The Evolution of Search and Social: Marketing Predictions for 2025 (Part 2 of 3)
SOCi Spotlight: ChoiceLocal’s Agency Perspective on Scaling Localized Content
The latest research shows that nearly 80 percent of consumers report that social content affects their purchase decisions. Social media is the first place most people turn to find or uncover more about a local business. Everything from your official social page content to mentions of your brand in social conversations affects the overall visibility and perception of your brand and can make the difference between your franchise location being chosen or passed up in favor of other options.
However, that engagement is no longer happening at the corporate level—everything is going local. In fact, 72 percent of brand engagement happens on local pages and 80 percent of those searching report being swayed by the opinions of others. A smart, locally-focused social media strategy, in platforms you can manage, can expand a brand's reach and create genuine connections to an engaged base of loyal customers.
As a part of this content series, SOCi sat down with some of our customers and asked about their strategic approach to different components of localized social marketing (LSM). Our hope is that other marketers can read through the answers and learn best practices from the multi-location businesses that are excelling in LSM!
ChoiceLocal truly understands the importance of having a localized social media strategy for the franchisee partners that they serve.
Q&A with ChoiceLocal
According to its website, ChoiceLocal is a local marketing agency, which helps franchises reap the benefits of a full suite of digital marketing services without paying exorbitant costs typically associated with a large scale franchise marketing agency. They offer proven strategies for franchise growth, including localized social marketing services. ChoiceLocal answered the following questions on the agency’s best practices for scaling localized social marketing for their growing base of partners. 1. Tell us about your experience using the SOCi Platform and how long you’ve been using it. ChoiceLocal has been utilizing the SOCi platform since the spring of 2018 with much success. Because of SOCi, we have been able to scale our social program and accommodate the franchise networks we serve with localized content every single day. SOCi is a fantastic platform for our needs – everything we do at ChoiceLocal is about localization, replication of success, and customer results. 2. What were your main challenges before you started using SOCi? Prior to implementing SOCi, we were scheduling individual posts to every single page that we manage, one at a time. We needed each link to be customized to the individual location of the franchisee partners we serve. To do this natively, it took our team hours and hours and created additional challenges with reporting. 3. What have been the greatest benefits you’ve received from using the platform? And what is your favorite part of the SOCi offering? SOCi has allowed us to scale our social media packages without creating a significant increase in workload for the social media team. The dynamic text capabilities have been invaluable to us and we use it both for localizing the content and for pushing out local URLs with every post. 4. Tell me about what surprised you the most or made you the happiest about using the SOCi platform? The intuitiveness and ease of use of the SOCi platform was a wonderful surprise. On the rare occasion when I cannot figure out what I’m doing on my own, I have a very supportive account rep and the SOCi University provides additional DIY training and assistance. 5. SOCi defines Localized Social Marketing (LSM) as marketing efforts that focus on building a local presence for a business, leveraging locally-driven communication channels to reach the specific local communities it serves (rather than a broad/national approach). Based on this description, do you see localized social marketing (LSM) as a key area of focus in your marketing mix today? Why or why not? Localization is literally the reason SOCi is the best and right platform for us. We cannot provide the agreed upon localized content to our partners that we serve without it. 6. When thinking about the areas of LSM, which include local profile pages like GMB, review sites like Yelp and local social pages on site like Facebook - are these areas generally managed or maintained centrally by your agency, or decentrally - meaning these assets are managed by individuals at the business level or a hybrid of the two? All social media profiles for our partners are managed through SOCi. Because the bulk of our clients are SEO-specific, we still natively use GMB for all of the Google listings management and we have an external vendor to do local listings management. The SOCi platform is specifically segmented to our social needs because internally, the social department is completely separate from SEO and PPC. 7. Based on the above-mentioned management approach what are some key challenges or issues you are facing in your LSM program? Prior to SOCi, we did employ a LSM strategy, but we struggled to localize the content for dozens of clients’ social media accounts. At that time, we had about 32 partners signed on for social services and we had to schedule content natively for each individual page to achieve the localization we promised. With SOCi, we were able to scale from 32 locations served to more than 130 in just over a year. 8. Please rank the following areas of LSM on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being not at all important and 5 being critically important to your business:- Local Ratings & Reviews
- Local Search Pages like Google My Business (GMB)
- Local Social Pages like Facebook
- Localized Content on the above-mentioned pages
- Quick response to consumer questions and reviews