social media are performing in separate locations so you can easily tweak and adjust campaigns to become more successful. In seeing how your campaigns are performing you can best plan your marketing strategy to target and re-target followers, traffic, and customers. The best growth comes hand in hand with the best analytics and with Esemdee you have exactly that!
