The Multi-Location Marketing Show

In this episode, Matt and Elliot introduce a guide to track your progress and identify the maturity level you have achieved in the multi-location business world.

They get into:

* The six different levels of the Local SEO Maturity Curve

* How to determine which level you belong to

* How to use this tool to move forward with your multi-location business

In this episode, Matt and Elliot introduce a new method for organic visibility multi-location marketing. They talk about:

* Improving overall lead production at the local level without having to increase the budget

* How to measure the opportunities available in your market

* Getting into the minds of consumers on a local level to better understand how they discover your services

* Why traditional organic listings have a much broader reach than map pack listings

In this episode, Matt, Elliot, and Kevin explore various topics related to multi-location marketing, including:

* What clues do search engines look for in your website’s content to give you local visibility.

* What content can you put on your local sites to improve SEO, increase local relevance, get more leads, and get more conversions.

* The importance of multi-location businesses making their sites as organic and local as possible.

* Why cookie-cutter website templates don’t work for multi-location businesses.

In this episode, Matt, Elliot, and Kevin explore various topics related to multi-location marketing, including:

* Advertising through search engines and social media

* Appearing organic and trustworthy in your reviews

* How the value of reviews differs from location to location

* How local businesses and local users equate to higher visibility locally

* The impact of on-site reviews

In this episode, Matt Nickols (CEO of MarketSnare), Elliot Olson (Sales & Marketing Manager of MarketSnare), and Kevin Mullett (VP of Program Services) explore various topics related to multi-location marketing, including:

* What is the difference between subdirectories, subdomains, and standalone domains?

* What are the advantages and disadvantages of using subdirectories, subdomains, and standalone domains when deploying an organic program?

* How do you decide which option is best for you?

In this episode, Matt Nickols (CEO of MarketSnare), Elliot Olson (Sales & Marketing Manager of MarketSnare), and John Goddard (Business Marketing Consultant of Goddard Industries) explore various topics related to multi-location marketing, including:

* Should a business with multi-locations use a call center?

* What happens when a business has many locations, and an agent at one location gets overwhelmed with calls and orders? Will those leads be lost? What if instead of sending customer enquiries to individual locations, what if they were sent to a centralized place? Would that call center convert more leads?

* What are some effective communication strategies for businesses with various separate physical locations?

In this episode, Matt Nickols (CEO of MarketSnare), Elliot Olson (Sales & Marketing Manager of MarketSnare), and guest Ben Lack (founder and CEO of Interrupt Media) explore various topics related to multi-location marketing, including:

* How Ben’s other gig as a drummer led him to create a multi-location business, which then led him to creating a demand generation marketing company that caters specifically to multi-location businesses.

* The difficulties multi-location businesses face trying to figure out the best channels to invest money in that will drive the right kind of demand generation.

* Ben’s finding that, when it comes to multi-location business, marketing is usually entirely centralized at head office, or all marketing is done individually by each location. (Yes, there are some hybrid approaches. Yet generally it’s one of these two models.)

* Multi-location businesses working with virtual teams (such as a marketing agency) to accomplish their marketing goals.

* The benefits of working with virtual marketing teams. *

Thanks to Ben Lack for being on our show!

In this episode, hosts Matt Nickols (CEO of MarketSnare) and Elliot Olson (Sales & Marketing Manager of MarketSnare) talk with guest Robert Ducharme, Founder and CEO of Routezilla Software Corp. They explore various topics related to multi-location marketing, including:

* Ways home service businesses (think interior designers, pool cleaners, home garden services, repairmen, etc.) can create a unique conversion strategy.

* How multi-location business can find local leads and convert them.

* The power of a scheduling solution that efficiently and effectively connects businesses with new customers.

* The necessity of scheduling service calls so they’re geographically close to each other (so that your workers save time traveling between jobs).

* How we now live in an omni-channel world where customers expect to be able to communicate with businesses via various methods.

In this episode, Matt Nickols (CEO of MarketSnare), Kevin Mullett (VP of Program Services at  MarketSnare), and Tim Flint (Principal and Strategist at Flint Analytics) explore various topics related to multi-location marketing, including:

* Google Business Profiles (formerly known as Google My Business) can help businesses manage their online presence across Google Search and Google Maps.

* How the info in your Google Business Profile ends up in Google’s “map pack” that display after potential customers search for local goods and services. Plus how the “map pack” is only viewable after some (but not all) very specific transactional intent searches are conducted.

* How map packs often get around 30% of organic traffic, and the rest of the organic traffic (around 70%) usually comes from the normal Google search results shown on a page.

* Two questions people think about when they search for your local goods or services via Google: Is this relevant to me? Is the distance appropriate?

* The differences between informational searches and transactional searches. So, Googling “HVAC scams” is an informational search, and Google probably won’t show you a map pack. However, Googling “HVAC repairs” is a transactional search, and Google will probably show you a map pack.

