June 7, 2022

How to Triple the Size of Your Multi-Location Brand’s Marketing Team Without Hiring Anyone

Darcy Bickham

How to Triple the Size of Your Multi-Location Brand's Marketing Team Without Hiring Anyone

As a multi-location marketer, you likely have a lot on your plate. There's a lot to keep up with, from ensuring each business location's reputation management efforts are up to par to maintaining a local social presence across locations. Not to mention local search efforts and other additional tasks you might be responsible for. While a more extensive marketing team might not be in the cards right now, there are other ways your multi-location business can get more work done more efficiently without hiring a single new employee. In this blog, we’ll cover the different types of marketing models your marketing team can leverage, how to find the right marketing technology, and even share a success story!

The Different Types of Marketing Models

We'll assume that you're familiar with the various components that make up a localized marketing strategy for this blog. If that's not the case, take a moment to check out our 2022 Localized Marketing Benchmark Report, which breaks down what top multi-location businesses are doing to dominate localized marketing.

Before we dive into how your multi-location business can accomplish a top-notch marketing strategy without additional employees, let's look at the different types of marketing models multi-location businesses can leverage. There are a few models to execute your localized marketing strategy effectively – centralized, decentralized, or hybrid.

The centralized model is where corporate primarily runs all marketing efforts.
The decentralized model is where individual business locations run all marketing efforts.
Finally, the hybrid model is a combination of the two above. Both corporate and individual business locations collaborate to run marketing efforts.

The Localized Marketing Imperative surveyed many multi-location marketers and found that the most commonly used model by 45 percent was the hybrid approach. It requires seamless coordination and sharing across corporate and local teams, only possible with the right multi-location marketing platform. Whether your multi-location business is experienced in localized marketing or you're just getting started, it's essential to ensure that both corporate and local teams are on the same page regarding which marketing model will be used. If you haven't already tried the hybrid marketing model - it’s the model we recommend selecting as it combines the best of both worlds: the power of local combined with the oversight and support of corporate. Often, local teams can feel overwhelmed if all of the marketing efforts rely solely on them, while if corporate is responsible for everything, it can come off as exactly that - too corporate - and you miss the local connection with your consumers. While splitting up the work is one of the main benefits of leveraging the hybrid model, there are additional perks. Local teams will likely be able to understand their target audience better, while corporate can manage tasks that don't require as much of an emphasis on local. For instance, local teams might have valuable insights on what type of local social content might resonate best with their target audience. At the same time, corporate can be responsible for ensuring everything is within brand guidelines and providing customizable templates and messaging for the local teams to localize. After choosing which marketing model your multi-location business will leverage, you can begin finding a solution that will help save your team both time and money.

Find the Right Marketing Technolog(y)ies

Marketing technology (also known as martech) is a set of software solutions marketers use to support marketing efforts and drive innovation and efficiency. We’re sure your marketing team already has some marketing technologies in place, from a solution that helps you schedule your social content to a tool that allows you to monitor your business's reviews. Although the purpose of martech tools is to help reduce your team's workload, that's not always what ends up happening. It's time to take a hard look at your marketing solutions and understand what's working for your multi-location business and what isn't. If your multi-location business has decided to leverage the hybrid marketing model, there are a few things you should consider when choosing a marketing technology, including:

How many problems or pain points can your marketing technology solve for? Is it a single-point solution or a tool that can handle all of your marketing needs from one place?
If the solution can scale marketing efforts across all of your business locations? This is huge!
Is the martech equipped for local and corporate teams to leverage depending on who is responsible for what?
What is the cost? Does it make more sense to purchase various martech solutions and train your employees on them, or have a single solution your marketing team can learn that handles every aspect of your localized marketing strategy?

As you can imagine, finding a solution that allows you to manage all of your marketing efforts from a single platform, at scale, with the ability for both local and corporate oversight, might seem impossible, but it's not! SOCi is the marketing platform for multi-location brands and has everything multi-location marketers need to dominate their localized marketing efforts at scale, all from a single login.

A Look into Ace Hardware's Success

We'll get more into how SOCi can help your multi-location business consolidate its marketing efforts making it feel like you've tripled your team, but first, let's look into how SOCi helped Ace Hardware. Before leveraging SOCi, inconsistency was a significant challenge for Ace due to the independent management of every social page connected to its more than 4,000 domestic locations. To top it off, 25% of those social pages remained unclaimed – leading to rogue and sometimes damaging content. But the real challenge lay in finding the right tool and partner to help local retailers manage their social media and online reputation when their own experience ranged from novice to expert. After partnering with SOCi, Ace Hardware was able to protect and grow their grand while increasing local sales. And enhance retailer understanding and participation in top social and reputation management efforts, all without hiring a single employee! The results were impressive.

A few months after partnering with SOCi, Ace Hardware saw:

More than one million followers generated
500+ new reviews per week
Seven times the engagement as they had before using SOCi
A four-star average rating across business locations
100+ new retailers leveraging the platform each month

Ace is a prime example of a large multi-location business that improved many aspects of its localized marketing efforts without adding any new team members. Many would argue that SOCi reduced some of marketing's workload.

Get Started Dominating Your Localized Marketing Efforts

It's time for your multi-location business to start achieving the same success. There's no longer an excuse that your multi-location business doesn't have the time and resources to execute a winning localized marketing strategy. SOCi is here to help!

image of multiple devices showing the SOCi platform

From local social to local search, online reputation management, local social, and more, SOCi has you covered. It's time to level up your business's localized marketing efforts and take some of the pressure off your marketing team. Request a demo today for more insight into how SOCi can help your multi-location business crush the competition!