A strong regional marketing strategy is a must-have for multi-location businesses. Research shows that 97% of people use the Internet to learn more about local businesses. Even more, 88% of mobile searches for local companies result in either in-store visits or a call within 24 hours.
What does this mean for multi-location businesses? First, implementing a regional marketing strategy boosts brand visibility. It also helps businesses grow their audiences and increase sales.
However, regional marketing can be difficult for a multi-location business. As a business owner, you may have to profile customers geographically and create targeted marketing campaigns. In all, it can be a lot of work.
For this reason, we’ve compiled simple but effective ways that businesses with multiple locations can implement regional marketing strategies.
- What Is a Regional Marketing Strategy?
- Why Is Regional Marketing Important?
- Benefits of Regional Marketing
- Regional Marketing Techniques
- How to Create a Regional Marketing Strategy
Drive results and boost your authority in the industry with this guide.
What Is a Regional Marketing Strategy?
A regional marketing strategy is a promotional plan that targets potential customers within a specific geographical location. As a result, you only target a population that’s most likely to buy from your business store in a particular area.
Regional Vs. National Marketing
National marketing focuses on a countrywide audience while regional focuses on a specific geographic area that may share characteristics.
For example, a national marketing campaign in the United States targets prospects in all 50 states. On the other hand, a regional campaign might target a specific state like California or a region like the Midwest.
A regional marketing strategy might go even further by targeting a group of states or cities in which you have physical business locations. For example, you could narrow down your target audience in California by focusing on cities like San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Why Is Regional Marketing Important?
Over the years at Goodway, we’ve seen firsthand how different markets–national, regional, and local–have different needs and characteristics. A marketing campaign that speaks to people living in Los Angeles will not resonate as well with people in a small town in Ohio.
Furthermore, the competitive landscape may change as you move into different areas. For multi-location businesses, your national competitors may not operate in specific regions, but you may have other local competitors to consider.
Franchises and other businesses that have multiple locations must consider how marketing changes based on geographical area and local culture. This is where regional marketing strategy comes in.
Benefits of Regional Marketing
Highly Targeted Campaigns that Drive Revenue
Regional campaigns only target people who can access your business store in a specific area. That way, you won’t target a general audience but a particular group of prospects with the highest potential to maximize marketing ROI.
Regional Marketing Boosts Brand Recognition and In-store Traffic
Add details like phone number, menu, social networks, and location to local business listings. It increases visibility, answers FAQs, and makes it easy for customers to find your business. Prospects can immediately call you or find a physical store location near them.
Regional Marketing Is Budget-Friendly
With regional marketing, you profile prospects geographically. This means you can identify qualified customer leads that are most likely to go to your store or make a purchase. Plus, you won’t waste ad dollars on audiences that are not close to your target location, making them unlikely to become customers.
In short, a regional marketing plan helps you know prospects better. With a targeted regional area, you can identify common pain points and develop marketing messages that resonate best with your audience.
Types of Regional Marketing Techniques That Work
Leveraging multi-location marketing, regional businesses can get better marketing results. However, you should also consider which channels and techniques make the most sense. Here are some of the best regional marketing techniques to include in your campaigns.
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising is an automated process of buying and selling online ads. It usually takes place in a system called Demand Side Platform (DSP). With this method, you can use one platform to advertise on multiple channels.
Leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence, programmatic advertising segments and targets a specific audience. It also simplifies creating a regional cross-channel marketing strategy by allowing you to work with dozens of ads simultaneously on multiple platforms.
However, programmatic advertising is more than just automating campaigns. You can save a ton of time that would otherwise be spent managing ad placements manually. Overall, it can improve paid ad performance.
Paid Search Ads
Paid search ads appear in search engines like Google when visitors search for specific keywords or queries.
Regional marketing campaigns often have location-based keywords. For instance, a barbecue restaurant that has locations in Kansas, California, and South Carolina can use the following keywords.
- Kansas – Barbecue restaurant in Olathe, Kansas
- California – Barbecue restaurant in Los Angeles, California
- South Carolina – Barbecue restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina
It’s crucial to use location-based keywords for two main reasons. First, they increase brand visibility whenever your business details appear in local searches. Second, they help you target highly interested prospects. The closer they are to your business, the more likely they are to visit or make a purchase.
Location-based Marketing and Geo-targeting
Location-based marketing is a strategy that leverages location data from devices like smartphones to pinpoint prospects’ interests. Interests include preferred restaurants, shopping malls, grocery stores, and other geo-location purchase-related activities.
With these details, you get analytics to profile your prospects based on their real-world visits to particular locations. That way, you serve potential customers with more relevant promotional content
How to Create a Regional Marketing Strategy
There are many elements to consider when creating regional marketing strategies, but they can be boiled down into five main components. To create a regional marketing plan that works for your multi-location business, follow these steps:
Step 1: Define Your Marketing Goals
Identify the purpose of your regional marketing campaign. Do you want to increase traffic in-store? Do you want to increase brand awareness? Defining your goal will help you prioritize which marketing efforts to focus on first.
It’s also important to outline measure KPIs or key performance indicators. How will you know that your marketing has been successful? To start, you’ll want to measure your customer acquisition costs and revenue.
Step 2: Determine Your Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is a detailed description of your ideal prospect. When you create buyer personas, they may include details like:
- Age
- Gender
- Education
- Job
- Location
- Marital status
They may also dive into particular pain points that customers face, shopping habits, and interests. Buyer personas can help you understand how to communicate effectively to target customers about your product and services.
Step 3: Choose the Right Platform
The right platform for your regional marketing campaign is where your prospects hang out. Where are they are most engaged? To determine this, you can ask questions like:
- Which social media platforms do they use?
- Do they follow a specific blog?
- What newsletters do they subscribe to?
- Are they watching television?
- Are they using streaming services like Netflix?
Once you have identified the platforms that your customers use most, then you’ll have a better idea of how to reach them. The next step is to define your marketing budget.
Step 4: Create a Budget
After you’ve established your marketing goals, you can nail down a budget. Use your goals to determine how much it costs to fund the marketing efforts and reach the targeted audience on the right platform. Here’s what to consider when setting a budget:
- Do you have historical data?
- If you’ve been running campaigns on various platforms, you may already have a sense of the conversion rates and cost per acquisition for your target audience.
- Will you be testing new marketing channels?
- If you are testing out marketing channels that you haven’t used before, you may not have a sense of what works and how much you’ll need to spend to be successful.
- In this case, set a small percent of your budget towards testing. Define a timeline for testing (usually 1-2 months at most) and assess if the channel is right for you before dedicating more dollars to it.
- What is your annual revenue?
- Your marketing budget should be a small percent of your gross revenue. This percent varies between companies and industries, and there is no one-size-fits-all answer. It can range from 7% to 11% or more depending on your annual revenue and industry–ecommerce companies tend to spend more.
Step 5: Launch Your Campaign
After considering all crucial factors, launch your regional campaign. Then, you can leverage pre-launch campaigns to test if the techniques work before investing heavily in the actual campaign.
How Goodway Can Help with Regional Marketing
It takes significant time and resources to manage marketing efforts at national, regional, and local levels.
At Goodway, we take the marketing burden off your shoulders so that you can concentrate on other core business activities. We have the experience necessary to streamline your regional marketing efforts and take your multi-location business to the next level.
Goodway’s skilled team of marketing professionals and robust tools help regional businesses manage their marketing. Contact us today to help you address your unique marketing needs and challenges.