Enterprise multi-location marketing: best practices and strategies

People turn to the internet to find what they need—and they enjoy the convenience of being able to make the purchase close to home. That’s what makes local marketing so important. In fact, in 2022, 98% of consumers used the internet to find local business information, up from 90% in 2019.

Local marketing for small businesses is one thing. But what if you’re a national brand overseeing dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of different individual locations?

That’s where you’ll need a strong enterprise multi-location marketing strategy. This type of strategy will help you keep a cohesive brand image across all locations while giving you the tools to leverage regional differences so that you can reach diverse audiences.

What is multi-location marketing?

Multi-location marketing is a location-based promotion strategy that enterprises use to promote various locations from the same brand—but in different locations. Rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all marketing campaign, multi-location marketing relies on tailored promotional techniques based on the needs of local customers in each individual location.

How does multi-location marketing differ from single-location marketing?

On the surface, the answer to this question might seem simple: Single-location marketing relies on strategies to promote a single business location, whereas multi-location marketing is a cohesive strategy that allows you to market in multiple locations. However, there are a lot of behind-the-scenes considerations that go into multi-location marketing strategies.

Let’s look at a housekeeping business as an example. In terms of marketing, a single local small business only really needs to worry about marketing to the people within their geographical area. If they’ve done their market research, then the owners know the types of homes that they’ll be contracted to clean and the types of services that people in the area need most. They’ve likely also discovered the types of advertising and promotions that get the most attention.

But what about a national housekeeping service? Here, everything changes from one location to the next. You’ll still need to align with your larger brand marketing strategy for consistency, but you’ll also need to rely on local marketing to reach consumers where they live, adjusting each location’s individualized strategy to account for regional differences. For example, people in one area may be more active on one particular social media platform—and thus, more likely to see ads on that platform—whereas a different social media platform may be more popular in another area.

This is seen across all industries. Things like popular sporting teams will differ from place to place, which will affect sports-related cross promotions. In addition, people in one region may prefer country music, which makes cross-promotions with top country stars super effective for those areas — but not so much in other areas where hip hop or pop is the top genre. Even the weather is something to think about. A “snow day special” in Michigan wouldn’t have the same impact in Florida.

Both single-location and enterprise multi-location marketing strategies unite under one umbrella, which is the brand’s overall voice and messaging. The key difference is that multi-location marketing needs to stay under that umbrella while also accounting for a multitude of regional variances.

What are the benefits of enterprise multi-location marketing?

For brands that have stores in multiple locations, multi-location marketing comes with a few must-have benefits compared to more traditional centralized marketing campaigns. Let’s explore some of the top advantages.

Improved reach and brand awareness

The largest, most obvious benefits of multi-location marketing are increased reach and brand awareness. Centralized marketing campaigns cast a broad net. Due to regional differences, this can lead to messaging that has a big impact in some areas, and next to no impact at all in other areas.

Multi-location marketing gives you the ability to sidestep this issue and ensure that your message is getting attention in each of your target markets.

Cost efficacy

According to the Fall 2023 CMO Survey by Deloitte, companies spent on average 10.6% of their total revenue on marketing. That’s a big chunk of money to spend on marketing.

Now, consider the idea that broad national or international marketing campaigns may not reach consumers in certain regions. Brands interested in making the most of their 10.6% marketing spend can generate a better ROI with local targeted campaigns. By targeting at the local level, you can reach a more targeted customer base and bring in more sales on the same budget.

Insights into consumer behavior

Enterprise multi-location marketing gives you a much better understanding of consumer behavior, and your marketing teams can leverage this knowledge to produce effective campaigns that are highly targeted toward smaller segments of potential customers.

These insights can help you improve the way your business runs in other ways too. For example, if you’re a major clothing brand, then you’ve probably learned that in warm coastal areas, items like sandals and breezy outfits market better. Meanwhile, people in colder regions may buy these items for summertime—but they’ll also be interested in cozy winter sweaters too. This is information you can use to adjust stock levels according to what each region is likely to purchase.

More competitive SEO rankings

Digital marketing is a huge component of modern advertising campaigns—and search engine optimization is a major component of digital marketing. However, the problem with SEO is that in today’s competitive landscape, it often proves difficult to snag Google’s top rankings in generalized, non-region-specific searches.

With local SEO, it becomes easier to cut through the noise. Instead of trying to rank for a national audience, you can adjust your messaging to target the local level, helping you get in front of customers who are looking for businesses in their area.

Improved relevancy, customer experiences, and loyalty

Multi-location marketing improves every aspect of the customer’s interaction with a brand. These campaigns rely on tailored content marketing that suits the tastes and needs of customers in a given region, which leads to a high degree of relevancy.

Relevant content improves customer experiences in a variety of ways. It reveals new offers, products, or events that may interest customers, shows them how products solve their particular pain points, and helps them build a personal sense of connection to the brand. Ultimately, this can lead to higher customer loyalty—and loyal customers are the ones who will keep coming back to make new purchases.

