Understanding The Value of Marketing Technology as a Local Chain Owner

When expanding your chain business, inefficiency is a direct threat to your success. One of the biggest benefits of growing your business is realizing new efficiencies and economies of scale from a growing footprint, increasing your potential profit margins.

But when inefficiencies and waste take root in your company, expansion only multiplies those costs across each business location. This leads to lower profits, greater financial instability, and more obstacles to continue expanding your chain in the future.

Your company’s comfort with technology can make or break its long-term business plans. As your business looks for ways to become more efficient, marketing technology needs to be part of the solution. Innovative marketing tools can help your business become more cost-efficient in its marketing and advertising, engage and convert new audiences faster, and drive better campaign ROI that leads to higher revenues and a stronger profit margin.

Here are some of the most impactful ways marketing technology can benefit your local chain business.

Improve Your Audience Targeting With Addressable and Geotarged Ads

Location-based targeting is an essential marketing technology for any local chain. As your business expands its geographic territory, addressable and geotargeted ad campaigns can help you concentrate your marketing resources on building your brand and attracting new customers in these regions.

Addressable TV technology gives your business more control over who sees your TV ads. With addressable ads, your business can target video ads at the household level, choosing your audience based on their location, demographics, preferences, or other targeting information. Addressable ads can also be delivered over traditional TV, video on demand, or over-the-top streaming, giving you more flexibility in how ads are delivered.

Geotargeting offers similar targeting capabilities across other marketing and advertising channels, including display ads, paid search marketing, and social media marketing. Your business can also use geofencing to target marketing and advertising campaigns to the locations of competing brands—a potentially powerful strategy for chains eager to expand and increase market share.

Gain Greater Control Over Digital Ad Placements Through DV360

Google’s Display & Video 360 (DV360) technology expands your access to ad inventories beyond Google properties, including other non-Google exchanges and publishers. This expanded choice can improve the fit and value of your inventories for advertising and marketing campaigns, delivering better ROI.

Along with this expanded reach, DV360 offers broader access to both first-party and third-party data when targeting campaigns to an audience. This benefits any kind of marketing or advertising campaign you might launch, but it’s particularly valuable to remarketing campaigns targeted to a niche audience across Google and non-Google properties.

For all of the potential value DV360 offers, the drawback is that it can be difficult for a small business owner to manage on its own—especially when you want to leverage its capabilities for the best results. A small business digital marketing consultant can offer the expertise required to reap the rewards of this technology.

Enhance Ad Buying Through Google’s Automated ‘Smart Bidding’ Solution

Automation is one of the most consistent difference-makers when it comes to adopting new marketing technology. Intelligent automation can eliminate tedious, time-consuming tasks while actually improving the outcomes of those processes.

That’s exactly the kind of value offered by Google’s “Smart Bidding” technology, which uses machine learning and automation to accelerate and enhance the ad buying process. For local chain businesses, the task of planning ad buys for individual locations can be extremely time-consuming and, in many cases, inefficient. Smart Bidding eliminates most of this manual labor to easily scale your ad buys—while also improving the quality of those investments.

Not only can Smart Bidding give your business a more sustainable option for planning and launching campaigns, but it can also improve the performance of those campaigns. Bear in mind, though, that it can be difficult to effectively use Smart Bidding if you aren’t an experienced marketer, and that the machine learning capabilities require time to “learn” about your campaigns and identify areas for improvement.

A marketing expert can help you navigate the ins and outs of this technology to maximize its value.

Drive Customer Awareness of Chain Locations Through Multi-Location Local SEO

Local businesses need to have their online presence optimized for local search. When you run a chain business, this requirement applies to each of your business locations.

Successful local SEO will give each business location greater visibility in online searches to build brand awareness and attract new visitors to your properties. Along with updated Google My Business listings for each of your locations, your business could benefit from local SEO tools to help you optimize your linking strategy, your local structured data, your ease of ranking in certain markets, and other factors.

Each of these marketing technologies has the potential to improve campaign performance and ROI, but the best results can only be achieved when you know the best practices of using these technologies. A small business marketing consultant can support your local chain business with in-house expertise on how to optimize the performance of these technologies for your brand.

Cox Media can help your business identify and implement the best tools to fulfill your marketing goals. Contact us today to get started.