Given that, it’s not surprising that digital marketing has become absolutely critical for your multi-location business.

Still, this raises an important question, “How to provide local customers with personalized and relevant experiences without compromising your corporate brand’s identity?”

Here are a few tips that will answer this question for you.

Create Indexable Location Pages for Each Branch

Some companies decide to let branch owners build separate websites. Let’s take an example of McDonald’s that has individual sites across different countries (mcdonalds.de, mcdonalds.gr, mcdonalds.com.au, mcdonaldsindia.com, etc.). Even though this tactic can increase website visibility in local SERPs, it may compromise your overall brand perception and consistency.

That is why many multi-location businesses decide to create indexable pages for each of their branches. Each page should include location-specific content, customer reviews and testimonials, photos of your offices and staff, local keywords, the exact NAP (name, address, phone number) for each business location.

Unify Multiple Locations into a Single Brand

Consistency is an integral part of any powerful digital marketing strategy. It gives you the opportunity to create a memorable brand presence and increase user experiences, irrespective of the marketing channel they use.

Still, maintaining brand consistency is not easy for multi-location businesses, especially franchises. Let’s take an example of the best franchises to open, such as fast food chains, hotel brands, or postal services. As an owner of a popular franchise, you will need to manage a plethora of business locations, each with an individual owner.

Your goal is to adapt your brand messaging to local audiences. At the same time, you will need to unify these local tactics into a consistent corporate brand that builds trust with audiences.

You want local consumers to recognize your brand every time they see your brand colors, logo, imagery, or ad. Statistics say that 65% of consumers get frustrated when they’re presented with inconsistent experiences across multiple channels.

Here are a few ways to maintain the consistency of your multi-location brand.

• Set a consistent brand personality. This is something that starts at a corporate level. Choose the brand tone of voice that resonates well with your audiences and implement it strategically across all online channels you use.
• Make sure your business’ information like exact address, phone number, maps, and business hours are used consistently online.
• Create a detailed brand style guide for franchisees that will provide them with directions on branding. It should cover every aspect of your strategy, from the size of brand logo on their website to the implementation of brand messaging on their blogs, social accounts, or email newsletters.
• Make sure that your promotions, sales, and discounts are provided across all stores.
• Survey different audience segments to see what they think of your brand image.

Key Aspects of your Digital Marketing Plan

Building a well-designed and cohesive website for your multi-location business is only half the job done. The other half is putting it in front of the right people. There are several key website promotion aspects you should invest in.

Storytelling Makes You Trusted and Authoritative

When crafting your content marketing strategy, map out your customers’ journeys and tailor your tactics to them. For example, infographics and articles are great for visitors that are just getting to know you, while explainer videos and how-to guides could be valuable to your existing customers. To increase blogging and publishing consistency, consider hiring an agency that will handle your content marketing strategy across all business branches.

You shouldn’t forget the role of user-generated content in forming customer perceptions. Encourage user reviews on GMB and social networks and even create dedicated local hashtags for them to use.

Local SEO Helps your Local Pages Appear High in Local Searches

As a franchisor, you need to ensure that each of your business locations appears in front of the right local audience.

For starters, target the right keywords. Here, you don’t need to focus on exact match keywords, as they’ve started losing their relevance over the past few years. Instead, focus on locally-relevant, natural, and long-tail keywords that will meet your consumers’ intent.

With the rise of voice search, customers’ needs have changed. They don’t need to use unnatural phrases like “Nail salons in San Francisco” to find the right information. Mobile searchers want more personalized offers, based on their location. For example, they will look for businesses that are “near them” or that are “open now.” Optimize for such keywords and check whether your address and business hours are accurate.

You need to invest in local off-site SEO, as well. Some of the most powerful practices to implement are:

• Claim Google My Business listings and create solid Facebook pages. These are the major sources of your website traffic. To optimize them to the max, you will need to provide geographical information for your listings, display user reviews and ratings, add website links and integrations, upload photos of each business location, and use built-in integrations like faster reservations.
• Don’t underestimate local business directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages, BBB, or Angie’s List.
• Focus on building authoritative backlinks to your company branches’ pages (or individual websites). Remember, backlinks are a central element of Google’s Local Pack.

Social Media Marketing Fosters Stronger Customer Relationships

Social networks help you humanize your brand and make it more relatable. They give you the opportunity to listen to your local audience, build stronger relationships with them, and foster brand loyalty.

The major problem with multi-location social media marketing is, again, consistency. If you let franchisees build and manage their own pages, then your brand guidelines need to cover each aspect of their social strategy, from rules for communicating with influencers and customers to managing crisis situations.

