The Hyperlocologist

What Are the Different Multi-Location Marketing Platforms?

Written by Spencer Moody | Sep 30, 2021 7:30:51 PM

Your franchise or multi-location brand is growing, and it’s time to build your marketing tech stack. While there are several companies offering services to help with Multi-Location Marketing, it’s a broad term that covers many areas of marketing, from listings management to paid advertising.

How do you know where to start when building your marketing tech stack?

Let’s take a look at the primary needs of a modern franchise digital marketing team and simplify the three major technology offerings and core capabilities you need to consider when building your multi-location marketing tech stack.

1. Make sure your location data is accurate - Location Listing and Review Management

Local store hours, menus, and contact information for each location need to be accurate across Google, Yelp, and other popular places where consumers search for products or services in their area. Accurate information is the first way to build confidence in your franchise business.

Consumers rely heavily on local reviews before making a decision to purchase - and having a strong rating across the popular search engines, and the ability to manage and take action on positive and negative reviews is critical.

Yext has been a leader in the market for location listing and review management, and newer competitors like Synup and RIO SEO have also emerged.  

2. Get the word out to your followers - Social Media Posts and Scheduling

In the ever-increasing social media world, gaining followers is still an important part of a marketing plan at the local level. People trust what their friends like and share and listen to their opinions on products, places, and services. 

Allowing each of your locations to post social content that is brand safe, and can easily be shared within your existing social networks, is cost-effective. The ability to automate posts with scheduling tools takes much of the hard work out of the picture.

Brands like Sprout Social and SoCi have platforms that help the brand team and individual locations to post social content all in one place.

3. Find new customers wherever they are online - Paid Local Advertising and Local Business Intelligence

 

When it comes time to expand local audiences and attract new customers, brands need sophisticated and data-driven local digital advertising across search, social, display, video, and out-of-home. Traditionally, franchise and multi-location brands have turned to multiple local agencies to help support their individual locations’ digital advertising. 

However, fragmented data and slow adoption by franchisees have been major issues in the past with an agency model. Brands that still deploy DMA targeting for groups of locations have left many locations wondering how their ad contribution is driving ROI for their location(s).  

Hyperlocology helps modern franchise marketers take control of local advertising and set the rules for collaboration with their franchisees - taking care of the hard advertising stuff and providing transparency and new local data in every community. 

Advertising across the most powerful channels with individual location budgets, targeting, messaging, and reporting is made easy with franchise brand advertising funds or local budgets.

We hope this helps jumpstart your thoughts as you build a winning multi-location marketing tech stack. Like we say, technology must empower your local marketing to be Brand Directed, and Locally Perfected.

If you want to take this topic to the next level, read our in-depth guide to Transforming Your Multi-location Digital Advertising from Siloed to Centralized.  No form submission is needed, just click the button below to open!  Enjoy.