Managing local marketing strategies for multiple-location companies can be challenging, even for experienced marketers. Let’s say you’re running a 30-location grocery store in Brisbane. Your store managers are begging you to do a better job of marketing to their local audiences. Here are just a sampling of their complaints:
- A manager of the flower department at one store feels like she can’t compete with the truly local florist who gets intimately involved with the high school at prom time and works with the local card store for Mother’s Day.
- A manager of the produce department at another store doesn’t like the fact that their Asian produce isn’t getting promoted to their substantial Asian population.
- A manager of the pharmacy department at a senior-rich store feels like he’s not effectively promoting senior-friendly products to his local market.
How do you solve these problems? By adopting location-based marketing.
Location-based marketing allows organizations to target consumers at a granular, personal level with online or offline messaging based on their physical location. It is all of the marketing activities you do to help your business be locally relevant to customers within a 1- to 5-mile radius. Location-based marketing requires a lot of effort, but the payoff can be great. It’s all about building relationships, giving back to the community and serving the needs of local customers.
Top4 steps to take for Location-Based Marketing
1. Maximise Google My Business Management for each location
Assuming you’ve set up Google My Business (GMB) for all of your locations:
- Create posts that are particular to each location-based buyer persona. For example, promote sunscreen products for the beach stores, meal kits and other senior-friendly products for the elderly stores, Asian fare for the Asian stores, and to-die-for flower offerings for the stores with local florists.
- Highlight a local employee each month, letting people know that if they come to the store that month and find the promoted employee, they will receive a special gift. This is all about making your local store feel like a living, breathing entity who cares for them and is worthy of being cared for. Think about how you feel about most corporations. They’re big. They’re unfeeling. They only care about their bottom line. Creating relationships locally goes a long way in building loyalty and trust.
- Promote a local school and/or a local vendor. Again, the local relationship is huge. A big corporation isn’t going to take the time to care about a local school. But your local store cares deeply.
- Sponsor a local activity, ideally with other local companies. Perhaps you will support a Little League team or a concert at one of the local wineries. And of course, as part of the sponsorship, include some of your favourite products that you are eager to sell more heavily.
2. Have a Local Online Reputation Management
We all love great reviews. But we know that with great reviews come some not-so-great reviews. Truth be told, the bad reviews aren’t the end of the world. People trust companies much more when they don’t look absolutely perfect. For example, let’s say you’re looking for a new carpet in a local shop, and you see that they have some bad reviews. But when you dig deeper, you notice that most of the bad reviews were due to the wrong product being sent, and the reviewers said that the company handled the mistakes smoothly.
Whether the reviews are bad or good, it’s important for the store manager to respond to all of them (the local person is key here). Corporate should write up positive and negative templates that they use on behalf of their store managers (making sure their store managers see everything) or their store managers use.
If you add your business on Top4, your business will be getting real and verified reviews from other locals just like you! The team monitors and manages all the reviews… so we’ll keep those spammy bad reviews away from your business.
But what if your business isn’t getting enough reviews? Well, our location-based marketing platform Top4 will also add a brand new feature that helps your business receive the reviews you deserve. Here’s a sneak peek of our new feature:
With one easy click, you can import your existing contacts from Gmail and send them emails to ask for your business’ reviews. If you don’t know what to write, we also added a customized message that will help you convey your message!
3. Localise Your Digital Marketing Presence Across Multiple Locations
Create location-specific web pages (company name/location) and social media personas to further help connect local customers with a specific site.
4. Add your business locations to Top4
Top4 location-based marketing platform has helped many businesses manage successful advertising campaigns. It’s a great platform where we use one dashboard to manage all of your social media strategies with focusing on local content, manage your online reputation and ads for your multi-location businesses and franchises. We’re the team that does it all, so you can focus on your multi-location businesses and franchises. Top4 Marketing Platform integrates and works hand-in-hand with Google, Google Maps, and Social Media Platforms to improve and strengthen your businesses online.
To find out how we can help you with your Website + Marketing, using our unique location marketing platform called Top4, get in touch today www.top4marketing.com.au
Looking to build customer loyalty through social media? Don’t forget to add your business to Top4.com.au
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Source: position2