Driving Engagement: Best Practices in Local Content Management

Every marketer knows the importance of audience targeting. In order to relate to your customer's needs and experiences, your brand needs to be able to speak to multiple different demographics and customer profiles, and your franchisees need to be able to create marketing content that's tailored to their own local community.

It takes the efforts of both corporate-level brand managers and franchise-level marketers to create great local content. A great brand manager will be able to guide franchise marketers to create impactful localized content campaigns that fit seamlessly into the wider corporate brand.

Benefits of Local Content Creation

It takes effort and resources to create high-quality local content, especially if you're responsible for creating assets across multiple different locations. Research has shown that this investment is more than worth it:

76% of people who perform mobile searches with the word "nearby" will visit a business within a day
28% of mobile "nearby" searches will result in a purchase
Geotargeted posts are up to six times more successful in driving engagements than global posts
Over 70% of brand engagement on social happens at the local page level

Content that's designed for and targeted toward local customer audiences will be exponentially more successful than generalized marketing content. By equipping your franchise marketers with the right local content tools and strategies, you can help drive revenue across the entire organization.

Local Content Management Best Practices

It can be daunting to set up a brand new local content program for your franchise network or to venture into local marketing as a franchise owner. We've curated a list of our recommended best practices to help you get started.

Optimize for Local Search

Search optimization is one of the single most powerful tools for local marketing. Local search users are some of the most valuable prospects possible—they're primed for a purchase and actively looking for your products and services. Make sure that your business is prepared to meet these searchers where they are.

Optimize your Google Business Profile. This is how you can get your business's information listed on Google Maps and at the top of the results page for relevant searches.
Get links from local sites. Reach out to community organizations, town directories, and local government offices to have your business added to lists of local resources and recommendations.
Use structured schema to add information to your website in the right format, so that Google can surface your information in featured snippets and other search highlights.

As a franchise marketer at the corporate level, add information on how to optimize for local search to your franchisee handbook. Offer trainings and "office hours" to help franchise owners make the most of their local search opportunities.

Create Hyper-Relevant Content

Making sure that Google knows where your business is located is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to localized content. In order to really engage with your local audience, you need to make content that's relevant to your target customers' specific experiences.

Curate a news feed from local sources to keep yourself updated on the events and issues that are most relevant to your audience. Take note of things that you could use in your local marketing, like:

Holidays and school breaks
Notable weather events
Community celebrations
Nonprofit causes
Local government issues

Brand asset managers can also use segmentation to create broad templates for localized content and release them to relevant groups of franchisees. For example, if you run a sandwich franchise, you might segment your franchise locations by climate and then create one template for a "warm up with a soup and sandwich combo" promotion and another for a "perfect beach day sandwich" campaign.

Make Use of User-Generated Content

Another extremely powerful local marketing tool is user-generated content, or content that comes directly from real customers. Research has shown that customers are far more likely to trust a brand that incorporates user-generated content into its marketing initiatives.

Pull quotes and testimonials from positive online reviews of your products or services and add them to landing pages and other marketing collateral. Keep an eye out for users that tag your business in photos and videos and incorporate the best content into your own advertising efforts. With in-platform editing capabilities, brand managers can create content templates designed for franchisees to add user-generated text and photos.

Use Automation for Personalization

With the rise of automation tools for marketers and small business owners, it's now possible to achieve detailed personalization at scale. Using an email marketing platform like Mailchimp or ConvertKit, franchise owners can segment their audiences by characteristics and recent brand interactions.

Using the customizable templates in their brand asset management tool, they can then design a variety of drip sequences that feature different value propositions and discounts that match different demographics and sales funnel stages.

Work with Local Vendors

Marketers at the franchise level have the unique ability to establish a presence not just in customers' online lives, but in their physical world as well. Consider extending your digital marketing efforts to include in-person marketing efforts, like:

Ads in local newsletters and community bulletins
Billboards in high-traffic locations
Branded giveaways, like pens and mugs
Sponsorships for nearby nonprofit groups

Adding a third-party vendor doesn't have to be difficult or confusing. Just integrate your brand asset management platform directly with your third-party vendors to enable seamless access to company-approved visual assets.

Measure Campaign Success by Location

When you hit on a campaign that works, you want to replicate that success across your entire franchise network. It's important to track and measure key metrics for your marketing campaigns in order to figure out what efforts are worth building upon.

Set up campaign tracking that will collect and analyze data from across your entire franchise network. With full visibility into your company's marketing successes and failures, you can identify great ideas and spread them to the rest of the locations in your franchise network.

Equip Your Franchises for Local Success

When individual franchises succeed, the whole company benefits. By equipping franchisees with the tools and training they need to dominate their local markets, franchise managers can become a force multiplier for company-wide revenue growth.

Learn more about managing distributed marketing teams effectively in our free guide, Distributed Marketing on Steroids. You'll learn new tactics and strategies for streamlined asset management, enforcing consistency across locations, and powering your franchise marketing operations effectively and efficiently.