How Your Multi-Location Business Can Determine the ROI of Your Local Social

As multi-location marketers, many of us utilize social media as a part of our localized marketing efforts, but do you know how it affects your bottom line? If used correctly, social media can lead to a positive return on investment (ROI) for your multi-location business. When developing a localized marketing strategy, it’s crucial to understand how a local social media plan can benefit your business. Throughout this blog, we’ll look at how you can determine the ROI of your local social media efforts, and we’ll also provide you with the tools needed to build a successful local social media plan. 

Determine Where Your Social Media is Currently 

Before you can begin improving your local social media presence, it’s important to analyze where your social media is at today. When getting started, there are a few things you should consider: 

1. Have you claimed all of your local social media pages? This is the first step in developing a strong social media presence.
2. Is there a proper page hierarchy setup of your pages? For instance, is there a parent/child relationship between your main business page and all of your local pages? If not, this is key to connecting your brand and improving brand recognition. 
3. Is all of your local business information updated across your local pages? If not, this can lead to consumer confusion and will hurt your business’s ROI. 
4. Are you currently doing any competitive analysis? It’s essential to understand how your competitors are performing to ensure you have a leg-up on them. 

If you answered yes to all of the above, your social media is in an excellent spot. However, there are always ample opportunities to improve. It would help if you also considered what channels your multi-location business is utilizing when it comes to social. Data from our Q3 2020 State of Multi-Location Marketing Report found that Facebook was used most by multi-location marketers, followed by Google My Business and Yelp. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t utilize other channels like Instagram, Twitter, TripAdvisor, and more. It is just a reminder of where you should focus your efforts. 

Before you start tracking the ROI of your social media efforts, you want to know where you’re starting and make goals for where you want to end up. For instance, is your goal to increase the number of followers you have on your Instagram pages? Do you want to expand the engagement across your posts? Make sure you determine this beforehand so that you can measure the success of your social media efforts in the long run. 

Set Up Proper Tracking

Once you’ve decided what metrics you want to measure for a successful social media strategy, it’s time to implement tracking. Regardless of the metric that is most important for your multi-location business, make an attainable goal that you want to reach over the next month or quarter, and start tracking it. 

Many of the most common local social platforms have a business manager that allows you to track many of the standard metrics you would want to improve. However, dependent upon your goals, there are additional tracking measures you should consider. 

• If increased clicks on your social posts is your goal, you can add UTM codes to your links. 
• If increased reach and engagement is your goal, establishing baseline benchmarks in each platform is key, and create monthly or quarterly reporting on your goal to see if you’re attaining it.
• If only impressions matter, establish a baseline number of people who view your posts and report on progress monthly or quarterly. 

Monitoring these metrics and reporting on them can give you an idea of what works well and where you still have room to improve. 

In terms of ROI, there are various ways that improved metrics can help boost your revenue. If you’re looking at conversion rates and see that more people are filling out a form that you shared on social media, these increased leads will then move into the sales funnel and ultimately make your business more money. Similarly, if your engagement is increased across social posts, this will boost your brand’s visibility, and again result in more revenue in the long run. Tracking your social media efforts and seeing the improvement helps you prove the importance social media has on your multi-location business’s ROI. 

Look At Other Contributing Factors 

While tracking metrics like your reach and engagement is essential to determining your ROI, other factors can contribute to your success. For instance, are other companies or consumers talking about your multi-location business on social? If so, this could again boost your brand visibility and widen your reach to your target audiences. Similarly, referrals and reviews can help improve your local social media presence, therefore improving your ROI. 

The line between local search and social has been blurred. What was previously considered strictly search or strictly social is now a mixture of the two. For instance, Facebook now allows ratings and reviews and the platform launched a “businesses nearby” feature earlier this year, while Google allows posting. If your Facebook account has a high star-rating and several reviews, Google pulls in this information on your local listings and this will ultimately contribute to you appearing in local search results and boosting your ROI. Many multi-location marketers underestimate the power of ratings and reviews, but ratings and reviews are the number one factor that consumers consider when making a purchasing decision. If your multi-location business isn’t optimizing your ratings and reviews strategy, this could hurt your local social ROI as well. For more information on the importance of ratings and reviews regarding ROI, check out our blog on the topic. 

Posting Strategy 

Now that you have the basics of tracking your success, how do you create success? That’s where your posting strategy comes in. You want to keep in mind four things when creating your posting strategy. 

• Localization

One of the most important aspects of a successful posting strategy is localization. Data from our Q3 2020 State of Multi-Location Marketing Report found that localized content performs 10x better than content that is not considered localized. The way you speak to your target audience in New York should be different from how you talk to your audiences in Florida. Similarly, if there is a big event in a city where you have a business location, that should be incorporated into your posting strategy. You want to ensure that your consumers feel connected to your brand, which can be done through localized content.

• Corporate and Local Content

You may be asking yourself, how should you balance the ratio of corporate and local content? While there is no exact percentage, it should be a mixture of the two. If you have any major company updates or generic news, this can be shared by corporate. Any local promotions, customer testimonials, or updates to hours of operation should be shared at the local level. If your local and corporate teams are working together, you will have a strong presence on social media with quality content. 

• Quality of Content

When it comes to quality content, we’ll keep this short and sweet! Unless you’re posting on Twitter, you should keep posting down to one or two posts per channel a day. There are also a variety of content types that consumers like. For instance, video typically performs better than a post with just text and an image. Similarly, content like customer testimonials, a Q&A on a specific product, or a tour of your facilities can be engaging to your target audiences. And types of posts that appeal to human connection – such as local feel good stories, posts that entertain – such as a funny GIF or photo, or posts that focus on the local community – such as examples of how your local businesses give back, all tend to receive better engagement. Get creative! For more tips on posting quality content on social media, read our blog on the topic. 

• Building Connections

Finally, building connections with your target audience is a must. Rather than focusing on selling, think about what messages would resonate most with your audience. Are they worried about their jobs during the pandemic? Recognize this, and speak to your audience where they’re at. If they know that you care about them and aren’t worried about selling to them, they’ll be more likely to purchase from your business when it does come time for them to make a purchase. 

Engagement Strategy 

Similarly to building real connections, an engagement strategy is necessary to make your consumers feel valued, increase sales, and improve your ROI. A strong engagement strategy is simple. Your multi-location business must ensure that you’re responding to all of the messages, comments, and mentions you receive promptly. These responses should be personalized and address what is being said in the message, especially those that are negative. Again, if consumers see that your business is taking the time to interact with them, it will help when making a purchase. 

Now that you understand how a strong social media strategy can impact your ROI, it’s time to take your efforts to the next level. SOCi’s social media management solution empowers enterprise and local teams to publish localized content, manage content libraries, respond to social engagements, and analyze performance — all within one powerful platform. Now corporate, regional, and local teams can plan, share, and manage all aspects of their localized social strategy effortlessly.

In addition to helping your multi-location business improve its social media strategy, SOCi can take your entire localized marketing strategy to the next level. SOCi is the all-in-one platform for your localized marketing needs. For more information on how SOCi can ensure you succeed in localized marketing, request a demo today!