Succeed at Multi-Location Marketing by Following These 7 Best Practices
When you have multiple locations for your brand, whether they are all within one city or spread throughout the country, it comes with a unique set of marketing challenges.
You need to market each business separately while also marketing your brand as a whole. You need to connect with local customers while also talking to a large, broad audience. And, you need to stretch your marketing budget and resources across multiple stores.
To help you balance this unique set of challenges, we put together a list of best practices to help you maximize your multi-location marketing and find the best return on your efforts.
7 Multi-Location Marketing Best Practices
Use these seven best practices for multi-location marketing to set your campaigns up for success.
#1) Create one central brand guide.
Regardless of whether one person is managing the marketing of all your locations or there is a person responsible for each location -- start by creating a brand guide.
A brand guide outlines the details of your marketing assets and messaging so your efforts always feel cohesive. It sets guidelines so that someone marketing a location in California follows the same branding as someone marketing a location in New York. The brand guide should include:
- Details of logo use and files of current logos
- Font and brand color details
- Description of brand tone and voice
- Key messaging guidelines
- Formats of branded terminology
#2) Create regional marketing guidelines.
Once you create a brand guide, develop sections for each location and/or region within the guide. The brand guide will talk about your brand as a whole. Then, the regional sections should outline unique guidelines for specific areas.
- Create regional personas that describe ideal customers in each location.
- Describe the business location and outline anything different from other locations.
- Include marketing notes about the region, such as list local festivals or events that could be a part of your marketing campaigns.
Related: 6 Regional Marketing Tips for Brands Trying to Tap Into a Local Market
#3) Track marketing data by location.
When running multi-location marketing campaigns, track data and performance on a brand and location level. Keep your data organized by location so you can see how campaigns performed differently based on region.
Having trouble tracking your marketing data? Not sure what to track? Or, how to store your info? Talk to MyArea Network. Our team of data specialists can help you set up a customized solution for managing and tracking data across multiple locations. Request your free consultation today.
#4) Segment your customers by their “home store.”
Organize your list of customers by their location. Assign each customer a “home store” that is the property they are most likely to visit.
Then, when you send text and email marketing campaigns, target customers based on their location. For example, send an email with a coupon for your Tampa location to only customers that live nearby. Or, send a text marketing event reminder to only customers who live near the event location.
Related: How Multi-Location Restaurants Can Use Data to Increase Revenue & Improve Operations
#5) Create a webpage for each location on your website.
When it comes to websites, multi-location marketing doesn’t mean you need to have a website for each of your locations. It only means you need at least one webpage on your site that is dedicated to each location.
Having one page for each location helps customers find the specific information they need about a location. It also helps you market individual locations as you can drive traffic through paid ads or promotions to a specific URL on your main website that includes location-relevant content.
Recommended Reading: How Regional Brands Can Use Location Pages to Boost Local Marketing Efforts
#6) Create online profiles for each location.
While you don’t need a website for each location, you do need business listings and social media profiles for each location of a multi-location business. Each listing and profile acts as a citation for your individual business location which supports a strong local SEO strategy. To build strong local SEO, you need to show the relationship between your business and its surrounding area. Citations help you do that.
Profiles also give customers an easy way to find information that is unique to each location and promote each business on social media by checking in when they visit. Create profiles for each business location on:
- Google My Business
- Yelp
- Angie’s List
Also, create a profile on your local MyArea Site. MyArea Sites are organized by area code. Find the site relevant to your location and create your free profile. This creates a valuable citation for your business all while helping you gain visibility in your community AND giving you access to mySuite -- a free set of local marketing tools.
#7) Use geo-targeting and geo-fencing in your paid ad strategy.
When promoting marketing campaigns for individual locations, you only want to target the customer that are close enough to visit your business. Two location-based marketing strategies can help with that: geo-targeting and geo-fencing.
Geo-targeting uses location targeting within paid ads. You choose which city, neighborhood, or zip code you want to show your ads to. This strategy makes sure you are only reaching audiences that are likely to become customers.
Geo-fencing goes a little deeper. It targets people based on their exact location. Geo-fencing creates a virtual boundary around a certain area and shows ads to people when they move in or out of that boundary. It’s a great strategy for hyper-targeting potential customers around your business or near other locations related to your business.
Recommended Reading: Using Geo-fencing Advertising to Target Customers at Exactly the Right Place
Maximize Your Multi-Location Marketing Efforts
Multi-location marketing can be challenging, but with these tips, your brand should be able to get on the right path to reaching the most customers while getting the most out of your resources.
For more tips on marketing your multi-location business, check out our guide on How Regional Brands Can Use Location Pages To Boost Their Local Marketing Efforts. It explores how multi-location brands can make deeper connections with their local customers.
And for even more advice, reach out to MyArea Network.
We specialize in working with regional brands that want to create a big impact in the communities around their individual locations. We’d love to show you want we can do and how we can help you market your brand across the country using our proprietary set of local Area Sites.
