From Lost to Found: Building Your First Multi-Location Marketing Strategy

Picture yourself as the new Chief Marketing Officer of a national brand that has 100 franchisees (or dealers, agents, locations, or other local representatives of your brand). You’ve been a CMO for over a decade, but this is your first time ever heading up a multi-location business like this and you realize you don’t have a multi-location marketing strategy. Where do you start?

In your first week, you do a deep-dive with your marketing leadership team, and are shocked to learn that your company and franchise network have:

• 17 Facebook pages.

• 22 Instagram accounts.

• 8 different email marketing platforms.

• 10 customer relationship management systems.

• 15 digital marketing agencies on contract.

For you, perhaps the worst thing is that the various marketing teams across the country don’t talk to each other. They don’t think it’s worth it. There is little synergy and everyone is doing their own thing with a wide variance in the customer experience and marketing performance. Over the years, they’ve each happily—and separately—managed their own marketing fiefdoms. To boot, they’re not so keen about a new CMO coming in and shaking things up. 

But you want to take your brand to the next level. Your vision includes:

• Creating marketing assets that can be re-used by all of your locations.

• Building a solid, consistent user experience.

• Harnessing efficiencies across your entire marketing ecosystem.
• Figuring out how to get accurate local marketing analytics.
• Moving the needle in each market for visibility, lead generation, and revenue growth
• Dominating your competition across all your local markets.

And you have a hunch that none of this is going to happen if your 100+ locations continue doing their own marketing. You understand the critical importance of localization in your marketing but coordinating everything that needs to be done across all your locations seems overwhelming and you don’t have the budget to hire an army of corporate marketers.

So, what are your options?

 Consider checking out the debut episode of my new podcast, “The Multi-Location Marketing Show.” In it, my co-host Elliot Olson and I answer questions such as:

• What is multi-location marketing?

• What differentiates local marketing from multi-location marketing?

• What do marketing and sales professionals who are responsible for performance across various local markets need to know about multi-location marketing?

• What are the benefits for you, your company, your franchisees, and your local reps when you scale local marketing programs across many locations?

• What are some tools and tactics that will make it possible to realize your vision with the efficiency you need and the results you require?

In our podcast, Elliot and I are going to demystify some of the biggest challenges facing marketing professionals who aim to bring big-brand capabilities to individual locations in a unified way.

Be sure to subscribe to “The Multi-Location Marketing Show”  on your favorite podcast app!