Top 4 Multi-Location Marketer Fails and How to Fix Them

Whether you're just getting started as a marketer or you've been in the industry for years, we all experience common issues. Wouldn't it be helpful to see how other multi-location marketers have failed in the past so that you can avoid the same mistakes? While there's no exact formula for marketing, learning from others' mistakes is a good starting point. We'll go through some of the top multi-location marketers' failures and share tactics your multi-location business can use to avoid them. Within this blog, you'll also find tips on improving your localized marketing efforts to help your business dominate its industry and win more sales.

1. I Can't Localize My Social Content At Scale. Won't Each Location Need to Create Its Content to Truly Localize?

A common challenge that many multi-location marketers face is localizing social content across 100s or 1,000s of business locations. You may be thinking, why is local social content even important? Seventy-two percent of user engagement and 66 percent of brand-related impressions happen on Facebook location pages and not on corporate pages. Similarly, localized content receives 12x the engagement rate of content that is not considered localized. While managing local content at scale is difficult, it's worth the effort. Many marketers believe that each location will need to create its own content to localize social efforts, and while that's true to some extent, it doesn't have to be as time-consuming on behalf of the local users as you initially think. There is a difference between local and localized. Local content must be created at each location. However, localized content can be created at the corporate brand level, and through a tool, like SOCi, can be shared, and localized to each individual location. Here is an example of a localized post.

With SOCi, you can easily localize creative, copy, links, and more, and tailor them to speak to each local audience. Localized content is king. So, there is a secret to scaling - take Huntington Learning Center (HLC), for example. When the pandemic hit, HLC had to figure out a way to support students and their families virtually. Huntington Learning Center quickly developed HuntingtonHelps LIVE, an online learning platform designed to provide individualized tutoring and test prep virtually, but needed to leverage local social to get the word out. That's where SOCi came in. Huntington Learning Center utilized SOCi's Social Solution to empower each franchisee to share their new virtual offerings within their unique communities easily.

After leveraging SOCi's Social Solution, Huntington Learning Center saw a 7x increase in their overall post volume across business locations and a 132 percent increase in post engagements. One of the most significant numbers to point out here is the increase in post volume. SOCi's Social Solution is easy to use and enables multi-location businesses to manage and deploy localized content at scale while maintaining brand consistency at both the enterprise and local levels. There's no longer an excuse for falling behind when it comes to local social.

2. I'm Struggling to Get My Local Stores to Focus on Review Management

A frequent theme across multi-location marketers is a concern with how to get buy-in from local stores on localized marketing efforts. One key area of localized marketing that requires adoption from the local locations is online reputation management. While many local business managers understand that a good or bad reputation can make or break the business, they often don't have any experience in online reputation management tactics. Additionally, they are so overwhelmed in the day-to-day tasks of running a business proactively managing their local store’s online reputation is at the end of their list of priorities. While corporate can manage individual locations’ online reputation through a consolidated tool, it is best to get the local teams involved to resolve issues quickly and to get that truly tailored response that customers crave. Ratings and reviews have become not only a top-ranking factor but the number one factor in determining which company a consumer chooses for business. If your multi-location business lets reputation management slip through the cracks, you’re causing major harm to your customer care and business. Aqua-Tots had a similar challenge. Aqua-Tots is one of the largest swim school franchises in the world, with 100+ business locations. While Aqua-Tots has successfully built a trusted brand, they needed to find a way to manage their online reputation while providing prospects with insight into their core values and world-class customer care. By leveraging SOCi's Review Solution, Aqua-Tots has provided their on-site local marketing coordinators with the tools they need to stay connected to their community through social posting and managing their online reputation. Through Aqua-Tots' partnership with SOCi, they saw a 22 percent increase in total reviews across Facebook, Google My Business, and Yelp, along with a 5.5 percent decrease in negative reviews. Most importantly, Aqua-Tots saw that their business location increased their review response rate by 3 percent.

3. Managing Listings Is Taking Up Too Much Time. Which Directories Are Most Important?

Another area many multi-location marketers struggle with is local listings. Do local listings impact my business's visibility on Google? Which directories are most important? How can I ensure all of my 100s or 1000s of local listings are consistently updated and accurate? The short answer -, yes, listings do impact your business's visibility on Google. They also provide consumers with crucial information about your local businesses. However, you need a tool to scale this effort for your business. And when it comes to which directories your business should be focusing on, data from our 2021 Localized Marketing Benchmark Report guides the way.

Facebook, Yelp, and GMB are the three most essential platforms your business should focus on. On average, leaders in localized marketing had 94 percent of their local listings claimed on GMB, 97 percent on Facebook, and 80 percent on Yelp. Your multi-location business should meet or exceed these averages while also keeping all of the information on your local listings accurate. Fogelman Properties struggled with this until meeting SOCi. Within the first six months of using SOCi Listings, Fogelman Properties saw a 51 percent increase in clicks to calls from Google and a 23 percent increase in clicks to website visits. Jeremy Lawson, former Reputation Manager at Fogelman, explained, "SOCi Listings has saved our marketing team countless hours updating the numerous directories we own. It has also helped increase our brand awareness and search optimization by syncing with and adding our communities to additional directories across the web." If your multi-location business faces a similar challenge, SOCi is here to help.

4. It's Difficult to Execute on ALL Areas of Localized Marketing Well

While local search and social each provide their challenges for multi-location marketers, many marketers also struggle with finding time to balance the different areas of localized marketing. With limited time and resources, many marketers wonder where they should spend their time getting the highest return on investment. While the answer looks different for different businesses, finding a solution that can help your multi-location company consolidate its localized marketing efforts makes it so your business doesn't have to pick and choose between marketing efforts. You can have it all (when you consolidate your efforts through a localized marketing tool). Take Anytime Fitness, for example. Anytime Fitness is a health and fitness club franchise with more than 4,000 gyms in 35 countries. Anytime Fitness understood the importance of having a hybrid approach to localized marketing where franchise owners are encouraged to manage their social media presence alongside corporate efforts. Still, they needed a solution that would empower both franchisees and corporate. By teaming up with SOCi, Anytime Fitness found the answer they were looking for. Now, Anytime Fitness can successfully provide franchisees with a tool that is user-friendly and acts as central command for executing their marketing strategy. Since streamlining their franchisees' workflows, Anytime Fitness saw significant changes in the impact of their localized marketing efforts. For instance, in just a few months, Anytime Fitness saw a 150 percent increase in clicks on localized content, and its review response time decreased by 50 percent. Making the switch to a tool that helped consolidate localized marketing efforts helped Anytime Fitness achieve great success, and it could help your business do the same. While SOCi isn't the magic solution to solve all of your problems, we can help with localized marketing. As you can see, many of the most common multi-location marketer fails can be solved with SOCi on hand. SOCi is 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 you crush the competition and become a leader in your industry, request a demo today!