Marketing Your Local Chain Business: Tips for Promoting Multiple Locations

02.09.2023 Sara Brasfield4 min

There’s a world of difference between running a single business location and operating multiple locations, sometimes in different cities. Although an expanded footprint creates new opportunities—increasing your audience reach, achieving economies of scale, and growing your gross profits, for example—running multiple locations also creates new challenges.

The same is true for your local marketing strategy. Yes, many of the principles of small business marketing are the same regardless of how many locations you operate. But the nuts and bolts of how you market your business is much different when balancing the marketing needs, territory, and unique audiences of these locations.

Read on to learn more about the challenges of digital marketing for multi-location businesses, along with our tips on how to boost marketing performance across your entire chain.

1. Update Your Google My Business Listings

Google My Business listings are important to any business location open to customers—especially local retailers. But keeping these listings up-to-date becomes a bigger task as your business opens new locations.

When a new business location is opened—or even before it’s open, ideally—you’ll need to submit your business location as a new listing with Google. This is an easy process that only takes a few minutes to complete, and it will improve your business location’s visibility in its local area, while also making it easier for your customers to find.

Accurate listings will also save your customers from calling or visiting the wrong location—leading to wasted time for your workers, and frustration for the customer.

2. Geotarget Your Campaigns to Nearby Consumers and Communities

The value of expanded business locations has a lot to do with how far your customers are willing to travel. Even if your clothing store enjoys high online reviews and strong customer satisfaction, shoppers are inevitably less likely to visit that location the further away they’re located.

If your business has built a loyal base of customers on one side of town, but hasn’t connected as much with shoppers on the other side of town, it may make sense to open a second location in close proximity to that target audience. Since each of these locations were chosen for their strategic value in building a brand presence and engaging a local audience, your advertising should be geotargeted to the geographic areas close to each location.

This geotargeted approach can range from delivering ads to mobile users within a fixed radius of the business, or targeting ad delivery to addresses or neighborhoods where your target audience can be found. By promoting the nearby business location through geofenced campaigns and hyperlocal marketing, you can leverage multiple locations to build awareness, engagement and, ultimately, new conversions.

3. Optimize for Local Search

If you want to leverage the physical presence of multiple business locations, your local SEO strategy needs to be aligned with these goals. Multi-location SEO strategy can help your business optimize its organic and paid search presence around each of its business locations—regardless of whether you operate multiple locations within the same city or across several states.

Multi-location SEO accounts for localized optimizations around each location. If you have one business location in Atlanta and a second in Nashville, for example, multi-location SEO will help you increase your search visibility for each of these locations. Google My Business listings, online directories, and localized SEO on your business website can all contribute to successful optimization across multiple business properties.

Best Practice: Analyze Each Location’s Marketing Performance On Its Own

As a company with multiple business locations, it’s always important to get a high-level view of your company’s marketing success. But localized strategies also need to be evaluated on their own terms, in part because results across different locations may vary.

When one business location is delivering a lower ROI than your other locations, for example, it could suggest that there’s something misaligned between your marketing goals, your campaign strategy, and your target audience. Your local SEO strategy may be less effective for a single location than others, or you may have misunderstood what types of messaging are most relevant to that location’s target audience.

Testing and campaign refinement can help you experiment with different approaches and elevate this performance over time. In the process, you’ll learn more about your target audience, the role of each business location in its respective communities, and how you can leverage this physical presence to strengthen your brand and drive stronger profits.

As your business expands, your marketing strategy inevitably grows more complex. A small business marketing consultant can help you adapt and optimize your local marketing strategy to balance the marketing needs of each business location, as well as the company’s overall goals.

Ready to get started? Contact Cox Media today.

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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!).

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