Advertising Your Multi-Location Local Business: Tips for Creating Quality Ad Content

04.13.2023 Sara Brasfield4 min

As small businesses mature into successful local chains, the rate of that growth is determined by the brand’s ability to expand its customer base. The faster you can attract new customers to a new location, the faster that location begins turning a profit—which in turn increases your financial ability to plan future locations for your successful local chain.

Localized advertising is one of your best tools for driving that growth. Whether expanding your chain’s footprint or growing your customer base across your brick-and-mortar locations, digital advertising can help you reach your target audience while controlling costs and optimizing for campaign performance.

No matter what your advertising goals may be, successful campaigns depend on quality creative to maximize engagement with your audience. Given the size of their company and the overlap in branding, messaging and audience, local chains are in a great position to invest in quality ad creative that serves their campaign goals and offers excellent ROI.

Read on for our recommendations on how chain businesses can push their ad creative to the next level.

Create Video Content That Can Be Used for Every Location

Video production is more affordable than ever. And, for chain businesses, video can be a particularly effective and valuable advertising channel when taking a strategic approach to video creation.

Digital video content can be repurposed and reformatted across many different channels. A video ad made for cable TV, for example, can be repurposed as an OTT streaming ad and even showcased on social media. Editing and reformatting can even allow the video to be used in many different video formats specific to each social platform.

When your business plans ahead, you can also retain the flexibility to create video ads that promote the entire chain or a specific location. A digital video ad, for example, can use the same video and audio and simply add in location-specific information—such as the business address, phone number, or other details—to promote individual chain locations through the ad. The right foresight and planning can help your chain maximize your video production ROI while making it easier to commit your budget to high-quality content creation.

Align Search Ads With User Intent

According to experts at Google, at least 46 percent of all search queries have local intent. Based on the high rate of this local search activity, chain businesses have an opportunity to improve advertising performance by creating paid search ads that lean into this local intent.

Location-based targeting is an obvious tactic to help connect with a local audience, but your business can further improve the quality of your customer engagement by tailoring search ad content to individual chain locations. A localized paid search ad might make a reference to a specific business location being located in a mall, for example, to make it easier for consumers to visit that location.

In some cases, specific chain locations may even offer different services or experiences from other locations within the same company. In this case, it can be helpful to promote these unique services to consumers to raise awareness of their availability—especially in cases where the search query is relevant to those offerings.

Embrace Messaging and Branding With Universal Appeal

Certain elements of location-specific ads need to be customized to fairly reflect a single location’s offerings, and to connect with a specific local audience. But local chains also need to identify the messaging and branding elements which are core to their business across every location, and which can be reused over and over again to lower production costs while supporting campaign ROI.

From colors to logos to music, these branding elements can be developed once and then reused indefinitely by a content production team. Likewise, messaging around pain points, the brand’s core values, and the company’s service offerings can likely be used across a wide range of content. This adds consistency to your larger advertising strategy while making content creation more affordable.

Team Up With A Reputable, Local Production Team

The more locations making up your chain business, the more important it becomes that your business manages its ad budget and other resources to maximize overall advertising performance, as well as the ROI for individual campaigns and creative assets.

Poor content planning can lead to unnecessary production waste, inconsistent ad creative, and a weaker brand in your market. The best way to avoid these all-too-common mistakes is to partner with a small business marketing consultant that understands how to plan, manage and optimize content creation for a local chain business.

With experience planning, producing and managing creative assets for local chain brands, Cox Media can help your business elevate the quality of its ad creative to improve your overall campaign performance.

Don’t let your chain business become a victim of its own growth and success. As your business grows, your digital ad strategy must also evolve to become more efficient and more engaging with your audience. Contact Cox Media today to see how we can help.

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About the Author

Sara Brasfield

Sara is a Marketing Manager on Cox Media’s corporate team in Atlanta, with a passion for writing and delivering relevant insights for advertisers. With more than nine years of experience in B2B marketing, Sara aims to help Cox Media’s current and future clients connect with their customers find new and unique ways to grow their business. Outside of the office, Sara loves spending time running, reading, and supporting her favorite sports teams (Go Braves & Gamecocks!).

View All of Sara Brasfield's Blog Posts

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