Convenience Marketing: The Key to Dominating Your Industry

With so many distractions online, it is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to stand out to consumers. As a multi-location marketer, where should you spend your time and resources to reach your target audience? The answer is all about convenience. Consumers like to get answers and information without putting in a lot of time and effort. This is where local search comes in. Throughout this blog, we'll look at what convenience marketing is, how you can leverage local search to market effectively, and why it's essential for your multi-location business.

Convenience Marketing and the Buyer's Journey

A comprehensive local search strategy provides consumers with the convenience consumers expect. When looking at the buyer's journey, convenience usually comes into play somewhere between the consideration and decision phase. Consumers already know what product or service they need, but they want to make sure they are getting the best value. When deciding to make a purchase, there are several factors consumers consider, including:

Ratings and reviews around the business or service
Location of the service or product
How easily they can communicate with the company to answer any questions
Ability to search for business information

As a multi-location business, your job is to make the consumer's decision easy, and this can be done through a focus on local search.

Local Search: Where to Focus Your Efforts

While your multi-location business may already have a local search strategy in place, is it meeting consumers' expectations? There are a few areas to consider when deciding where your business should focus its search efforts.

Reputation Management

Does your business have a reputation management strategy in place? Eighty-eight percent of consumers now trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Similarly, 95 percent of consumers say online reviews influence their buying decisions. If your business doesn't have reviews for consumers to read through when they're deciding whether to purchase your product or service, you’re missing out on a huge influential factor in the buyer's journey. Our 2021 Localized Marketing Benchmark Report (LMBR) analyzed more than 275 top multi-location businesses and found where they were succeeding and where there's room for improvement in reputation management. Data from the report found that, on average, leaders in localized marketing have an average star rating of 4.2 stars across Google My Business (GMB) and Facebook and an average of 3.2 stars on Yelp. When looking at review volume, businesses received an average of 303 reviews per location on GMB and 65 per location on Facebook. Is your multi-location business reaching or exceeding these averages?

Responding to reviews is something to consider as well. Responding to reviews shows the consumer that you value their experience. While your business should aim to respond to all of the reviews each location receives, that's not always feasible. Negative reviews should be responded to first in a personalized manner that addresses the customer's comment. If your business is trying to determine how many reviews to respond to, the 2021 LMBR also found that, on average, companies responded to 31 percent of reviews on GMB, 26 percent on Facebook, and only 13 percent on Yelp. As a general rule of thumb, though, the more reviews responded to, the better.

Local Listings

Local listings are also a key component of providing your consumers with convenience. Accurate and consistent listings on Google lead to improved rankings on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), drastically increasing the likelihood that your multi-location business will appear in relevant search results. As a multi-location marketer, it's your responsibility to ensure that each of your business locations have claimed and optimized its local listings with the most updated business information. Not only will it help your rankings on Google, but it will also provide consumers with any information they need about your business. For instance, rather than going to your website to get your business's contact information or address, the consumer can get the information directly from your business's local listings, providing more convenience. When it comes to local listings, the 2021 LMBR guides the way. The report found that, on average, leaders in localized marketing had an impressive 97 percent of local listings claimed on Facebook, 94 percent on GMB, and only 80 percent on Yelp. Again, your multi-location business must meet or exceed these averages to compete and stand out as an industry leader. With a solid local listings and reputation management strategy, your multi-location business is on its way to dominating local search and giving consumers the convenience they crave.

Start Gaining More Online Visibility and Win More Sales

Now that you have the knowledge needed to crush convenience marketing, it's time to get started, and SOCi is here to help. When it comes to managing your reputation across 100s or even 1,000s of business locations, the thought can be overwhelming. That's where SOCi comes in. SOCi Reviews allows users to view every action taken on reviews and monitor every activity on social media. Now, your local, regional, and corporate teams will always know which reviews and social engagements are addressed and which ones still require attention to ensure the prompt responses consumers expect. Maintaining a winning reputation becomes a lot easier with SOCi Reviews.

While you have your reputation management struggles solved, what about your local listings? SOCi Listings has you covered. SOCi empowers you to manage your business listings at scale and effectively optimize your online presence and local search rankings. From syncing, updating, and managing your local listings to custom audits and profile recommendations, SOCi Listings covers every step of the process to launch your listings to the top of search results. As a multi-location marketer, you'll never have to worry if a local listing is updated and accurate again with SOCi Listings.

Between SOCi Reviews and SOCi Listings, your multi-location business should have everything it needs to dominate convenience marketing. For more information on how SOCi can help you crush other aspects of your localized marketing efforts and win more sales, request a demo today!