Tips for Marketing Your Business’s Multiple Locations

We’ll be the first to acknowledge that marketing isn’t a simple and straightforward process for any business owner. There is a reason so many businesses hire professionals like us instead of trying to master their own marketing. As complex as it can be for an owner with a single business, though, everything is far more complicated if you have multiple locations.

As great as it is to expand your business by adding locations, you need to keep up with a consistent, effective marketing strategy if you want to maintain your momentum. If you’re having a hard time with that hurdle, our professionals at McCauley Marketing Services have a few tips.

Create a Brand Guide

If there is one piece of advice you’ll hear from marketing professionals over and over, it’s that you need to have a strong, well-defined brand. When you’ve done that, the next step should be a brand guide that includes all those details: your brand’s voice as well as your color schemes, fonts, messaging, mission statements, and more.

A brand guide allows you to make sure your marketing stays consistent no matter who is creating the content. It’s a good idea for any business to have because it creates a smoother path for your marketing team and marketing strategy to grow in the future, but it’s especially vital when you’re trying to contain multiple locations under the same brand.

It’s also crucial that your entire team understands the brand guide. It’s better to take the time to go through it together and make sure everyone is on the same page than to wind up with inconsistent and ineffective branding.

Decide What to Divide and What to Combine

One of the keys to a strong marketing strategy is diversity. You need a presence on the web, social media, review sites, the local landscape, and more. This is not only for your brand itself but for the services and products you offer as well. When you have multiple locations, it’s hard to know when to market all your locations in one place and when to give each location its own presence.

For example, should you have a single website for your entire business or should each location have its own site? The same goes for social media pages. There is no one-size-fits-all answer. It all depends on how differently you plan to operate your various locations and how close they are to each other. For example, let’s say you have several locations in metro Atlanta and a few locations in the New York City area as well. You may want one page on each social media platform for your Atlanta locations and a separate page for all your New York locations.

Divide Your Budget

As you’re designing a marketing strategy, one of the first steps for any business is to set a budget. If you have multiple locations, you have an extra task: determining how to divide your budget among your locations.

More than likely, you’ll decide to put more money into marketing one location than the others because it just opened and will need special attention. You may also decide to set a certain budget for marketing each location individually as well as creating a separate budget for advertising that promotes all your locations at the same time, like search engine optimization for a shared website.

Do Your Research for Each Location

There is a lot of research that goes into creating a well-planned marketing strategy. It’s vital to know who is in your neighborhood and who makes up your local audience as well as what your competition in the area is doing.

If you have multiple locations, you will need a separate research project for each location. They all have their own demographics and competition. You can’t market the same way in a community of single young professionals as you do in a community of families with kids. In addition to location-specific research, you must also analyze your business’s data and marketing metrics for each location separately to see which messages are landing and which aren’t so you can adjust your overall plan if needed.

Expanding Your Business Without Missing a Beat

Every company that expands will go through some degree of growing pains, but many common growing pains are avoidable. Maintaining a consistent and well-planned marketing strategy for your multi-location business will help you make the most of your growth at every stage.

To leave it up to the pros, call McCauley Marketing Services to schedule a meeting whether you have one location or dozens.