Marketing ROIs Your Brand’s CEO Will Love

As a multi-location marketer, getting the most out of your marketing efforts should always be top of mind, especially with inflation on the rise. Consumer prices have risen by 9.1 percent from June 2021 to June 2022. This increase in prices emphasizes the need for your business to reevaluate its marketing efforts and consider how to improve your return on investment (ROI). This blog is here to help! We'll dive into tips and tactics your multi-location business can leverage to boost your localized marketing ROI and impress your CEO! Let's get started.

1. Know Your Numbers

While this may seem like common sense, multi-location marketers must understand how each localized marketing initiative performs. If you're not measuring the success and failures of your efforts, how do you know what's working? Before making any adjustments to your current localized marketing strategy, ensure there's a way to measure each marketing tactic’s success. For instance, when it comes to local social media, what engagement rates are you receiving? When looking at reputation management, are all of your business locations responding to reviews promptly? What about the effectiveness of your ad spend? These are all items to consider. It's also important to measure how much you spend on each effort. If your budget is the highest for your social media or reputation management efforts, are they producing the highest ROI? On the other hand, efforts that are performing exceptionally well might need an increase in budget. It is crucial to know your numbers and share them with your CEO monthly or quarterly. Not only will this impress your CEO, but it will also allow you to understand which efforts bring in the most revenue. If you're unsure where your numbers should fall when it comes to different components of your localized marketing strategy, our 2022 Localized Marketing Benchmark Report can help. This comprehensive report shows how localized marketing leaders perform in local search, social, and online reputation management. You can use the averages in this report as a benchmark for your business's marketing efforts.

2. Make Optimizations Based on Performance

Understanding which marketing efforts dominate ROI allows your multi-location business to make optimizations based on performance. While it's great to understand the numbers, it doesn't make a difference unless you make optimizations based on the findings. For instance, if you notice that your local social engagement is falling flat, it's worth testing various types of content to find what boosts engagement. Similarly, suppose one of your business locations is receiving feedback in reviews about long wait times or a lack of responsiveness from your customer service team. In that case, local teams should make adjustments accordingly. Consumers will notice if your multi-location business makes changes to better serve and engage with its customers, which can ultimately impact ROI. Therefore, it’s worth remeasuring your ROI after you’ve implemented changes. Many multi-location marketers get busy and don't take the time to analyze performance and optimize marketing efforts. Analyzing performance and optimizing your marketing efforts can help your business stand out from competitors.

3. Don’t Neglect Your Local Consumers

Consumers crave a local connection. Eighty-nine percent of people search for a local business using their phone at least once a week. Similarly, three out of four consumers say they've discovered a new local offering based on recommendations and posts on social media. If your business isn't tailoring its marketing efforts based on the location it's serving, you're missing out on possible ROI. How you market to a potential customer in Austin, Texas on social media will differ from how you'd speak to a customer in Boston, Massachusetts. Similarly, when managing your online reputation, it's essential to see what local communities are saying about their local business. As mentioned above, feedback from local reviews can help you improve your business model. Creating and optimizing local listings and pages for each of your business locations are also essential. With so many searches linked to something local, your local business must appear in relevant search results. As you can see, adjusting all aspects of your localized marketing strategy based on location and personalization is non-negotiable. If your multi-location business focuses on corporate-first marketing, it's time to start incorporating a local component. Our Ultimate Localized Marketing Template can help. This guide provides you with which local search, social, and reputation management efforts your multi-location business should focus on and includes checklists to guide you through developing your strategy!

4. Leverage A/B Testing

Another vital marketing initiative your multi-location business shouldn't overlook is A/B testing. A/B testing is a way to compare two versions of marketing content to see which performs better, helping your business improve its ROI. With A/B testing, you select a specific variable you want to test while keeping all other variables the same. When getting started with A/B testing, choose pieces of your marketing strategy that need to be improved. You don't want to risk hurting initiatives that are already performing well. For instance, if the open rate of your emails is low, consider testing two different subject lines. Similarly, if engagement on local social media has been lower than you'd like, test the same message with video content vs. a static image. Once you understand what performs best with your local audiences, you can implement those concepts into other aspects of your marketing strategy. CEOs like to feel confident that they're getting the most out of their dollar, and A/B testing is one way to confirm this. For more insight into incorporating A/B testing into your localized marketing strategy, check out our blog on the topic.

5. Consider Consolidating Solutions

It's no secret that CEOs always look for ways to cut costs without cutting quality. Working smarter, not harder, distinguishes industry leaders from the rest. Many multi-location businesses leverage a variety of tools to manage their marketing strategy. One solution may be used for scheduling social media content, while another manages reputation management efforts or local listings. Analyzing how much your business is spending on various marketing platforms is key. Often, consolidating solutions into a single platform that empowers you to manage all localized marketing efforts will save your business time and money in the long run. Even if it doesn't save your business dollars upfront, consolidating your localized marketing solution will save your marketing team time and effort, ultimately helping improve your ROI. Rather than learning a full tech stack, your local teams can learn one platform that they can then leverage for all their localized marketing initiatives. This gives teams more time for creativity in other areas. Analyzing your current tech stack and providing your CEO with consolidation options is a great way to streamline your localized marketing strategy and simultaneously save time and money.

6. Always Be Two Steps Ahead

Staying ahead of the curve and understanding the future of marketing can help your business boost its ROI and stand out from competitors. Many marketers are stuck doing the same A + B = C marketing formula quarter after quarter. While this may keep your ROI consistent, it hinders growth. Thinking outside the box and staying on top of the latest marketing trends is critical. As multi-location marketers, we understand that keeping up with the trends can be challenging. There are always updates and changes with local search and social platforms; it can be difficult to differentiate which news is important and worth adjusting your marketing efforts for. That's where SOCi's Local Memo comes in. The Local Memo is a weekly update that brings you the latest localized marketing news. It's written by Damian Rollison, SOCi's Director of Market Insights, and is released every Monday. The Local Memo prevents you from having to do the digging yourself while also allowing you to keep up with trends and platform updates. To receive the Local Memo in your inbox weekly, subscribe at the end of this blog!

Boost Your ROI and Stand Out from Competitors

Improving your business's ROI is never straightforward; hopefully, this blog helped. Now that you understand what is needed to evaluate and optimize your localized marketing ROI, it's time to start. As mentioned previously, finding a solution that can help you manage your localized marketing efforts from a single login is a great way to improve your ROI, which is where SOCi comes in! SOCi is the marketing platform for multi-location brands. From local listings to local social to reputation management, social advertising, and more, SOCi can help your business manage every aspect of your localized marketing strategy. SOCi also provides your multi-location business with insights and reporting on all aspects of your marketing strategy, allowing you to improve marketing efforts and boost your ROI.

image of multiple devices showing the SOCi platform