Paid Search Increases Brand Visibility

SEO is a long-term strategy. As such, it doesn’t deliver immediate results. Therefore, if you want to increase your multi-location business’ visibility faster, PPC is the right addition to your marketing strategy. PPC will not only help you rank at the top of the SERPs, but will also increase brand awareness and boost your conversions.

Still, you shouldn’t create generic ads for each of your business locations. Instead, localize them. Just like with SEO, you should use local keywords to generate qualified leads to your location pages and turn them into qualified leads. You could also pick your negative keywords, based on your local audiences’ behaviors.

Email Marketing Nurtures Leads and Turns them into Paying Customers

As the number of email users is predicted to reach 4.1 billion by 2021, it’s not surprising that email marketing remains the basis of your lead nurturing strategy. Adapt your newsletters to local audiences and, at the same time, keep them on-brand. One of the simplest ways to maintain the consistency of your email newsletters is to create templates for every business’ branch so you can control their use of your brand language and style.

Conclusions

The main idea behind multi-location digital marketing is to provide personalized user experiences across multiple locations without hurting your overall brand presence. Even though these are some fundamental tactics you should apply, you will need to adapt them according to your business’ individual needs. Most importantly, keep testing your locations’ online practices and update them regularly.

The post A Brief Guide to Multi-Location Digital Marketing appeared first on Relevance.

While SEO boosts an online presence in the long-run, PPC gives a competitive advantage to the businesses having a hard time generating traffic from organic search. Therefore, instead of choosing one practice over another, you should understand how they work and integrate them for better results.

SEO may be Slow, but It’s a Long-Term Investment

[bctt tweet=”Optimizing your site for search engines isn’t all about rankings, traffic, and conversions.” username=”relevance”]

If executed strategically, SEO helps you build persistent and authoritative online presence. It boosts your brand exposure on Google, builds trust and credibility among your customers, and positions you as a highly authoritative online resource.

So, if you want to rise above your competition as the industry leader, SEO is your most valuable tool. Unfortunately, its results cannot be seen overnight. It requires taking smaller steps towards reaching greater goals, which includes:

• having a responsive site
• creating high-quality content
• understanding your target audience
• providing impeccable customer support
• earning reputable external links
• building a consistent social media presence

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PPC Drives Instant, but Short-Term Results

The idea behind PPC is simple. Once a user googles keywords you’re targeting, your ad will appear in the sponsored results in the SERPs. And, the major benefit of paid ads lies in the fact that they drive instant results, especially if you’re planning to:

• Boost your website traffic in the SERPs instantly. The moment a PPC campaign is approved, your ad gets displayed to millions to the users conducting relevant searches. And, according to Google, greater exposure drives higher brand awareness.
• Improve sales. PPC lets you put your product placements (the product name, price, photo, and purchase link) in front of the right people.
• Promote a time-sensitive offer. Marketing product launches, events, or new services to your target customers should evoke FOMO (fear of missing out). Precisely because of that, they need to have an explicit expiration date and this is where PPC can help, as it will give your offers the visibility you need in a matter of minutes.
• Stay competitive for your keyword category. Paid ads have a prominent position in the SERPs and attract 41% of clicks. Not investing in them means sending a significant share of traffic to your rivals.

However, unlike SEO, PPC doesn’t drive long-term results. Namely, the moment you stop investing in it, your ad won’t appear in front of your target audience anymore.

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Driving Qualified Traffic vs. Increasing Conversions

An SEO expert Barry Adams tweeted: “So let’s kill this debate once and for all. Organic traffic beats paid traffic for every single metric.”

Organic search is generally more popular among online users and that’s why it drives more traffic. According to MarTech, up to 80% of online users are only focusing on organic search results.

However, it’s not only website traffic, but end results we should observe. And, this is where figures change dramatically, as PPC visitors are 50% more likely to complete a purchase than organic visitors. The famous Pareto Principle can explain this phenomenon- 80% of your business revenue comes from just 20% of your leads.

[bctt tweet=”To boost your sales, you need to get in front of the right people and that’s where PPC shines.” username=”relevance”]

Based on their age range, gender, income bracket, education level, marital status, and location, AdWords lets you target only those people that are relevant to your business and prevent your ad from appearing in front of irrelevant audiences. By narrowing your target audience, you will manage to drive more qualified visitors to your site and guide them down the sales funnel towards making a purchase. This also a great way to control the costs of your PPC campaign.

