The latest research reveals that 80 percent of consumers consider reviews important to their purchase decision and social is second only to referrals as a customer acquisition source. Finding a tool that can help your agency manage clients’ local social pages and monitor their online reputation, at-scale, can help you proactively manage the digital presence of your clients.

As a part of this content series, SOCi sat down with some of our customers and asked about their strategic approach to different components of localized marketing (LM). Our hope is that other marketers can read through the answers and learn best practices from companies that are excelling in LM!

Rosemont Media truly understands the importance of having a proactive, localized marketing strategy for every client that they serve.

Q&A with Rosemont Media

According to its website, Rosemont Media is a modern ad agency for healthcare. Rosemont media combines cutting-edge technology with custom website design services and multi-faceted search engine marketing campaigns to allow their clients to focus on the most important aspect of their success: the patient.

Rosemont Media answered the following questions on the agency’s best practices for localized marketing.

1. Tell us about your experience using the SOCi Platform and how long you’ve been using
it.

Rosemont Media started using the SOCi Platform in 2016 to service clients in the elective healthcare industry. Throughout our time, we have seen SOCi’s commitment to constantly improve and evolve their product, which in turn helps us to service our clients faster, better, and more effectively.

2. What were your main challenges before you started using SOCi? 

One of the biggest challenges, as an agency, was keeping track of editorial calendars across our network of clients. We needed an easy but sophisticated way of presenting calendars to our customers, and SOCi’s client approval gateway feature delivered exactly that. Spreadsheets of upcoming social content were confusing customers and lacked the ability to present visual content in a meaningful way. Word documents became too cumbersome to construct and any revision needs were difficult to track.

3. What have been the greatest benefits you’ve received from using SOCi? And what is your favorite part of the SOCi offering?

At Rosemont Media, we have definitely been able to save time in our agency to client process through the interactive client approval gateway, and of course the scheduling features.

4. Tell me about what surprised you the most or made you the happiest about using the SOCi platform?

The approval gateway in SOCi really stands out compared to other industry-leading platforms that we have tried. It not only keeps our team organized, but it allows us to present our social media content to clients in a sophisticated and polished format.

5. SOCi defines Localized Marketing (LM) as marketing efforts that focus on building a local presence for a business, leveraging locally-driven communication channels to reach the specific local communities it serves (rather than a broad/national approach). May include social media marketing, review sites, social advertising, and other two-way engagement channels. Based on this description, do you see localized marketing (LM) as a key area of focus in your marketing mix today? And what is your localized marketing strategy that has proven to be most successful for your clients?

Since the inception of the internet, it has gone from a worldwide experience to more of a hyper-localized experience. We are dedicated to healthcare services and most of those services are typically purchased locally, so LM is extremely important for our clients, and the strategies that we deploy for them.

6. When thinking about the areas of LM, which include local profile pages like GMB, review sites like Yelp and local social pages on sites like Facebook – are these areas generally managed or maintained centrally by your agency, or decentrally – meaning these assets are managed by individuals at the business level or a hybrid of the two?

Rosemont Media encourages client participation in order to be most successful with updating, sharing, and responding to the different tactics within localized marketing. We operate in a hybrid model of centralized/decentralized local marketing management because the healthcare practice or business has to play a role in sharing custom messaging to local clients in order to be successful.

7. Based on the above-mentioned management approach what are some key challenges or issues you are facing in your LM program? (Examples could include but are not limited to localizing your content across all of your social pages, knowing about and /or responding to ratings and reviews in a timely manner, claiming and managing all of your local pages, getting local business involvement, getting local-community engagement etc.)

Some key challenges that we’ve faced are getting the practice/business involved and local community engagement. As an agency, we are most challenged with the clients’ thought process of “do it for me”. While we strive to make localized marketing as easy and turnkey as possible for our clients, we do require a back and forth partnership so that our team is representing their business as best as possible through the use of localized, custom content tailored for their local audiences. Having a strong partnership with your clients is the key to success.

8. Please rank the following areas of LSM on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being the least important and 5 being critically important to your business:

• Local Search Pages like Google My Business (GMB): 1
• Local Ratings & Reviews: 2
• Local Social Pages like Facebook: 3
• Localized Content on the above-mentioned pages: 4
• Quick response to consumer questions and reviews: 5

9. If you had to select a social or review platform that is the most impactful for your business, which would you choose and why? 

Facebook, Instagram, and GMB are most impactful for our business because they are the main networks we contract service with our clients on, and they are the most impactful to consumer usage in the elective healthcare industry. Consumers tend to use social media and review sites to educate themselves on elective healthcare practices local to their cities.

10. Are you currently leveraging localized ads in social to supplement your LM efforts? Why or why not?

Yes, our goal is to drive local engagement and conversion via social media and we amplify our organic social content by running social ads to increase engagement and convert online browsing to instore business. Our clients have seen great success with this paid approach.

11. If there is one learning or pitfall you have learned through your LM efforts that you would like to share with other marketers, what would that be?

The greatest challenge our agency has faced in localized marketing for our clients is figuring out the best targeting options to get the most exposure for our content, as well as managing the details of the specific promotion. We have found that our clients think any promotion will increase business, however, the promo has to be enticing to the consumers in order to see online activity convert to instore business.

12. How do you see localized marketing impacting your business? What about reputation management? Did you do it well in the past? How has that changed?

Social media moves very fast; therefore, you need to have a proactive social media content plan, which should include a regular cadence of positive content about your business. Additionally, you should create a plan to generate daily customer reviews on the top online reputation management platforms. As an agency, we have to educate our clients and act fast on ever-changing marketing concepts, as well as trends in medical and dental marketing, while still focusing on our bottom line, scaling our business, and increasing the efficiency of our teams in order to service our clients with the most successful results in localized marketing.

To learn more about how SOCi can help your agency empower multi-location marketers to manage their localized marketing strategy across 100s or 1000s of locations efficiently, click here!