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Budgeting for 2022 – Where to Focus Your Localized Marketing Efforts

 

It’s hard to believe that we’re already in Q4 of 2021. The new year will be here before we know it, which means it’s time to start thinking about your marketing budget for 2022. The more thought and analysis you put into your 2022 budget as a multi-location marketer, the better results you’ll get. While it can seem daunting to map out your localized marketing budget for an entire year, it doesn’t have to be. Throughout this blog, we’ll dive into factors you should consider when budgeting and provide tips to ensure your multi-location business is getting the most out of its marketing budget. 

 

Re-Evaluate Your Current Marketing Plan and Analyze What’s Worked 

One of the most accessible places to start when budgeting for 2022 is to look at what is currently working for your multi-location business and what isn’t. For instance, if advertising is the main factor of your budget in 2022, consider – how is your ad spend performing? Can you find any spending or performance trends over the past 4 quarters?  Is your cost-per-click low compared to industry standards, or is there room for improvement? If your cost-per-click is low, what can your multi-location business do to maintain the lower cost for 2022?

 

This is just one example of analyzing your marketing performance – but the same level of questioning and analysis should be applied to every component of your localized marketing tactics over the past year. These are all factors to consider when budgeting. If you have a comprehensive understanding of what worked in the past, you can determine which areas you should continue to allocate more funding towards and where you could potentially pull back on the spend. 

 

 

 

Evaluate your channel spend for the metrics that matter to your business – whether it’s CPC, cost per lead (CPL), cost per thousand (CPM), or cost per sale (CPS), these are metrics that should be tracked and analyzed on regular basis – quarterly, monthly, or even weekly.  If you notice that you’ve previously put a lot of money into certain tactics but haven’t seen great results, it’s likely time to rethink your strategy and potentially move some funds to another area of marketing. While re-evaluating your current localized marketing strategy is a great way to start budgeting for 2022, it’s only the first step of the process. There are other tactics your multi-location business should consider to ensure you’re getting the most out of your budget. 

 

Consider Trends and the Competition

After you fully understand what worked for your own multi-location business in 

the past, you can then begin to look at upcoming trends and your competition. The world of digital marketing is constantly changing, so you must be aware of upcoming trends and save a portion of your budget to fund new tactics that are related to those trends. For instance, social listening was a big trend in 2021 and necessary to stay ahead of the competition. While you should still include social listening in your localized marketing strategy for 2022, there are other upcoming trends that may require more budget allocation.

 

Our recent blog breaks down which trends we think will be significant in 2022 and explains how you can prepare as a multi-location marketer. Researching and reading content on trends for 2022 will help you understand what to expect and where to save room in your budget for new or growing trends. 

 

While understanding trends for 2022 is essential, and you should dedicate a portion of your budget to test new tactics based on trends, your multi-location business should also pay attention to where the competition is focusing its localized marketing efforts. Although it’s not necessary to have the same localized marketing strategy as your competitors, having an idea of their strategies and presence is essential to ensuring you’re always one step ahead.

 

If the competition is spending money and effort to optimize their local listings and build their local search strategy, you want to ensure your business matches them in terms of online visibility.

 

On the other hand, if they’re putting a lot of money into a chatbot solution, your multi-location business should consider how a chatbot solution could help improve your customer experience. (Hint: It would!) Having a pulse on the latest trends and what your competitors are doing can help you decide where your marketing dollars should go. 

 

Focus on Return on Investment 

This wouldn’t be a budgeting blog if we didn’t touch on return on investment (ROI). While it might seem obvious, many marketers determine their budgeting plans without looking at ROI. As a multi-location marketer, you likely understand that localized marketing is worth the investment, but proving it is often easier said than done. Generally speaking, localized marketing ROI is the sum of all the actions taking place across local search, local social, and ratings and reviews that create value, but how exactly do you calculate it? 

 

Consider the following: 

  1. Step 1: Set specific and measurable goals. Track your performance with key performance indicators (KPIs). 
  2. Step 2: Track conversions by implementing proper analytics tracking. The most common tools that your multi-location business can leverage to measure marketing performance include Google Analytics, social media monitoring, call tracking, leads from contact forms, and email marketing software analytics. 
  3. Step 3: Determine current localized marketing performance. It’s important to understand where your business is at when starting, so you can then later measure how far you’ve come. 
  4. Step 4: Clarify the value by channel. To begin tracking ROI, you must understand your current state in various areas of localized marketing. What is your potential lift compared to how they are already performing? 

 

Following all of the steps mentioned above will help you calculate whether you are getting more money than you are putting in. SOCi has also created a formula that enables you to calculate a more exact ROI. For an in-depth look at the procedure, check out our comprehensive ROI guide.

 

Once you calculate the ROI for different components of your localized marketing strategy, it will help you determine which areas are worth investing in. For instance, if you’re currently getting a significant ROI from your local social efforts, you would likely want to keep that up for 2022. On the other hand, if your reputation management strategy is currently costing your business money, you can reconsider improving that strategy for next year. 

 

 

 

Consolidate Your Localized Marketing Efforts 

 

Once you’ve analyzed your business’s localized marketing strategy, looked at trends and the competitive landscape, and tracked your ROI, you’ve reached the final step of identifying your preliminary budget for 2022. Analyzing how much your business is spending on various marketing platforms is another necessary step. If your multi-location business uses different marketing platforms for managing social, reputation management efforts, chatbots, and more, you could be costing your business more. Often, consolidating into a single platform that empowers you to manage all localized marketing efforts will save your business time and money in the long run. Even if it doesn’t save your business dollars upfront, consolidating your localized marketing solution will save your marketing team time and effort, ultimately helping improve your ROI.

 

Data from a Forrester Study, The Localized Marketing Imperative found that seven out of 10 marketers with access to a solution that manages all localized content across locations see a resulting positive impact on localized marketing. Think of all the time it takes your marketing team to learn how to navigate different platforms and even log into each platform to complete various aspects of your localized marketing strategy. Consolidation has also been proven to help with local adoption.

 

Take Anytime Fitness as an example. With more than 4,000 gyms in 35 countries, Anytime Fitness needed a solution to empower franchisees to maintain a strong community connection on their social media pages with local content while responding to reviews, ultimately lending itself to building trust and brand integrity in local communities.

 

By teaming up with SOCi, Anytime Fitness was able to successfully provide franchisees with a tool that is user-friendly and acts as a central command for executing their marketing strategy. With an average of 54 percent of users actively utilizing the platform, they’ve been able to decrease their overall review response time by 50 percent over one quarter. Additionally, they found that hyperlocal content posted by the location managers received 150 percent more clicks and 77 percent more user engagement than corporate content, ultimately helping boost Anytime Fitness’s ROI.

 

 

 

Now that you have everything you need to plan your localized marketing budget for 2022, it’s time to get started. When it comes to proving your business’s ROI and consolidating your marketing efforts, SOCi is here to help! SOCi is the all-in-one platform for multi-location marketers and can provide your business with the tools needed to crush your localized marketing goals! From local listings to ratings and reviews to social, chatbots, and more, SOCi has you covered. For more insight on how SOCi can help you determine the ROI of your current marketing efforts and consolidate your efforts, request a demo today!

 

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