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At first glance, marketing a multi-location business seems similar to marketing a single-location business.
After all, the goals are the same—building awareness, sparking action, increasing sales—so the approaches should also be the same, right?
Wrong.
Though there’s plenty of overlap in tactics, there’s also something decidedly different about multi-location and franchise marketing. Success requires being aware of the particular pitfalls these types of businesses face.
Multi-location firms often make these seven marketing mistakes, which should be avoided at any cost:
1. You’re not localizing your web offerings.
If you have multiple stores or offices offering the same products and/or services, you might think it makes sense to lump everything together online and add a single page that lists all of your locations.
The problem is that search engines and other online platforms don’t get it. They want to serve consumers information for specific locations, as well as for the overarching business.
That’s why developing localized web offerings is so important. This doesn’t mean you have to create a separate site for every location—that can be a step too far—but it does mean that each one should have its own page, which includes things like the phone number, address, images, offers and reviews.
2. Your branding isn’t consistent.
Here’s where things start to get tricky: while you want each of your locations to have its own presence, it’s also imperative that your branding is consistent.
This matters for two reasons. First, you want to ensure that your brand value is carried across