Best Marketing Strategies for Multi-Location Businesses

woman in a coffee shop

Running a multi-location business can expand your customer base and increase your profit margin massively. However, these benefits come with marketing challenges. For example, you’ll have to market each business separately to tailor your products to the needs of a local customer. This personalization may increase marketing expenses. Because multi-location business marketing has unique challenges, you might be asking yourself the following questions: 

  • What marketing strategies work for a business with multiple locations? 
  • How can a multi-location business personalize its marketing techniques without compromising the brand identity? 
  • What marketing tactics should you use to boost sales and reduce costs significantly? 

This guide will walk you through the best marketing practices for multi-location businesses to help you answer the questions above. We’ll cover all you need to know about marketing strategies when you run multiple businesses, including how to:

But first, let’s start with the basics.

What is Multi-Location Marketing? 

It’s a location-based promotion strategy for various business branches or franchises of the same brand but in different locations. Multi-location marketing aims at tailoring your promotion techniques to the needs of a local customer in each business location. This kind of marketing thrives in online platforms since the world embraces digitalization. 

That said, below are the multi-location marketing strategies that help you harness the full power of techniques like using a digital ad creative. As a result, you’ll build a targeted campaign that connects with the local audience without hurting your general brand identity. 

Top Marketing Strategies for Multi-Location Businesses

1. Create a Central Brand Guide

A central brand guide helps you remain consistent. It ensures that a marketing team in location A follows similar branding rules as location B to avoid contradictions that may hurt the general brand. 

If you run a franchise with one or more locations, your overall organization likely already has a brand guide. In most cases, you’ll have to follow their guidelines, and what you can do, depends on the brand. 

Here’s what is usually included in a central brand guide: 

  • Logo details that every business as a part of your brand must use in marketing
  • The voice and description of the general brand
  • Formats of crucial brand terminologies
  • Brand colors, fonts, and messaging guidelines

2. Segment Your Audience

Split your customer list location-wise, assigning each person your brand’s business store they’ll likely visit. As a result, you’ll create a targeted marketing campaign that addresses a specific customer’s needs and boosts sales in your business, usually known as people-based marketing. 

You have dozens of options when looking for audience segmentation tools, like customer relationship management (CRM) software programs. Just ensure you choose the software that meets the needs of your multi-location business. 

3. Monitor Marketing Data by Location 

You need to monitor performance analytics and reports at a location level. That way, you’ll access region-based insights to help you make meaningful marketing decisions that drive the results you desire. 

Similar to segmentation software programs, you have many choices when looking for analytics tools that track the geographical distribution of your audience.

Using location targeting allows you to choose the geographical locations you want your ads to appear. For example, you get to pick geo-locations like countries, regions within a nation, and a radius near a place where your audience is most likely to find you. 

Geo-targeting makes your paid ads efficient by making it easy for customers to find your nearby physical store online. For this reason, geo-targeting helps you boost traffic in your business. 

Here’s a quick overview of setting up paid ads for multiple business locations: 

  • Step 1: Create different keywords for each location you’re targeting (e.g., “Restaurants near Prairie Village in Kansas City,” “Restaurants in Brooklyn, NewYork)
  • Step 2: Use Google Ads to set up marketing campaigns for each location you’re targeting. Once you’ve set up the campaign, you can edit the locations on the tool when necessary to avoid overlap and cross-bidding. 

5. Use Location-Specific Web Pages on Your Site

In this multi-location marketing strategy, you create at least one webpage for each location you’ve established your brand. Location-specific web pages ensure potential customers can find precise details concerning your business’ location. 

6. Incorporate Text Message Marketing in Your Campaign

SMS marketing is reliable because of two main reasons. First, competition is relatively low, unlike in email marketing. As a result, it increases the open rates of your marketing message. Second, text message marketing takes personalization to the next level by presenting offers direct to customers’ inboxes. 

So, whether you’re setting up a franchise marketing campaign or promotion strategy for various business branches, SMS marketing can help you achieve your goals fast, and can be a core component of a loyalty program strategy.  

7. Leverage Online Reviews

Customer reviews are powerful in marketing. Including positive reviews on your site help you build a good reputation that attracts new customers. Such testimonials are persuasive since they inform prospects of the real value proposition of your business. 

On the other hand, you can respond to negative online reviews on social media to deal with brand objections. This tactic will help you remove obstacles in a buyer’s journey and boost sales in your business. 

8. Implement Hyperlocal Programmatic Campaigns

A good multi-location marketing strategy almost always includes some component of programmatic advertising. 

Since programmatic advertising allows you to work with multiple digital publishers at once. Instead of creating manual insertion orders and campaigns with each publisher, you’re able to create streamlined hyperlocal campaigns in days instead of months. 

Today’s programmatic campaigns are incredibly effective and give businesses more control over their budget, ad creative, and targeting at the local level.  

However, with all the other functions that business owners manage, it is not easy to also manage programmatic advertising. It still takes time to set up and monitor results. 

In our experience, most people with multiple business locations don’t have the desire or time to do so. In the end, it saves more time and money to outsource programmatic advertising. 

9. Incorporate Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a crucial factor you need to consider when creating web content. SEO helps you increase your visibility on the Internet so that prospects can find you easily. One way to include SEO in your campaign is to use relevant keywords in promotional content. For example, combine the products (or services) you offer with your business location (e.g., Plumbing services in Charleston, South Carolina). 

10. Use Location-Specific Email Marketing

Email marketing is increasingly becoming one of the best local marketing techniques. The reason is that technology gives marketers powerful email segmentation tools to target specific prospects. For instance, these tools allow you to split your audience depending on their location, interaction with your business, and position in the sales funnel. As a result, you can tailor your campaign to the local audience’s needs.

11.  Leverage Local Directories

Local directories like Yelp, Facebook Pages, and Google My Business will make your organization pop up online when people search for businesses like yours near them. Therefore, update your contacts and business locations to help you get more customers. 

How is Marketing Different for Multi-Location Businesses? 

Marketing a multi-location business is different from promoting a single location business because you must consider many factors, including: 

  • Whether all the stores are selling similar services or products
  • You must consider the offers that are only available in specific locations. 
  • The specific areas you’ve established each brand: interstate, nationwide, or worldwide? 

After considering these factors, you’ll have to create marketing strategies for each business location to appeal to local buyers. In short, marketing a multi-location business doesn’t involve a single marketing strategy. Instead, you need to treat each business location as a single entity without hurting the brand identity of the general organization. 

At Goodway Group, we have what it takes to offer seamless marketing strategies for multi-location businesses. With a reliable remote workforce nationwide and worldwide, you get 100% in-house marketing services to help take your business to the next level. Our 15 years of experience is solid proof that you can trust us to handle your marketing needs the right way. Contact us today to work together and create a marketing plan that drives sales in your business.