Localized Data: The Key to Unlocking Personalization

Personalization consists of tailoring a service or product to accommodate specific individuals - just think about the ads you’re served on your social media feed. It's more than likely that they're tailored to your interests, browsing, or buying habits. Consumers have become so accustomed to seeing highly personalized marketing that it is now something they’ve come to expect from brands. Gone are the days that your multi-location business can roll out a generic marketing plan with corporate waterfalled content for each of your business locations to leverage. Through personalization, you should speak directly to the wants and needs of your local target audiences, and it's important to note that location also has to be taken into consideration. The way your multi-location business would speak to your target audience in Washington may vary from the way you'd market to consumers in Texas. However, how do you create personalized content at scale for each of your business locations? Localized data can help you craft personalized marketing strategies.

The Importance of Personalization

As mentioned above, consumers have come to expect personalization. If your multi-location business is not personalizing its content, you’re missing out on new sales opportunities. If you need further convincing, the data speaks for itself - localized content receives 12x the engagement as content that is not considered localized. What does this mean? Content that is speaking to its target audience at the local level receives far more engagement than generic, corporate content. Consumers don't want to feel anonymous and will be more likely to purchase from a business they think takes the time and effort to market specifically to them. Data from another study found that 67 percent of respondents said brands must automatically adjust their content based on their current context. So now that you understand the importance of personalization in social content, how can you use your multi-location business's localized data to perfect a personalized and localized marketing strategy?

Personalization and Location: How to Combine the Two

Whether you’re a pro at localization, or you’re just getting started - there are ways you can become even more personalized in your messaging using insights from localized data. However, let’s start with the basics. Your multi-location business should start by ensuring you have all of your local social and search pages claimed. This includes local listings. Your business won't have localized platforms to share personalized content without claiming local pages and local listing first.

Social

Once you've claimed your local social channels and local listings, it's time to start brainstorming your content strategy - let’s get personalized! The first easy tip for weaving personalization into content is considering each business’s location - and ask the local teams about popular events or themes that resonate with their local audiences. If you're in the health and fitness industry and have a business located in San Francisco, you may want to shout out your customers participating in the 10k Across the Bay race. Similarly, if your business is located in Green Bay, Wisconsin, you might want to post about the first day of The Packers football season. Creating personalized content that will resonate with your target audience based on their location is vital. You can empower your local locations to create this type of content by supporting their efforts with calendars of suggested topics, visual templates, and suggested copy. It will help your multi-location business stay relevant and provide the personalization consumers crave. For additional tips on creating a killer content strategy for your multi-location business, check out our Localized Social Content Guide.

However, to do this at scale to fill an entire month’s content calendar for 100s or 1000s of locations - you must incorporate the use of a tool, like SOCi. SOCi's Social Solution also allows your business to discover, create, and share dynamic localized content while maintaining brand consistency at both the enterprise and local levels. Through the use of our dynamic text and patent-pending dynamic image technology, you can deploy a post that will auto-populate with local text and images across all of your locations - enter localization at scale.

Reputation

There are other ways outside of localized content your business can tie personalization into your localized marketing efforts. Take reputation management, for example. Your business is receiving ratings and reviews at the local level. If you're not already managing and responding to these reviews, it's time to start. Personalization is critical when responding to reviews, especially the negative ones. By mentioning the customer's name in your response and addressing the issue they mentioned, you're showing both them and future customers that your business cares enough to respond to their experience. Consumers say they tend to read ten reviews before deciding on a company. Of those who read reviews, 97 percent said they pay attention to the responses business owners and operators write, so responding to reviews in a personalized and timely manner is necessary! While our social tool can help you personalize your content across local social, SOCi Reviews can empower the personalization of review responses, at-scale. Through SOCi, users can view every action taken on reviews and monitor every activity on social media - ensuring personalization at every step. With SOCi’s Smart Responses, our solution uses machine learning to auto-suggest more relevant and personalized responses for your reviews and social engagements. Additionally, local teams can also choose from pre-crafted responses with dynamic text capabilities to automatically personalize individual reactions to each situation.

Where Do I Stack Up?

While it's essential to personalize both your local social and search efforts, it's also important to understand industry standards when it comes to these efforts. This is where our 2021 Localized Marketing Benchmark Report comes in! The report audits 250+ top multi-location brands and quantifies their digital presence and performance, establishing standardized and quantifiable benchmarks. These benchmarks are essential for your multi-location business to be aware of so you can ensure you're meeting or exceeding industry standards. For instance, personalizing your local social content is critical, but if your local businesses are only posting once a month on Facebook, and the industry-standard is 13 times a month, your efforts could still be falling flat.

Start Creating Killer Personalized Content

It's easy to see that personalization is vital if your multi-location business wants to differentiate itself from the competition. Personalization is a sure way for your business to win more sales. Although it takes added time and effort, it's worth the investment. SOCi is also here to help support your business in its personalization and localization journey. For more information on how SOCi can give your business the tools needed to crush its localized marketing goals through personalization, request a demo today!