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Major Price Differences

To build a solid SEO campaign, you need to either hire an agency or build an in-house SEO team and equip them with the right tools to do their job. In the US, the majority of businesses are allocating less than $5000 per month to SEO. Even though investing in your SEO tactics may cost you a penny, the traffic you drive from them is free. This is what we mean by “free organic traffic.”

On the other hand, PPC basically means that you’re going to pay for each click on your ad. Stats show that the average cost per click in AdWords is around $2, while the priciest keywords can exceed $50 per click. Moreover, an average small business spends about $10,000 per month on PPC. It’s also important to mention that PPC isn’t all about the money you invest. When placing your ad, Google uses Ad Rank, combining your CPC bid and your quality score (Google’s metric that tracks your CTR, ad relevance, and landing page quality).

There is no need to observe SEO and PPC as opposing strategies. I always emphasize the importance of combining them to give your online presence a notable boost. Additionally, as your site is the backbone of your online presence, don’t forget to make it responsive, search-friendly, and visually pleasing. Otherwise, a visitor will run away from you without even exploring your offers.

The post SEO vs. PPC: Which is Better for your Marketing Strategy? appeared first on Relevance.

Using just raw data or just your customers’ opinions as your guiding star for content creation would be like using a single leg in a race where all your competitors rely on both – you’ll probably get to the finish line, but definitely not first, and certainly in a great deal of pain. While the premise of blending the two approaches into a single strategy may sound fairly simple, it’s a complex issue most brands fail to achieve. Let’s take a look at how you can use the best of both worlds and turn them into a winning strategy for your brand.

Do your homework on both fronts

You may be an expert when it comes to knowing your brand, but in order for your audience to know and love your business as much as you do, they first need to understand what you do. For that chemistry to happen, you need to know your market, if there is a gap you could fill with a unique value proposition, and how on Earth your top competitors are sitting on their thrones.

Then again, you also need to know your possible customers – not just their age, gender, and problem that needs solving, but their preferred social networks, what sort of language structures and imagery they enjoy, etc. Using different tools to analyze niche-specific keywords is a great start, but analyzing how your actual audience searches for your services is an even better way to refine your content creation.

Focus on engagement

Spewing dozens of posts on your Facebook page every day without striving to engage is a waste of time and creativity. Although an active page is a great way to signal Google and other search engines that your brand is alive, if the type of content you post isn’t getting people chatty, then being liked by Google is pointless. Take a look at the posts that have gathered the most buzz around your brand, and that have inspired the most likes, shares, and comments – the timing and type of content both matter for your target audience, so you’ll get a better understanding of what and when to post.

Striving to get people talking about your brand will naturally increase your website traffic, your conversion rates will grow, and your brand awareness will skyrocket. By building a customer-focused mindset, your data analysis will reflect your efforts to the benefit of your brand.

Step up to the learning curve

As much as you conduct your initial research both of the available data and your audience to craft the perfect content strategy, you need to remember that no approach is set in stone. Market trends change, and so do your customers’ preferences, which means you need to be in the loop with the latest updates you can implement into your strategy.

You wouldn’t target millennials with direct-call marketing, and you wouldn’t target baby boomers via Instagram – but these are just rough ideas in a sea of fine-print that can affect your entire marketing campaigns. Keep organizing surveys, sending email inquiries, and doing data research for the sake of cross-comparison, and you’ll have enough information to adjust your strategy on the go and even expect trend changes before they occur.

Diversify, monitor, analyze, tweak

Even the least-informed of marketers now know that content diversification has become a must-do of every modern brand. Including videos, memes, animations, images, and articles, and always looking for new formats is now a norm, not a marketing exception. Knowing and implementing this is not enough, hence the need to keep an eye on how your efforts are unraveling and if they are making an impact. In the process of analyzing the effect of your content, you needn’t only look at the numbers, but you can go straight to the source and ask your audience.

Use your content to implement call-to-action messages, to ask if they’d like a sequel to a detailed blog post, if they’d like a new topic covered, or if they would enjoy a weekly roundup of your posts. Their feedback is as valuable as the data that tells you how much time each visitor spends on your website and on a particular piece of content.

Rinse and repeat

There is no cookie-cutter solution to win the content race. Your brand is a unique entity that needs an equally unique strategy to be presented consistently to your audience. Bind your data and your audience’s feedback into a flexible  strategy that allows room for change as much as it makes the most of the two sources to deliver quality content.

The post How to Combine Data-Driven and Audience-Focused Content Strategies for Optimum Results appeared first on Relevance.