Thanks to our guests!

In this episode, Matt Nickols (CEO of MarketSnare), Kevin Mullett (VP of Program Services at  MarketSnare), and Tim Flint (Principal and Strategist at Flint Analytics) explore various topics related to multi-location marketing, including:

* Paid traffic versus organic traffic.

* How too many local businesses focus too heavily on Google My Business (GMB), which is paid traffic, and not enough about organic traffic.

* How Google’s “vicinity update” impacts local advertising search results.

* Why focusing on Google’s Local Pack can be beneficial yet at times problematic. (The Local Pack is a search engine results page (SERP) feature that shows results on the first page of a search query with a local intent. Via Google Maps, it shows business locations and with listings of local businesses relevant to your particular search.)

Thanks to our guests!

In this episode, Matt Nickols (CEO of MarketSnare), Kevin Mullett (VP of Program Services at  MarketSnare), and Tim Flint (Principal and Strategist at Flint Analytics) explore various topics related to multi-location marketing, including:

* How sometimes marketers who work in corporate head offices unfortunately don’t pay much attention to what’s happening at the local level.

* If a few of your local businesses (e.g. local dealers in a national network of dealerships) are absolutely crushing it with great digital ads and organic visibility, how do you replicate that at scale?

* The pros and cons of allowing a local business (which is just one part of an overall multi-location business) to manage its own website.

* How the MarketSnare platform empowers businesses to build and manage dozens (or hundreds!) of localized websites that are unique, have local relevance, and build authority in local markets.

* The importance of creating truly local customer buying experiences.

* How the “Only Local Tickets” brand has various individual websites that cater only to various cities/regions, such as the “Only Indy Tickets” website for Indianapolis, the “Only Fort Wayne Tickets” website, the “Only Miami Tickets” website, and more.

Thanks to our guests!

In this episode, Matt Nickols (CEO of MarketSnare) and Elliot Olson (Sales & Marketing Manager of MarketSnare) explore various topics related to multi-location marketing, including:

* What the rising cost of digital advertisements mean for your multi-location business.

When it comes to local business listings, unfortunately there’s a ton of misinformation out there about:

* What business listings are.

* What multiple business listings can do for multi-location businesses.

* Why some business listings websites are important (and others are irrelevant).

In this episode, Matt Nickols (CEO of MarketSnare), Elliot Olson (Sales & Marketing Manager of MarketSnare), and Kevin Mullett (VP of Program Services at MarketSnare) do a deep dive into local business listings.

Explored in this episode:

* How does a business collate and manage accurate information for each of your locations or local representatives of your brand?

* Next, how do you ensure that all of that information is consistent and up to date on various business listings and review sites?

* Some sites (e.g. Yelp) are crucial to users in some parts of the country, and relatively unimportant in other parts of the country.

* Some sites (e.g. TripAdvisor) are extremely important to some industries (e.g. hospitality), yet unimportant to other industries.

* Various business listings websites and review sites, including Better Business Bureau (BBB), Yellow Pages, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google My Business, etc.

* Having accurate and consistent business data across multiple business listings can be a credibility booster.

* How do you influence Google's trust that you are a business and that your locations are where you do business from?

Thanks to our guest Kevin Mullett.

What is local social media management and why is it important to multi-location businesses?

In this episode, Matt Nickols (CEO of MarketSnare), Elliot Olson (Sales & Marketing Manager of MarketSnare), and guest Kevin Mullett (VP of Program Services at MarketSnare) answer that big question.

They also explore:

* How can a business do local social media at scale?

* How can a business efficiently use social media to reach local markets?

* What aspects of paid advertising and organic traffic should a multi-location business pay attention to when conducting social media campaigns?

* There’s a big difference between using social media to build your brand at the national level than there is using social media for brand awareness at the regional and local levels.

* Why do consumers often have more inherent trust when it comes to local marketing and local businesses?

* Facebook studied the effectiveness of local pages versus corporate pages. They found that local pages regularly outperform corporate pages.

* How can a business use it’s national/corporate marketing assets at the local level?

* Content and personality are two of the biggest factors when it comes to differentiating local social media versus national/corporate social media.

Thanks to our guest Kevin Mullett.

When it comes to marketing, how should multi-location businesses manage legal compliance issues?

In this episode, Matt Nickols (CEO of MarketSnare) and Elliot Olson (Sales & Marketing Manager of MarketSnare) explore various topics related to legal compliance and multi-location marketing, including:

* If you’re marketing across state lines, or across various counties, you should be knowledgeable about various legal concerns for each region.

* When it comes to networks of multi-location businesses (e.g. dealers, agents, franchises, etc.), it’s also important to adhere to what we refer to as “brand compliance.” This isn’t a legal term. To us, it means: Are the various representations of your brand across multiple locations in alignment? In other words, are your brand messages consistent across all of your markets?

