December 7, 2020

How Multi-Location Businesses Can Leverage Localized Intelligence Effectively

Localized intelligence and social listening give multi-location businesses the ability to surface and gain insight into critical conversations about their brand. It empowers companies to serve customers better, gather business insights, and gain advantages over their local competitors. It’s time for your multi-location business to utilize social listening and other forms of localized intelligence to gain a leg up on your competition. Throughout this blog, we'll explain how your multi-location business can effectively leverage localized intelligence to improve localized marketing efforts. From listening to market trends and the conversations around your competitors to executing social listening at the local level for your brand, we have a lot of tips to take your strategy to the next level.

Execute Social Listening at the Local Level

Social listening occurs when you track your social media platforms for mentions and conversations related to your brand. You then can then turn these insights into action. To stay on top of the conversations happening around your multi-location business, social listening at the local level is a must. While you may already be tracking these conversations at the brand level, they can vary at the local level. For instance, are there conversations about how difficult parking is at one of your San Diego locations? Are consumers excited about the new renovation at your store location in New York? With the help of social listening, your multi-location business will be able to find patterns and trends in consumer behavior, better understand the sentiment surrounding your business, find areas of opportunity, and more. Without social listening, these conversations could be happening off your main social pages, and you would miss them. You can then use the conversations and information found from social listening to inform your localized marketing efforts. Is there any room for improvement? How can your multi-location business leverage what consumers are already excited about and make it better? Can you leverage other location’s successes or learn from their failures? If you're listening to conversations around your multi-location business and not making any changes, then what's the point? It's essential to develop a tactical plan on how to use the information you received through social listening and crush your localized marketing efforts.

Optimize Social Selling Opportunities

One of the areas your multi-location business can leverage social listening insights is through social selling. Social selling is a new approach to selling that allows your sales team to communicate with potential leads through social media directly. Through social listening, your multi-location business can identify new leads and prospects and pass that information to your sales team. Social listening also gives you insight into where the conversation is happening around your multi-location business. If there are certain Facebook groups that converse about your business, or a comment thread about your business, through social listening, you can become aware of these conversations and have your sales team jump in and see if there are potential leads. Social selling allows your sales team to laser target prospects, and social listening can help you find these prospects. One of the main goals of any marketing tactic is to increase sales, and social listening can help you do precisely this.

Strengthen Your Reputation Through Social Listening

As you would expect, social listening will give you a pretty good idea of where your business's reputation stands. When starting to analyze your reputation using the insights social listening provides, the first thing you should do is make a list of the negative things mentioned frequently. Is there any opportunity to improve in any of these areas? Can any of these negative conversations be avoided through proactive measures? If so, make these areas a top priority. While you should make improvements where consumers have expressed concerns or dissatisfaction, there are other ways to improve your reputation through social listening. For instance, through social listening, you can begin to form yourself as a leader in your industry. In the conversations, have there been any other businesses mentioned? If so, there might be an opportunity to form a partnership with these companies if they're not a direct competitor. Partnering with other businesses in the industry can boost your visibility and strengthen your reputation. Similarly, you can use social listening insights to look at what people feel they are missing in your industry. This allows you to be the first business to fill that void, again boosting your reputation. As multi-location marketers, we all want the best reputation, and social listening can help ensure that you build and maintain a strong reputation

Implement Social Listening For Competitors

When focusing on competitive analysis, multi-location businesses can learn valuable information about their competitors and differentiate themselves within one easy-to-manage dashboard. With social listening, businesses can search, monitor, and benchmark themselves against local competitors on public social pages. While you can keep an eye on your competitors' engagement, it's also essential to see what type of engagement occurs. Engagement and sentiment insights complement each other nicely -- if one of your competitors begins to receive huge spikes in engagements, before social listening, you would have little insight into why. When you add sentiment analysis into the mix, we begin to better understand whether this spike results from something positive or negative. Perhaps they encountered a PR nightmare, and now they're trending on Twitter. Sentiment provides a valuable piece of the puzzle and allows you to understand the context behind engagement spikes. Monitoring your competitors through social listening allows you to understand where your multi-location business is succeeding and where there's room to improve. It also provides you with an opportunity to avoid mistakes that other companies have made and potentially make improvements in areas where your competitors succeed. This competitive insight is critical when it comes to building an effective localized marketing strategy.

Monitor Market Trends

Does your multi-location business know what keywords are experiencing a huge surge in popularity in your space? If you are aware, you can utilize these trending topics to learn what's peaking customer interest and take advantage of the current conversation. This will help build your expertise in your industry, which is a key component of EAT, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, which are all necessary to boost your multi-location business’s local SEO. For instance, if you're in the fitness industry and see that everyone is talking about a new type of high-intensity workout, you can use this knowledge to your benefit. Whether you add this new type of activity to your gym, post about it on your local social channels, or respond to other conversations about this workout, it will make your multi-location business seem relevant. Similarly, suppose there's a negative conversation happening online about a specific product that you carry in your store. In that case, you can re-evaluate whether or not you want to keep that product. Monitoring market trends allows your multi-location business to stay on top of the latest conversations happening in your industry and avoid negativity. If your multi-location business isn't already utilizing localized intelligence to monitor market trends, it's time to start. Now that you're aware of the benefits of utilizing localized intelligence, there's no going back. Localized intelligence can provide critical insights into your business that you would have otherwise missed. Finding a tool that can help you listen to the conversation surrounding your brand, along with market trends and competitors, can be difficult, but SOCi is here to help! SOCi has a soon to be released listening tool. Through this tool, you'll be able to discover what local consumers are saying about your locations and competitors, plus activate local engagement across all business locations with localized listening capabilities, sentiment analysis, and user-generated content. SOCi uses natural language processing and machine learning to interpret and classify emotions throughout social pages. This allows businesses to organize customer engagements as positive, negative, or neutral, providing better insight into the customer experience. If this isn't enough, SOCi is also the central command for multi-location marketers and the all-in-one platform for your localized marketing needs. For more information on how SOCi can help your multi-location business leverage social listening, and develop a winning localized marketing strategy, request a demo today!