June 30, 2022

Localized Marketing Takes Collaboration: How to Get Local and Enterprise Teams on Board

As a multi-location business with 100s or 1,000s of business locations, managing localized marketing efforts at scale is no easy task. Between corporate and local teams, it can be challenging to delegate tasks and ensure everything gets done as efficiently and effectively as possible, making collaboration a must! While your multi-location business might have some tactics where collaboration is already happening between local and corporate teams, there's likely room for improvement. We'll share tips your multi-location business can leverage to collaborate effectively and get the most out of your localized marketing efforts within this blog.

1. Determine a Mission

Before you can start focusing on how to expand collaboration efforts, it's crucial to determine a mission for your corporate and local marketing teams, and your multi-location business as a whole. Often, companies have a mission statement that highlights the purpose of their business. This mission statement ensures that all teams are aligned with the company's goals. Similarly, a mission statement allows teams to work towards a common goal. Suppose both local and corporate team members understand that their purpose is to provide customers with the best possible experience or provide high-quality products and services. In that case, there will be a better understanding of why specific tasks or efforts are required.

2. Set Goals and Tactics for Measuring Success

Once you've covered the mission statement, it's time to get a little more granular and define specific goals. We'll focus on marketing efforts for this blog, but the tips shared can also be used for sales and customer success efforts. As a multi-location business, what are the goals of your marketing team? Are you trying to increase your sales funnel by "X" percent? Do you want to keep customer retention above 90 percent? What about more specific marketing goals? What do you want your engagement rate to be on local social, and how do you want your local businesses to rank for specific, targeted keywords on Google? If you're looking for a starting point on the types of goals your multi-location business should strive to hit, our 2022 Localized Marketing Benchmark Report can help! It provides benchmarks for what leaders in localized marketing are doing to find success in local social, search, and online reputation management.

Deciding on marketing goals before starting a new year, quarter, or month is a must. Goals create accountability and ensure local and corporate teams know what they are responsible for accomplishing. While goals are great, it's also essential to measure the success of the goals. Your multi-location business can measure success in many ways, but it's essential to have a clear plan as to how you're going to track the success of your goals. Regardless of what you choose, finding a way to measure success is non-negotiable.

3. Define Roles and Responsibilities

With 100s or 1,000s of business locations, it's vital to ensure that roles and responsibilities are clear. 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.

The hybrid model is a combination of the two above. Both corporate and individual business locations collaborate to run marketing efforts.

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. If each local business is entirely responsible for its marketing efforts, it can get overwhelming. The hybrid marketing model also promotes collaboration. For instance, let's use local social for an example. While local teams might understand the type of content that will resonate with their local audiences, corporate can provide insight on brand guidelines and tone of voice. As long as everyone is aware of who is responsible for what, you can effectively execute your localized marketing efforts.

4. Foster Frequent Communication

Communication is a critical component of collaboration! It can be challenging to navigate communication between corporate and local teams as a multi-location business.

Below are some ideas your multi-location business can leverage to foster communication:

Leverage a platform where local teams and corporate can leave feedback or comments regarding marketing efforts.

Implement weekly, monthly, or quarterly standing calls between corporate and local teams.

Provide an open-door policy. Ensure that local teams feel comfortable reaching out to corporate with questions regarding localized marketing.

Use a messaging system that allows you to collaborate and communicate with teams all over the country.

Implementing some, if not all of these tactics will allow your multi-location business to have streamlined communication, providing more opportunities for collaboration.

5. Find a Solution That Works for Your Multi-Location Business

One of the last steps your multi-location business must implement to promote collaboration is finding a marketing solution that works for corporate and local teams. Too often, corporate is in charge of choosing a marketing technology (martech) that might not work for local teams. Regardless of who is purchasing the martech solutions for your multi-location business, both corporate and local teams should have input - afterall, adoption and continued utilization of the tool is the true power of martech. 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 martech tools help reduce your team's workload, leaving more time for collaboration, that's not always what ends up happening.

When selecting a martech solution for your multi-location business, ask yourself the following questions:

Can corporate and local teams use this solution?
- If you're striving for collaboration, finding a solution that solves for both use cases is critical.

Does this solution allow me to scale my localized marketing efforts? What are the workflows and automations that can be created?
- Again, if you're spending less time executing your localized marketing strategy, your teams will have more time to collaborate.

Will this solution solve multiple aspects of my localized marketing strategy, or just one?
- The fewer platforms local teams have to learn how to use, the better!

Are there cost benefits associated with a platform?
- Does it make more sense to purchase various martech solutions and train your employees on multiple tools, or have a single solution your marketing team can learn that handles every aspect of your localized marketing strategy?

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 here to help. At the end of this blog, we'll share how SOCi can help your multi-location business crush its localized marketing efforts and foster collaboration.

6. Provide Adequate Training

We'll keep this tip short and sweet! Once you've selected the right marketing solution(s) for your multi-location business, you must ensure that corporate and local teams are trained properly. New team members will continuously be cycled through with 100s or 1,000s of business locations. Each new team member should receive adequate training on the tools your business uses for localized marketing as a part of onboarding. Similarly, your business must provide training on the various aspects of localized marketing. Training will be required if you expect local managers to draft local social content or optimize local listings. The more your teams feel comfortable with their localized marketing efforts, the more time they'll have to get creative and collaborate.

7. Celebrate Success

Another way to ensure that team collaboration thrives is by celebrating successes. As a multi-location marketer, you understand that your teams work hard. If you accomplish a goal or milestone, it should be celebrated! Too often, we reach one goal and set the next without thinking about the accomplishment. Your multi-location business should prioritize celebrating the wins to prevent teams from burning out. Developing an environment where teams can collaborate across 100s or 1,000s of business locations is no easy task. In order to collaborate, your local teams should feel comfortable with the basics of localized marketing. While some of that falls on your multi-location business, SOCi is here to help. SOCi is the marketing platform for multi-location brands. From local social to local listings, reputation management, and more, SOCi has all of the tools your business needs to dominate its localized marketing strategy, all within a single platform. It is the only centralized platform built for multi-location marketers, allowing corporate and local teams to manage localized marketing efforts and ultimately provide more collaboration time!