Home Depot is a great example of a brand that does this kind of marketing well. Their website offers relevancy through recommendations based on shopping history and location, which means shoppers are likely to see snow blowers in the winter and gardening tools in the spring.

They also founded the Home Depot Foundation to provide assistance for veterans and communities affected by natural disasters—and that helps build authentic connection and loyalty between communities and the brand.

Enterprise multi-location marketing: challenges and best practices to overcome them

It’s time to learn how to give your multi-location marketing efforts a boost. Let’s discuss a few challenges—and the best practices that will help you overcome them.

1. The challenge: understanding local market differences

As mentioned, different locations will have different sets of needs and preferences—and you’ll need to understand these differences to learn how customers will behave in each region.

Best practice: Study consumer behavior to understand local market differences

Do research for each of your target regions to understand how customer behavior differs from place to place.

Once you’ve done the research, create customer segments specific to each region, and include information that you’ve gathered about local needs and preferences. Leverage tools like Yelp Audiences to not only design and strategically place ads but to also create audience segments based on Yelp search activity, page visits, and other factors.

Then you can adjust your local marketing efforts to reach these customers.

2. The challenge: ensuring brand consistency

With different locations all relying on slightly different marketing strategies to suit their unique local audiences, it can be tough to maintain the consistency of your brand voice across all locations.

Best practice: Create a centralized marketing strategy

Above all else, your overall brand message and voice should be unified through a centralized marketing strategy that keeps multiple locations on-brand. It’s true that different strategies will work better in some areas, and some areas will prefer different products—but messaging and branding should consistently represent who you are and the value that you offer to customers.

Start by creating a marketing playbook. It should outline the key goals and objectives for your marketing plan, top content channels to use, information about key brand messaging, standard processes and workflows for marketing teams, and other details designed to keep everyone on the same page.

Along with this, be sure to distribute information about the types of things that need to stay consistent across locations—everything including logos, colors and design elements, and the overarching brand voice.

3. The challenge: improving performance across multiple locations

Marketing performance may lag at one or more locations while others perform extremely well. The challenge is figuring out what causes these differences.

Best practice: Continuously monitor and analyze each location’s marketing efforts

All marketing campaigns benefit from continuous monitoring. Analyzing each individual strategy or approach will tell you which are most effective among your target audience.

Just as important, this analysis should include analytics for each specific location. Through this data, you’ll discover what works and what doesn’t for each location—and you’ll be able to improve performance over time.

4. The challenge: communication breakdowns

One of the biggest challenges—and keys to success—for multi-location brands is communication. Creating a cohesive brand identity not only requires a centralized marketing strategy but also strong communication between headquarters and each of your locations.

Best practice: Create strong lines of communication between headquarters and locations

It’s not enough to simply send out brand guidelines to each location. Instead, work with locations to make sure they understand the ways they can be tailoring their individual marketing efforts to suit both their location and your overall brand identity.

Here are a few ways to do this:

• Send out ads and marketing assets as templates that allow individual locations to fill in the blanks with their own information
• Create co-op budgets that require approval so that you can get insights into how locations are spending marketing dollars
• Make monthly or quarterly strategy reviews a part of your schedule to help keep marketers at all locations on the same page

5. The challenge: budgeting across multiple locations

Most multi-location brands quickly discover that not all locations have the same marketing needs. Some will need much higher investments into building an online presence and spreading their reach, while for other locations, your marketing budget may be fairly minimal.

Best practice: Leverage data to determine location-specific budgets

When evaluating location-based budgets, a lot of it can come down to competition. For example, in a small town with only two other pizza joints to choose from, you may not need to spend as much money on various marketing tactics to attract local customers. In a major metro, however, your budget will need to be larger so that you can leverage paid ads and other strategies to put you out in front of dozens of other competitors.

When you’re analyzing marketing campaigns by location, be sure to compare conversion rates and location-specific customer acquisition costs to determine where you need to allocate greater shares of your company’s overall marketing budget.

6. The challenge: skillset variances between locations

Have you noticed that one location isn’t performing as well as another despite the fact that they’re marketing to tailored segments using similar techniques? The problem could come down to training among your employees.

Best practice: Provide training in marketing to each location

One location may have particularly skilled marketing team members who excel at executing your brand’s marketing strategy whereas another location may not have quite as much know-how, resulting in lagging performance. Invest in training for your marketing teams at each location to ensure that everyone has the skills needed to get results. And if your corporate marketing team handles local marketing efforts, make sure that team includes local marketing specialists who are trained and up-to-date on what it takes to market individual stores to local audiences.

8 different types of multi-location marketing strategies to try

To start enhancing your location-specific marketing efforts, employ a mix of tried-and-tested techniques that national brands use to market to local audiences.

1. Differentiate between content marketing and location-based content marketing

According to one survey, 99% of shoppers research purchases online before going to a store at least some of the time—and that’s what makes content marketing a crucial part of modern marketing efforts. For enterprise multi-location marketing, you’ll need to go a step further by differentiating between generalized online content meant for a broad target audience and localized content for region-specific audiences.

Keep product pages, blogs, and other types of content general in terms of location (unless you’re posting blogs or news pieces with information about events in a particular area).

