AI Resource Hub
AI In Local Marketing: Delivering Scale, Brand Consistency, and ROI
Liberty Tax leverages SOCi's AI to scale operations, boost SEO, and enhance lead generation. Their marketing team efficiently oversees 2,200 offices by providing national content, while empowering franchisees to customize local material. Liberty Tax has improved their customer engagement through AI-generated responses, ensuring quick and brand-consistent interactions with reviews and comments. The platform also simplifies the creation of localized content for each office, making it easier to connect with customers in their communities.
Liberty Tax Transforms Local Marketing Strategy for Growth and Local Success
For over five years, Liberty Tax has utilized SOCi to improve data consistency in managing online listings, leading to improved Google rankings and benefits for local franchisees.
AI In Action
For multi-location businesses, multiply that same set of tasks by hundreds, or even thousands, of locations. Now, it’s gone from a routine task to a daunting chore, especially when you factor in maintaining brand consistency across all these pages managed by different individuals.
Learn More About AI in Local Marketing
Integrating AI Into Your Local Marketing
By leveraging SOCi’s Local Pages and Listings tools, the retailer streamlined cross-team collaboration and ensured accurate, engaging store pages with direct links from Google Business Profiles. This approach personalized local store experiences at scale, driving more in-store traffic.
SOCi helped DICK’S Sporting Goods improve organic visibility for high-ticket items and seasonal campaigns, leading to a 74% increase in discovery search rankings, 97% of stores appearing in Google’s 3-Pack, and a 16% increase in website visits.
DICK’S Sporting Goods Dominates Local SEO Through Localized Store Pages
74%
97%
16%
AI In Action
Rankings Increase in Discovery Searches
of Locations Included in the Google 3-Pack
Increase in Website Traffic
Resources: Dive Deeper on AI Agents
AI Agents for Multi-Location Marketing:
Engaging Customers, Enhancing Visibility, & Reputation
If AI has changed the marketing game, AI agents are the new MVP.
You can think of AI agents as an extension of your workforce. You can assign them tasks to carry out, then have them report back to you on their results and findings.
Automatically update and optimize local listings to boost search visibility
Quickly respond to reviews and identify customer sentiment trends
Create and distribute content that’s on-brand and designed to resonate with a specific audience
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An AI agent, or agentic AI, is an AI-powered software system that can perform tasks autonomously.
AI agents can help local marketers do the following:
Establish Your Baseline by auditing your presence and performance on the most important digital platforms for local markets. For most businesses, this means anywhere your Google Business Profile appears, such as Google Maps or Google Search, as well as Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, and others. Depending on your industry, there may be other platforms you want to include, such as Tripadvisor for the travel industry.
You’re looking for two things: places where you aren’t present (no page for your business) or where you’re not performing (not on the first page of search results or in the Google 3-Pack). While it’s possible to do this manually, there are a number of tools that can do this for you, including SOCi’s own Benchmark Your Business Tool.
Ultimately, you’re trying to identify gaps: places where your business either doesn’t have a profile, or isn’t ranking well in search results. Increasing your presence and performance in these areas will be the key to bringing more customers in through your doors. Don’t be concerned about whether or not you have the resources to tackle everything, right now your goal is to identify as many gaps as possible.
1
Choose an AI partner to address your biggest priorities based on your audit. If your goal is to improve your reputation by lowering your response time to user reviews, make sure to choose a solution that can automate reading and responding to reviews. For further guidance, check out 10 Essential Questions Marketers Should Ask Their AI Vendors.
While it’s important to prioritize your most obvious needs upfront, it will only benefit your organization in the long run to choose a comprehensive tool that can assist with more than just one thing. For example, while analyzing and responding to reviews, you may discover a complaint about inadequate location information being posted online. If your AI solution is not able to stand up individual social pages for your locations and update them with relevant information, like business hours, you may find your AI overhaul at a standstill.
There may be a higher initial cost associated with more robust AI solutions, but the long term benefit to your organization will be greatly increased. Plus, a fully-integrated AI solution, which connects to multiple aspects of your business, will be better informed and able to take what it learns from your brand on social media and apply it to your reviews, and other aspects of your business.
2
Train your AI to speak in your brand’s voice
by exposing it to as much of your written content as possible, in order for it to learn. Then, have it begin its work under supervision, with a “human in the loop,” as the saying goes. Give it user reviews and evaluate its responses until it’s ready to directly respond to your customers.
3
Increase scope by letting it tackle more activities
until its responsibilities extend to the lower-tier priorities you identified in your audit. If you started it off on just reputation, now is the time to introduce it to search and social. The best AI solutions will not just benefit from the cross-fertilization of learning about your brand in all these different places, it’ll also provide assistance with branding and regulatory compliance. Soon it will become your business's very best brand ambassador.
4
Monitor and improve as you implement
As in step 1, analytics and reporting will once again be essential, this time to illustrate and quantify the AI’s impact. Now that your AI is up and running, your job is to monitor its performance across the board, looking for places to optimize. Now, you’re also prepared to respond to emergent challenges, such as adjusting to a competitor’s moves in the marketplace, or a change in a platform’s algorithm, as often happens with Google Search.
5
For a small business with a location or two, local marketing is a manageable but significant task to make sure your business has accurate information and looks open and inviting online. You create listings (such as Yelp and Google Business Profile pages) and social media profiles (Instagram, X, Facebook, and others) post accurate hours, welcoming photos, and respond to comments and reviews.
Schedule a demo to see SOCi's AI in action today, or sign up now for our AI Agent Webinar Series, launching in March.
Ready to Learn More?
Schedule a demo to see SOCi's AI in action today, or sign up now for our AI Agent Webinar Series, launching in March.
Ready to Learn More?
That’s what makes artificial intelligence such a perfect tool for multi-location local marketers, allowing them to scale their marketing efforts while saving effort and maintaining a personalized, location-specific approach. Multi-location businesses often face the challenge of managing marketing strategies across various regions with different customer demographics, preferences, and competitive landscapes. AI helps solve these challenges by enabling more efficient, consistent, and targeted marketing across all locations.
