SOCi Helps Franchises Master Localized Digital Marketing

Localized marketing is more important than ever and SOCi, Inc., an awardwinning platform built specifically for “next-level” multi-location marketers, wants to help franchises reach and engage the local communities they serve with its recently released 2020 Localized Marketing Benchmark Report (LMBR).

The LMBR is the second annual report conducted by SOCi and Localogy (formerly the Local Search Association), and was developed to understand whether a relationship existed between localized marketing performance, and real-world business results, SOCi’s Senior Director of Marketing Leah Linnet said during a recent interview from Austin where SOCi has a sales office.

Linnet said the 2020 LMBR, which released last month, has three primary goals:

• Establish standards for multi-location brand presence and promotion through top local marketing channels that influence modern consumer buying decisions.

• Quantify the presence and optimization of today’s top multi-location brands, thereby establishing benchmarks for practicing marketers through a scoring index of top performers.

• Analyze who scores above or below the benchmark, thus revealing a target list of best practices for multi-location brands.

Relationship between localized marketing and revenue

The majority of online search queries are now local or have local intent. Therefore, sites like Google prioritize local search results, which means franchises have to embrace a comprehensive localized marketing strategy to optimize all digital efforts to match consumers digital habits, Linnet said. This includes monitoring and responding to ratings and reviews for each business location, optimizing local listings to ensure accurate up-to-date information, and increasing social engagement on local pages.

For two consecutive years, the LMBR has discovered that franchise businesses that performed well in localized marketing saw substantial business growth, with the top 10 localized marketing leaders seeing average sales growth three times that of their less localized marketing savvy competitors.

Companies can use the 2020 LMBR as a sort of checklist for localized marketing they need to pay attention to in order to perform better, Linnet said.

“Every time I’m talking to prospects or customers, they’re all trying to understand what’s new, what they are missing, what they should be doing differently, and how the algorithms have changed,” Linnet said. “We’re trying to give marketers that perspective about all the digital aspects they need to be monitoring to improve their score.”

How a major franchise utilized the 2019 LMBR

One franchise that benefited greatly from the first annual report in 2019 was Sport Clips.

Chad Jordan, who is now Vice President of Business Development and Brands at SOCi, used to be Director of Digital Marketing at Sport Clips.

Jordan said Sport Clips used the 2019 report to determine that it was not doing well engaging with customers who were leaving positive online reviews, meaning that while it was receiving a lot of good customer reviews, it was missing a key component of online reputation – review responses. This lack of engagement actually ended up hurting Sport Clips’ locations in local search rankings.

“After looking at the 2019 LMBR, we made it a big focus to go educate our

“Every time I’m talking to prospects or customers, they’re all trying to understand what’s new, what they are missing, what they should be doing differently, and how the algorithms have changed. We’re trying to give marketers that perspective about all the digital aspects they need to be monitoring to improve their score.” - Leah Linnet

franchisees and give them tools, like SOCi, to set up notifications on their phones, so each time a location received a new review, the local user could promptly respond,” Jordan said during a recent interview from his home office in Santa Barbara.

“Sport Clips plans to once again analyze the data from this year’s report and take actionable measures to further improve upon our digital marketing results,” said John Musser, Social and Digital Marketing Manager at Sport Clips.

Similar to what Sport Clips did in 2019 and plans to do in 2020, other franchise businesses will be able to use the 2020 LMBR to identify gaps in their localized marketing and focus their strategies more, he explained.

For Sport Clips, it was important to capture that hometown feeling of having the local business owner communicate with customers in their local community.

As with independently-owned businesses, localized marketing is important for franchisees, Jordan said, to show consumers that when they spend their money with the franchise location, that money is staying within the community and helping a local business owner rather than leaving the community and going to some huge corporation.

“We wanted to send content to all 1,800 of our locations on Facebook, Instagram, and Google My Business, but we didn’t want it to look like corporate was doing it,” Jordan explained. “So, we were able to localize the messaging and schedule it for each one of the local pages through SOCi. Additionally, through our partnership with SOCi, we were able to place dynamic tags and location-specific information in the posts or content, so when it did land on a local page, it appeared to a consumer that the franchisee or business owner had posted it themselves, rather than something corporate did.”

The Report

The report examines how top franchise businesses are performing in the top digital channels covering local search, social, and ratings and reviews.

For the 2020 LMBR, SOCi and Localogy examined over 665,000 local pages from 251 brands and ranked each on a 100point scale. The scoring was awarded based on 23 ranking factors that cover presence, customer care (in the form of ratings and reviews), and engagement across the top three digital platforms for localized marketing: Google My Business, Facebook, and Yelp.

SOCi and Localogy audited, on average, 85% of a brand’s locations, and examined millions of reviews, comments, and other forms of engagement on Google My Business, Facebook, and Yelp local pages.

The 2020 version of the report was released last month, and companies can use it to help them see where they stand in terms of localized marketing and improve in areas where they are lacking.

Interested franchise brands with 50 or more locations can request their very own LMBR score, plus download the full report, from the lmbenchmark.com website at no cost.

“After looking at the 2019 LMBR, we made it a big focus to go educate our franchisees and give them tools, like SOCi, to set up notifications on their phones, so each time a location received a new review, the local user could promptly respond.” - Chad Jordan