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Earn More Sales With Conversational Commerce

 

As a multi-location marketer, if you see a huge increase in sales, it likely means your marketing efforts are paying off. In today’s digital-first world, where consumers spend record amounts of time on social media, it can be challenging to stand out from all the noise. 

 

That’s where conversational commerce comes in. Conversational commerce allows your multi-location business to directly connect to its target audience through local social. Within this blog, we’ll dive deeper into conversational commerce – define the term, delve into how you can incorporate it effectively into your local social efforts, and tips to meet your audience where they’re spending the most time. 

 

Conversational Commerce: The Basics 

 

Conversational commerce occurs when you engage with prospects and customers in real-time and in a highly personalized manner. These genuine dialogue-driven connections ultimately shorten the sales cycles and result in a more human buying experience. Social channels continue to influence consumer purchasing, with social commerce expected to grow 35% in 2021, hitting $39.2 billion in revenue.  When your multi-location business puts time and effort into your communication with potential customers, they notice. Social media is a great way to build brand awareness and can even be used further down the buyer’s journey. In fact, 76 percent of consumers have purchased a product or service they saw in a brand’s social media post. If your multi-location business isn’t leveraging social media effectively, you’re missing huge influential buying potential. 

 

While social media is an essential part of conversational commerce, it’s all about local social. Data found that 72 percent of user engagement and 66 percent of brand-related impressions happen on local Facebook pages and not on corporate pages. Local content on local social pages proves to be more effective than content coming from a corporate page. For your multi-location business to leverage conversational commerce effectively, you must ensure that all your local social pages are claimed and active. If not, here’s a blog that can get you started with a local social strategy before focusing on conversational commerce. 

 

Tying Conversational Commerce into Your Localized Strategy

 

Incorporating conversational commerce into your localized marketing efforts is essential, and as we’ve mentioned, it starts with a solid local social strategy. When it comes to the dos and don’ts of a local social plan, our 2021 Localized Marketing Benchmark Report guides the way. The report examines how top multi-location businesses perform in the most influential digital channels, including local search, social, and ratings & reviews. 

 

When looking at local social media, the report found that the ultimate success metric for social marketing comes down to high-valued engagements—the “social” part of social media. High-valued engagements result in comments and shares of your content and pages by local customers and your community. These most valuable engagement indicators let you know if you are giving your audience the content they want to see. When you increase high-valued local engagements, you increase your social efforts’ value and overall reach. 

 

 

 

 

When analyzing the report’s top ten leaders in localized marketing, the data found that, on average, these companies received 131 engagements per post on Facebook, with 12 of those engagements being high value. If your multi-location business isn’t sure what kind of local content to use to drive high valued engagements, our blog on the topic can help. While high-value engagement leads to conversations with your target audience, it’s also important to consider how often your multi-location business is posting on local social, and how many of your business locations fully leverage local social. 

 

For instance, leaders in localized marketing have an average of 49 percent of their locations posting on Facebook, and only 17 percent posting on Google My Business (GMB). The monthly post frequency on Facebook averages out at nine posts per month on Facebook, with only one post per month on GMB. Is your multi-location business meeting the averages or falling behind? 

 

 

 

 

Impress Your Target Audience and Win More Sales 

 

If your multi-location business isn’t effectively leveraging this powerful channel, or optimizing your presence on social through meeting or exceeding the benchmarks mentioned above, it’s time to revamp your local social strategy. That’s where SOCi comes in. SOCi’s Social Solution enables multi-location businesses to manage and deploy localized content at scale while maintaining brand consistency at both the enterprise and local levels. Similarly, SOCi’s Social solution allows your multi-location business to discover, create, and share dynamic localized content while maintaining strong brand consistency across all business locations. This helps your business impress your target audience through local conversations. 

 

After using SOCi’s Social Solution, your multi-location business should begin to notice an increase in high-value engagements. Huntington Learning Center is an excellent example of this. 

 

After using SOCi, Huntington Learning Center saw a 132 percent increase in post engagement and a 68 percent increase in comments. Patricia McCabe, Senior Director, Franchise Marketing at Huntington Learning Center, explained, “We take a lot of pride in our hard work and commitment to excellence in education. SOCi has made it easy for each franchisee to share that message and develop stronger connections with every unique community we serve.”

 

If your multi-location business is looking to win more sales through conversational commerce and find the same success as Huntington Learning Center, SOCi is here to help. For more information on how SOCi can help your multi-location business connect with your target audience and rise as a leader in your industry, request a demo today!