For location-specific content, focus on creating a page for each storefront—and use that space to tell customers what is unique about that particular location. Highlight products that are specific to that location, share local news that is relevant to that storefront, and be sure to include details like the store’s hours and a map to reach it.

Another way to create unique local content is to include testimonials or location-specific customer reviews on each of your storefront pages. You can also leverage platforms like Yelp, which give you location-specific pages plus spaces for reviews. This gives you the opportunity not only to use location-specific keywords but also to provide social proof that will encourage others in the community to visit a particular storefront.

What you don’t want to do is create multiple individual pages with the same content but different keywords to target each location. That can get your website flagged for duplicate content, which will lead to penalties that lower your page rankings or even get your pages delisted.

2. Leverage local SEO

Local SEO involves getting your business and storefronts to rank in local searches. If you’ve followed the above advice and created unique local pages for each storefront, then you’re part of the way there already.

To round things out, make sure that your local storefront pages include access to your name, address, and phone number. They should also include other details like store hours, maps and products unique to the location.

Since active pages tend to rank higher in searches, be mindful to add fresh content to your local pages once in a while. Keep them updated with things like special holiday hours, news about the location, or updated details on new social media channels.

Finally, you can boost local SEO further by building backlinks. These can include other local businesses who link to your pages, community events that link to you, or links that you place on business directory sites like Yelp.

3. Use local business platforms and directories

Take advantage of local platforms and directories by creating and maintaining individual pages for each of your locations. Google My Business, Facebook Pages, and Yelp Pages will all help you appear in local searches.

Make sure that the information on each page is consistent, conveying the same types of information (e.g., unique products, department listings, services offered) about each location and the same contact information so as to avoid confusing customers.

When you work with Yelp for Brands, you can use the Upgrade Package to help your business pages stand out and make a good impression on potential customers. The Upgrade Package lets you create Portfolios to show off your products or services, CTAs to drive engagement, Business Highlights to show what makes your business special, and more.

4. Take advantage of location-based PPC advertising

Location-based advertising should be a key part of your overall marketing strategy. Whether via Yelp Ads, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or another platform, these ads are designed to help you put your message in front of the right target audience in the right location.

To utilize this tactic effectively, you can use a similar template for each of your ads—but you should geo-target each with location-specific keywords, and make sure that each leads to a location-specific landing page.

Try advertising solutions from Yelp for Brands to ramp up your PPC advertising even more. Search Ads help you rank higher among Yelp searches, and Showcase Ads give you more creative control of your on-platform ads by letting you create visually engaging advertisements for your business pages. Plus Dynamic Yelp Content Ads use real-time data from Yelp to create visually compelling off-platform ads.

5. Target region-specific segments with email marketing

Email marketing campaigns are rapidly becoming one of the most powerful tools in multi-location marketing. Why? Because many of today’s latest email marketing tools—like ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, and Salesforce—give you the ability to segment customers by their location, which allows you to send out targeted messaging to each segment.

Leverage email marketing to share information about location-specific news, events, sales, and offers to drive more traffic and boost sales.

6. Add SMS marketing to your campaign

In addition to email marketing, SMS marketing is another good way to reach customers at the local level—and you can even promote many of the same offers and events that you do with email marketing.

What makes SMS a reliable marketing method is that competition tends to be a lot lower compared to email marketing. Whereas people skim over dozens of emails per day, they’re more likely to see—and act—on promotions sent directly to their phone number. In fact, recent research shows that over 80% of consumers check their text notifications within five minutes of receiving a text, which makes it a very efficient method for getting attention.

7. Cross promote with local influencers

Part of the challenge with enterprise multi-location marketing is finding ways to establish each storefront as a pillar in the local community. Cross promoting with local influencers can help you do this.

The key is to partner with others who are prominent within a given community—well-respected individuals, social media influencers, sports teams, popular local businesses, and so on. This strategy can popularize your stores among local customers and also build trust—especially when you consider the fact that 69% of consumers are likely to trust a friend, family member, or influencer recommendation over messaging that comes directly from brands.

8. Try event marketing

In addition to local influencers and cross-promotions, you can add event marketing to your local marketing efforts. One way is to create unique store events that engage customers, and invite them to stop by and participate. Another great way to cross-promote is to involve individual store locations in brand activism and local events to help spread the word about the values your brand supports.

One brand that does event marketing really well? Sephora. Check their events page at any given time to find dozens of listings for nearby in-store events spanning everything from hot new product drops to makeup how-tos and free beauty consultations.

Harness the power of enterprise multi-location marketing with Yelp for Brands

Effective enterprise multi-location marketing strategies rely on tools and techniques to help you deliver your message where local consumers will see it. Using the strategies and best practices listed above, you can spread the word while keeping your brand’s messaging consistent. The right tools and strategies will also help you position ads in the right places at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

And that’s where Yelp for Brands comes in. This platform gives you access to a dedicated support team who will help you take your multi-location marketing efforts to the next level. To learn more, speak with a Yelp for Brands expert about the solutions your business needs to meet your sales goals.