Planning Social Media Marketing Strategy for a Multi-Location Brand

Does your brand have more than one location? Do you require an improvised social media marketing strategy?

In this blog, you can find four steps to plan your social media marketing strategy and run your business seamlessly across all locations.

1. Strategize your global brand message

Extending your business in different markets (like counties, cities, states, or countries) means extending your digital footprints, too, to make interaction with your target audience. But should you be creating new social media accounts every time you move your business to a new place? Or does a global account work fine for you?

This directly depends on the size of your team. But even a small team can make a considerable influence with the right strategy. Whether it is regional or global, all your social media marketing efforts must link with your overall business goals of creating awareness and driving profitability. To accomplish this, you must have a single voice approach to online community involvement, promotions, and messaging.

Begin with a plan that focuses on the directives of your global social media and then communicate it to the regional or local teams. The global message must seize the goals, objectives, values, and missions of your brand, which will further help your teams to create campaigns and online promotions.

Structure your local/regional teams

• Assign roles as per team members’ strength. For instance, your team’s community social lead should be proficient in replying to comments and lead generations.
• Assign team members to your social media channels as per their understanding of the platform. Consider your team members’ skills and specialties to assign them to the channels when you have multiple markets/accounts.
• Assign team leads according to the regions they are acquainted with. A person who knows the culture of a particular region can connect with the target audience much better. Hiring a native speaker or local expert can furthermore ease the process for you.

When you have social media presence in multiple countries or states with cultural nuances and time differences, it wouldn’t be a smart move to appoint one lead for handling all the accounts. Even though there are social media scheduling and management tools, local representation of the global message matters.

2. Build local/regional media approach in line with your brand’s message

Research about the cultural variations in the region you are moving in or operating already. In case you have a multiple market strategy prepared already and still receiving poor engagement rates, it can be due to the overly generic messages you are posting across the platforms which your audience is finding challenging to relate to.

Examine your brand assets, taglines, and phrases. Even the simplest details, such as your brand name or color, may not be appealing in the local market because of certain differences. Start translating and researching your branding and messaging as much as you can. After that, you can decide if a change of name is required.

Start researching the local events, cultural celebrations, and marketing efforts of local businesses. With these insights, you will get an idea of where your brand is lagging.

Even the famous brand KFC had to change its name in Quebec, Canada, where it is known as PFK.

3. Choosing the right social media channels

Once you have crafted your global brand message, set up your local/regional teams, and made local/regional media approach around the brand’s message, it’s time to choose the correct social media channels.

However, in case you already have multiple social media channels and are still getting low engagements, you may want to do your social media auditing. Examining your social media marketing efforts will assist you to refocus your marketing efforts. Here are the things you should consider when auditing:

• Research the data available regarding the use of social media in your market and see if it sounds logical for you to operate multiple social media accounts for your brand.
• Research the demographics of your audience and the number of active users on each platform.
• Gain insights about how people are using social media platforms and see ways to optimize your content. Social media platforms update their algorithms often, make sure you are aware of them.
• Choose a social media management tool that lets you review the analytics of all your accounts from one dashboard. Monitor the performance of your current accounts.

While selecting a social media platform for your brand, take your business goals, audience, and best fit according to your brand style into consideration. You may not want to spend unnecessary time on handling social media accounts that are not likely to generate any potential leads. Instead, choose the platforms which fit the goals, style, and audience interest because that will give you greater output.

4. Develop campaigns and promotions for each region

Last but not least, decide how you will be developing campaigns and promotions for your target audience.

Try to recognize in which markets your messaging will come out as appealing and where it won’t. You will want to ensure that the brand sentiment, social media engagement, and business opportunities will fit your global social media plan. There will be some promotions that all of your audience will find relatable, and these will be better for global campaigns.

Keeping an end goal in mind, start running target advertising on social media. According to your campaign goal, you can decide to target a global audience or focus on specific regions only. Marketing can be tricky; therefore, spend wisely and look out for opportunities smartly. To keep your audience engaged, you need to promote your content around the clock when you have local/regional multiple social media accounts.

With brands that have multiple locations, following these simple four steps will help you prepare a sound social media marketing strategy that will help you run your business seamlessly. With the right plan and right approach, you will be able to maintain your overall business goals while interacting with your regional target audience simultaneously.