Empower local operators with local digital marketing

Supercharge your multi-location business

For multi-location businesses, you can empower local operators with local digital marketing to engage customers and drive growth in the digital age. But what exactly is local digital marketing?

In essence, local digital marketing leverages online channels to promote your brand and connect with audiences in specific geographic areas or communities. This allows you to deliver targeted messaging and offers tailored to each location.

While corporate marketing teams set overall strategy and branding, local operators are truly the frontline for executing local digital marketing. But these local teams often lack resources and marketing expertise.

In this article, we’ll explore how corporate leaders can empower local operators with local digital marketing to boost their impact. With the right strategies, tools, and technology like Evocalize, you can supercharge localized efforts and excel at local digital marketing.

Why local operators need local digital marketing

Local operators play a crucial role in driving awareness, traffic, and sales in their specific communities. Local digital marketing gives them visibility and relevance with nearby audiences.

Targeted digital ads, social media, optimized listings, and other online marketing allow local operators to find and engage customers in their area. Strategies like limited-time promotions, sponsoring community events, and highlighting their location’s uniqueness help generate foot traffic and sales.

For multi-location businesses, local digital marketing also builds brand affinity at the local level. Customers develop stronger connections and loyalty to locations they frequently visit and engage with online.

Additionally, effective local digital marketing enables individual locations to compete with national brands spending heavily to target their geography. By optimizing their local presence, small businesses can gain an edge.

Challenges local operators face

While local digital marketing is critical, location operators often struggle to execute effective strategies on their own. Some key challenges include:

• Lack of marketing resources and expertise – Most don’t have dedicated marketing staff or training.
• Unfamiliar with digital marketing tactics – Many don’t know how to set up and run digital ads or campaigns.
• Time and priority constraints – Marketing competes with their core operational responsibilities.
• Maintaining brand consistency – Hard to adhere to corporate guidelines without support.
• Compliance concerns – Risk of improper usage of branding assets or inappropriate messaging.

These limitations make it extremely difficult for local operators to succeed with digital marketing and see a positive ROI.

Strategies to empower local operators with local digital marketing

Corporate leaders have several impactful opportunities to empower local operators with local digital marketing and set them up for success:

• Create a localized marketing playbook detailing best practices, guiding principles, and guardrails. Make it easy to access through videos and documentation.
• Provide templates for social posts, ads, and email campaigns that locations can customize with local info. Give access to a cloud library of approved creative assets.
• Develop turnkey campaign blueprints with optimal targeting and messaging strategies that local operators can launch as-is after adding their location specifics.
• Allocate a portion of marketing budget specifically for local digital initiatives. Consider providing matching funds when locations invest their own budget.
• Encourage community involvement through partnerships with neighborhood businesses, sponsoring local events, supporting local causes on social media, and more.
• Foster collaboration between locations by sharing effective campaign examples and creative ideas on an ongoing basis. Encourage locations to learn from each other.
• Recognize top-performing locations through contests and incentives to motivate continuous improvement.
• Provide access to free digital marketing training resources and webinars to build local teams’ knowledge.

With proper corporate enablement and support systems in place, local operators can effectively build their digital marketing skills and local relevance. Later we’ll explore how technology like Evocalize takes capabilities to the next level.

Check out these 10 other tips for leveling up your local marketing. 

Digital tools to equip local teams

Basic digital tools provide an opportunity for less experienced local marketers to start improving their presence. These are decent options to start if you want to empower local operators with local digital marketing.

Social media management platforms

Tools like Sprout Social and Hootsuite enable locations to engage local followers, promote events/offers, and monitor mentions. Proper social media management expands reach and nurtures customer relationships.

Tips:

• Encourage consistent posting and interaction
• Share local photos/videos to highlight community
• Respond promptly to messages and reviews

Design apps

Easy design apps such as Canva and Marq allow non-designers to create localized graphics, social content, and basic ads. This improves localization with less effort.

Tips:

• Provide templates aligned with brand guidelines
• Set up a shared creative asset library
• Take advantage of size templates for social media

Listing management

Managing key listings on sites like Google My Business, Yelp, and other directories helps customers find location info. Moz Local and Marqii centralizes listing management.

Tips:

• Claim and verify all possible listings
• Keep business hours, and descriptions consistent
• Encourage customer reviews

DIY ad platforms

Google Ads and Facebook offer do-it-yourself ad platforms locations can leverage for basic text/display ads. This provides affordable exposure.

Tips:

• Start with small budgets to test
• Use highly targeted local audiences
• Track conversions carefully

While useful, these entry-level tools have limitations in capability and optimization. But they allow inexperienced marketers to improve their local presence while building skills.

Learn about these 5 AI tools for multi-location franchises. 

The power of Evocalize for local teams

To truly unlock the potential of multi-location digital marketing, Evocalize is a game-changing technology platform built for local operators.

Evocalize solves the common challenges local teams face by automating and simplifying localized digital marketing:

• Advanced algorithms optimize and run effective ad campaigns automatically across channels like Facebook and Google – no manual work required.
• Built-in AI makes it easy for local operators to engage their target audience with relevant copy that’s tailored to them. 
• Robust optimization capabilities maximize campaign performance as Evocalize’s machine learning models improve over time – easily outpacing DIY efforts.
• Local operators can launch hyper-targeted campaigns while corporate still maintains full brand control and visibility – ensuring consistency.
• Detailed performance insights are provided at both location and multi-location levels to inform ongoing optimization – enabling data-driven decisions.

For local operators, Evocalize alleviates the pressures of localized digital marketing and delivers results. Corporate leaders gain confidence that branding is on point while benefiting from happy, empowered local teams.

With Evocalize, multi-location businesses can finally operate as a competitive, coordinated unit. The complexities turn to simplicities.

Conclusion

Local digital marketing is imperative for multi-location businesses to drive growth by connecting with local customers. While local operators play a key role, they often lack the skills and resources to execute on their own.

By providing training, guidelines, tools, and technology, corporate leaders can empower local operators with local digital marketing. Platforms like Evocalize take capabilities to the next level through automation and AI.

Don’t leave untapped potential on the table. Get local operators and your entire organization on board to embrace local digital marketing. With the right foundations, your brand is positioned to win in the digital era.