August 3, 2023

The Power of CoMarketing Clouds: Streamline Collaborative Localized Marketing Efforts

Darcy Bickham

The Power of CoMarketing Clouds: Streamline Collaborative Localized Marketing Efforts

In the world of marketing, collaboration is of the utmost importance. Collaboration often leads to innovation, efficiency, and increased success. As a multi-location enterprise, you may think of collaboration as brainstorming sessions between corporate and local teams or working together within your team to develop new ideas and strategies. While this does define collaboration, what if we told you it could go beyond that? What if your marketing platform could assist with collaboration? Hint — it can! Within this blog, we'll introduce you to the comarketing cloud (CMC), explain how you can use it for collaboration, and share ways your brand can leverage a CMC to level up your localized marketing strategy. Let's get into it!

Introducing the Comarketing Cloud

Before we dive into how comarketing clouds can help improve your marketing planning and execution, let's define what a CMC is. As you'd expect, a component of the comarketing cloud is comarketing, which combines hard-working employees with finely tuned technology to the specific area of marketing they specialize in.

A comarketing cloud (CMC) is a single place where marketers can use to analyze data, make strategic and tactical recommendations, and automate processes — ultimately improving your bottom line.

For instance, SOCi's CMC is a single platform that can help you manage the three main components of localized marketing: local search, local social, and online reputation management. Additionally, a CMC provides a place for more efficient collaboration between humans and artificially intelligent technology to make more data-driven decisions and curate better content. Now that you understand what a comarketing cloud is, let's get into ways that it can help boost collaboration, which will ultimately improve your localized marketing strategy and its results.

How Comarketing Clouds Can Streamline Collaboration

While there are several ways CMCs can help improve collaboration, we'll discuss the top four ways.

1. Transform Ideas Into Action

When your multi-location business has brainstorming sessions with local teams, corporate, or a combination, you may develop great ideas to improve your marketing strategy. Often, these ideas get left on the back burner due to a lack of time and resources. Other items take priority, and these great ideas may never become reality. That's where a comarketing cloud can help. With a CMC, you have all of the tools you need in one place to execute a comprehensive localized marketing strategy. Whether your team develops new ideas for social media, local search, or online reputation management, you already have the technology needed to easily and efficiently implement those ideas. For instance, did you develop a way to templatize social media content at the local level? Implement those templates directly into your CMC. What about leveraging a third-party integration to connect your local listings with food delivery apps? The right CMC should be able to help you do so, as seen in the example below.

An example of Bar Louie's local listings with food delivery integrations

With a good CMC, you no longer have to let ideas stay as ideas. You can quickly implement them and start seeing results.

2. Automate Workflows and Processes

A CMC can improve collaboration by allowing you to turn ideas into a reality and streamline processes, giving your team members more time to collaborate. A comarketing cloud should automate some of the tasks that both local and corporate team members have done manually in the past. Take responding to reviews, for example. Without a CMC, your local teams might spend several hours a month responding to reviews a business location has received. If you can automate that process through a CMC, consider all the time you'll save that can be used on collaboration and brainstorms to improve current efforts and processes. This saved time can lead to increased revenue, which is every marketer's goal. For additional tips on boosting your brand's ROI through localized marketing, download our Guide to Localized Marketing ROI.

3. Leverage Content Collaboration

Speaking of doing the work for you, a CMC can also help you develop content ideas you may not have thought of previously. For instance, many CMCs can generate ideas for social posts, respond to reviews through artificial intelligence, help ideate and draft social ads, and more! How your CMC responds to reviews or some novel social ideas may spark a new idea among your team members. Many CMC tools also provide additional resources for your company to develop quality content. For instance, at SOCi, we provide numerous guides and long-form content pieces that can help trigger new ideas and ensure you're current on localized marketing best practices. Additionally, data like our 2023 Local Visibility Index, which analyzes how multi-location enterprises perform in the three main areas of localized marketing, can provide you with industry standards your brand should meet or exceed.

4. Utilize Data to Inform Marketing Decisions

Comarketing clouds can also contribute to collaboration through the data they provide. An impactful CMC will provide data and insights into the performance of the marketing efforts it is managing. Are you interested in seeing common sentiment trends from reviews across business locations? What about insight into which types of social media content are performing best? A CMC should be able to do this.

reviews-report-and-sentiment_Macbook-Air-2

So how does this data turn into collaboration? Your brand can take the key findings from the data to help optimize and improve current efforts. If there's a gap in performance between multiple business locations, you can look at what the higher performing locations are doing well and implement those learned practices into the lesser performing locations. Additionally, this data may spark a new marketing campaign idea or uncover opportunities you have yet to think of. You can then test those ideas through the CMC and track performance. Thus, continuing the cycle.

Find a CoMarketing Cloud for Your Multi-Location Enterprise

It's no secret that a comarketing cloud can take your brand's localized marketing strategy to the next level. While many solutions out there promote efficiency and collaboration, how do you find the right solution for your multi-location enterprise? When choosing a CMC, it's essential to find one equipped to handle large-scale operations for all locations, products, and solutions your multi-location enterprise oversees. CMC providers with experience in a specific industry or business type will have the most highly trained models for an enterprise's use case. That's where SOCi comes in. Through the use of advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning, the SOCi Genius platform provides multi-location enterprises with actionable insights and recommendations while automating their most important workflows at scale.

image of multiple devices showing the SOCi platform

From managing local social to local listings, surveys, social advertising, and more. SOCi has you covered. Additionally, we recently introduced Genius Reviews. SOCi Genius Reviews integrates our award-winning review response management tool with GPT-4 to transform how marketers respond to reviews.

Genius-Reviews-suggested-reviews

Genius Reviews combines cutting-edge AI technology, advanced on-brand training models, and leading localization and automation tools to deliver a highly customizable and automated system for managing reviews. For additional information on why SOCi is the right CMC for your multi-location enterprise, request a demo today!