Stanley Steemer Leverages Local Boosting to Strengthen Online Visibility

With over 2.8 billion active users per month, Facebook remains the most prominent online social platform. As multi-location marketers, having a robust local presence on Facebook is a must. While organic posting is cost-effective, it can't compare with local boosting's mass reach and engagement power on this key platform. Within this blog, we'll dive into the importance of local boosting and how a huge franchise brand, Stanley Steemer, was able to leverage boosting to take its localized marketing strategy to the next level. Read on for a recap of a recent webinar with Stanley Steemer. You'll also get exclusive tips on how to incorporate local boosting into your local social efforts.

Local Boosting: What Is It and Why Does It Matter?

A boosted post is simply an existing organic social post that you pay to have distributed or seen by a larger and more targeted audience. While you can boost posts on various social platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, when we refer to boosting posts in this blog, we'll be referring to Facebook specifically. When you boost a post, it will still appear in your audience's Facebook newsfeed and say "sponsored" on the post. While both boosted posts and ads say sponsored on Facebook, boosting a post is a much more manageable form of advertising. Ad campaigns take a lot longer to set up, provide more ad placement options, and have an expanded list of ad objectives. When looking at boosted content vs. ad campaigns, various benefits come with both ad types. However, with boosting,, you can deploy a boosted post within seconds, allowing you to quickly reach more of the right people. Local boosting will enable you to extend your reach and access analytics so you can track the effectiveness of your boosted posts. If you're still not convinced of the power of local boosting, Stanley Steemer's experience with local boosting may help.

How Stanley Steemer Incorporated Local Boosting

When looking at brand engagements, three out of four happen at the local page level, not at the national level. Before deciding to revamp their local social efforts, Stanley Steemer created social content from the corporate level that would trickle down to its local social pages. Once Stanley Steemer realized the value in localized content, they adjusted their local social efforts and found that local content immediately resonated with their target audience. Stanley Steemer's localized content received five times the engagement when compared to general corporate content. After seeing how well local content performed, Stanley Steemer decided to test local boosting as well. Boosting posts at the local level empowered Stanley Steemer to reach more of their target audience with a relatively small budget. In one specific case, a Stanley Steemer location in Knoxville, Tennessee had a reach of 20 pre-boosting. After Stanley Steemer boosted the post, the reach expanded to 10,513. On average, when boosting, the reach increased by 200x the amount of non-boosted content, and engagement increased by 13x. Stanley Steemer plans to continue with local boosting to expand their reach further and increase online visibility.

Stanley Steemer's Tips for Local Boosting

Since Stanley Steemer's local boosting efforts were so successful, they came up with a list of tips for other multi-location marketers to use when leveraging local boosting. Some of the essential tips Stanley Steemer provided in the webinar include:

Setting up multiple tests when boosting to see what works and what doesn't. Is there a specific type of content that works best? What time of day or day of the week gets the most extensive reach and engagement? These are factors you can track with testing.
Giving yourself time to build audiences. Think about who your business is trying to reach with local boosting, and set your targeting accordingly.
Setting clear goals and reporting requirements. Before boosting posts, determine what you would consider successful and develop ways to track the success of your boosted posts.
Capturing and creating engaging local content that can be used for boosted posts. If you don't have interesting local content, you won't have anything to promote in the first place.

It's also crucial for multi-location businesses to educate their local marketing teams on the importance of local boosting. If all of your business locations are on board, the payoff will be worth the effort.

Get Started on Your Local Boosting Journey

Now that you understand the impact local boosting can have on your social strategy, it's time to get started. If your multi-location business has already begun using local boosting, good for you! Try some of the tips mentioned above to see if you can improve your local boosting reach and engagement. If your multi-location business hasn't tested local boosting, now is the time to start. While boosting across 100s or 1,000s of business locations can be nearly impossible, SOCi is here to help you scale. SOCi's Ads solution empowers you to boost unlimited, custom social posts for multiple pages in less than 30 seconds. SOCi Ads PLUS also provides flexibility in how you fund your boost campaigns. Choose to evenly distribute your social boosting budget across all of your locations or customize the spend for each post, all through one centralized tool. Stanley Steemer uses SOCi for their local boosting efforts and found that it's easy to use for all of their business locations.

If your multi-location business is looking for other ways to strengthen your local social efforts, SOCi's Social solution can provide extra support. SOCi's Social solution enables multi-location companies to manage and deploy localized content at scale while maintaining brand consistency at both the enterprise and local levels. With SOCi's Social solution, you can easily create the localized content your multi-location business needs for local boosting. For more information on how SOCi can help you level up your local social efforts and other aspects of your localized marketing strategy, request a demo today!