Creating a successful marketing strategy for a multilocation business requires a unique approach. Whether you're a large retailer with thousands of locations across the country or a franchise spanning multiple geographic regions, there are several challenges you may face. Your marketing strategy must create a personalized, relevant experience for local customers while also appealing to a large, broad audience to truly make an impact.
An effective multilocation marketing strategy will help you keep your messaging on-brand, increase opportunities to connect with customers and ensure that each location gets the appropriate attention. The following guide looks into multilocation marketing and the five most essential elements of a successful multilocation marketing strategy.
What Is Multilocation Marketing?
Multilocation marketing is a promotional strategy designed to help multilocation businesses cater to each branch's local customers while ensuring that all marketing adheres to overarching brand guidelines. This may include a mix of digital and traditional marketing strategies designed to promote the business, generate new leads, and close more sales.
What Is a Multilocation Business?
The term "multilocation business" may refer to one of two different types of structures:
1. An enterprise business or corporate office with multiple franchise locations or
2. A single small business with multiple physical locations
Regardless of which structure your business falls into, a well-planned-out multilocation business marketing strategy can improve efficiency, lower costs, and increase the return on investment (ROI) associated with your marketing efforts. Working with a single multilocation marketing agency and managing all locations under one comprehensive location marketing platform can save time and money while improving your overall results. Ultimately, the right multilocation marketing strategy will enhance your overall brand engagement and bring more sales to each of your locations.
5 Elements of a Successful Multilocation Marketing Strategy
Successful multilocation businesses need to create a scalable, on-brand strategy that empowers local teams to engage customers on a personal level while also maintaining your brand's integrity. While the ideal plan can vary from one brand to the next, there are a few things most successful strategies have in common.
1. Coordinated Marketing Plan
When creating your multilocation marketing strategy, it's crucial to establish who will be responsible for developing the marketing plan and creating necessary materials early on. You may decide to handle all marketing at the corporate level and distribute it to each location or give each location the autonomy to create its strategy and materials.
Whichever you decide, make sure the responsible parties plan and develop an editorial calendar. This will help capture opportunities surrounding upcoming holidays, planned promotions, and other timely events. By reviewing each location's calendar ahead of time, you can easily supervise their marketing plans and adhere to your brand guidelines.
2. Clear Brand Guidelines
Whether you centralize your marketing or provide more autonomy, it's critical to have one central brand guideline. This should include your brand logo, colors, font styles, permitted imagery for digital marketing campaigns, and printed promotional materials.
It's also vital to provide standards for representing your brand on social media. If you want to ensure even more consistency, you can take things a step further by providing a summary of your key messaging points and a description of your brand tone and voice.
3. Community Engagement
If you want your business to be well-known in your community, you need to get involved. There are many ways to get your name out there and make an impression, from offering demonstrations or free trials at local events to coordinating local social media giveaway contests. You may also consider sponsoring a sports team in your community, donating raffle items for local fundraisers, or simply reaching out to area organizations and asking how you can help.
Each location manager is likely to have a better understanding of the needs of their community, so it's often best to give them the freedom to choose which events and causes to support. If you want more control, you can always require final approval before allowing them to commit.
4. Local SEO
One of the keys to a successful multilocation marketing strategy is optimizing local business marketing solutions. For many, this begins with creating or claiming a Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) for each location.
Creating a custom website for each location or adding individual location landing pages to a centralized site will benefit you. It will improve your local SEO and increase the chances that your page or site will show up when a user conducts a local search, such as "gym near me." Ensure the page or site includes your business name, address, and phone number for further optimization. Also, consider adding a map or "get directions" link to make it easier for potential customers to find the location they're looking for.
5. Segmentation and Automation
Tracking your data and performance both for the overall brand and for each location will also help improve the results of your multilocation marketing strategy. Using a location marketing tool will allow you to quickly and easily see how each campaign performs by region.
You'll also want to segment your customers by their "home store." Combining this type of segmentation with a specialized sales app will allow you to automatically set up email marketing or SMS message campaigns so you can provide special location-based offers to the appropriate customer or prospects. As you gather more data, you can also segment your contacts by customer needs, further narrowing down your marketing efforts and allowing you to consistently get the right messaging in front of the appropriate audience.
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