Digital marketing can be a thorny issue for local franchise brands. On the corporate level, you’re engaged in broad, national campaigns that promote your brand as a whole. At the location level, you need to worry about local marketing efforts.
That means taking a hybrid approach to your digital marketing strategy.
Yet, when you look online for digital marketing best practices, there’s little information on how to balance brand-level and location-level marketing.
Most of the advice you’ll find is focused on one or the other, but there’s little information on how to coordinate corporate campaigns and local marketing to complement one another.
At Qiigo, we specialize in digital marketing campaigns for national brands, so we know a thing or two about the best ways to market your location-level brand online. If you’re in the process of rethinking your digital marketing strategy, here are seven important areas that you’ll want to focus on.
What Location-level Brands Need for Digital Marketing
- Create Unique, Localized SEO Content. If your brand uses boilerplate content for each location’s site, these pages will likely be excluded from search results. Google expects every page on your website to have unique content. When it detects duplicate content, it removes these pages from search results. Effective local SEO for franchise brands, therefore, requires the creation and implementation of unique, localized content for each location’s website.
- Centralize Your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns. The ability to carefully segment your PPC campaigns is just one of the advantages of modern PPC. This has made it much easier, cheaper, and effective for franchise brands to centralize their PPC efforts. Centralized campaigns benefit from the cost-efficiencies of scale, the accuracy of larger data sets, and the cohesion of a unified message. Meanwhile, it’s now easy to customize ads based on users’ locations or to create a market through which franchisees can increase or decrease ad spending in their market.
- Engage in Two-Tier Reputation Management. Reputation management for franchise brands naturally occurs on two levels: the reputation of your brand and the reputation of individual locations. While some companies prefer to focus their corporate efforts purely on their brand-level reputation, it’s often smarter to assist individual locations with reputation management. This can be done by identifying locations with low review counts or middling ratings, then providing them with tools and resources to strengthen their review profiles.
- Local Listings Monitoring & Management. It can be costly and inefficient for individual franchise locations to manage their own local listings. By handling local listings management at the corporate level, multi-location brands can eliminate redundancies and lower the cost of these services. Centralized management also carries other benefits. For example, it ensures business data is consistently structured from one location to the other. And if problems with one location’s data are causing problems for another location, it is much easier to correct this issue.
- Help Locations Win Fans on Social Media. Social media is one area where it can pay to give individual locations control over digital marketing. Franchisees can put a human face on their business and use social media to build a strong community presence. With that said, there’s a lot that brands can do to aid franchisees on social media. For example, brands can provide locations with content to augment their social media feeds, creating a mix of corporate and local content. Brands can also use their corporate accounts to signal boost franchisees’ posts and profiles.
- Target Locally with Programmatic Ads. Programmatic ads — which show users ads based on certain types of user data — are an excellent tool for local marketing. Multi-location brands have an advantage in this field, since they can build and/or acquire large data sets for programmatic targeting. This data can then be used to run centralized campaigns that include localized targeting and customization. Alternatively, it can be provided to franchisees who wish to run independent programmatic campaigns.
- Mobile-Friendly Website Design. Nearly two-thirds of all web traffic now comes from mobile devices, and studies show that most local searches occur on mobile devices. In light of this, it’s crucial that multi-location brands have mobile-friendly websites on both the corporate level and local levels. In particular, it’s important that you have a mobile-friendly store finder — a feature that often has problems on mobile devices.