* In certain industries, such as healthcare and financing, legal and compliance issues get complicated when a business is running various local websites and customized local marketing campaigns.

* The recent development of companies needing to provide ways for users to opt-out of their consumer data being tracked.

* Europe’s law on data protection and privacy, called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

* The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPR).

In this episode, Matt Nickols (CEO of MarketSnare) and Elliot Olson (Sales & Marketing Manager of MarketSnare) explore various topics related to multi-location marketing, including:

* Why is it important for multi-location and local businesses to calculate their return on investment (ROI) for marketing campaigns?

* How do you calculate your marketing ROI?

* Why it might be difficult to connect some of your marketing costs, such as building brand awareness, to your overall ROI.

* If you’re spending marketing dollars across various local markets, it’s important to calculate the return on all of your efforts to make sure you’re investing in all of the right areas.

* If, as a marketer, you know your ROI numbers, then you can help make the biggest impact for your organization and your local representatives.

In this episode, Matt Nickols (CEO of MarketSnare) and Elliot Olson (Sales & Marketing Manager of MarketSnare) explore various topics related to multi-location marketing, including:

* How can local businesses quantify their SEO efforts? Also, more specifically, what are some of the ways you can measure organic visibility?

* The importance of a local business running a local marketing performance assessment.

* How and why keywords rank across different markets.

* Understanding where your business lands on a search engine result page (SERP).

* How your ranking on a SERP dramatically influences click-through rate (which is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page).

* If your business is on page two of a SERP, you’re essentially invisible to potential clients.

* The importance of understanding your ranking date and industry benchmarks.

* How small businesses can maximize opportunities in local markets.

In this episode, Matt Nickols (CEO of MarketSnare) and Elliot Olson (Sales & Marketing Manager of MarketSnare) explore various topics related to multi-location marketing, including:

* In marketing, what is organic visibility?

* Organic search visibility is earned. You can’t pay to be there.

* How can a company get ranked high on results of search engines such as Google and Bing?

* Earned listings (which is another term for organic listings).

* The art of getting ranked higher is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

* Why local SEO is still relevant for national brands.

* At the local level, consumers are often searching for a category, rather than a brand. At the national level, consumers are more often searching for a brand.

* To local consumers, it often doesn’t matter if a national brand has a fantastic website. Local consumers are often more motivated to connect with local companies.

* How should a marketing team split their time and effort between organic visibility and paid advertising?

In this episode, Matt Nickols (CEO of MarketSnare) and Elliot Olson (Sales & Marketing Manager of MarketSnare) explore various topics related to multi-location marketing, including:

* The importance of marketing professionals imagining themselves working at various locations around the country. That way, you’ll see the various location-specific marketing needs of your representatives in a multi-location business.

* When you’re talking with your representatives in Colorado, Texas, or Indiana, ask them location-specific questions that will ensure your local marketing programs are successful.

* First you need to think about one local market only, and ask, “What do I need to do to dominate this local market?” Then, as you start putting some of those things in place, you should think, “Okay, how do we do this at scale? How do we do this in other locations?”

* The value of doing marketing intel at the local level. When you do a local web search, who are the top three or four listings in the search results? How are your local competitors positioning themselves?

* Doing a national customer analysis (e.g buyer personas, core value proposition, etc.), then breaking it all down to the local level. How does the average national customer look, feel, and behave compared to customers in Charlotte, Corpus Christi, and Colorado Springs?

* The necessity to tailor ads to different markets. For instance, you don't want images of mountains for ads showing in Miami, and you don't want images of palm trees for ads showing in Denver.

In our debut episode, Matt and Elliot do a deep dive into:

* What is multi-location marketing?

* What differentiates local marketing from multi-location marketing?

* What do marketing and sales professionals who are responsible for performance across various local markets need to know about multi-location marketing?

* What are the benefits for you, your company, your franchisees, and your local reps when you scale local marketing programs across many locations?

Matt Nickols is the CEO of MarketSnare. Elliot Olson is the Sales & Marketing Manager of MarketSnare. As co-hosts of “The Multi-Location Marketing Show,” Matt and Elliot will share stories that empower marketers to take control of local websites, business listings, reviews, social media, lead nurturing, and digital ads that deliver unrivaled results in each local market.

Also explored in this episode:

* How a company that had hundreds of different websites ended up butchering their brand at the local level.

* The challenges that marketers face trying to market products and services at the local level across various geographic markets.

* How doing multi-location marketing is a completely different universe than national marketing for a single-location brand.

* Why, if you’re operating in, say, 100 markets in the US, you need to customize and personalize how you market. Just think about how customers in Miami, Denver, and Minneapolis often have very different priorities when it comes to your products and services.

* How, with digital marketing and traditional marketing (e.g. direct mail, cable radio, etc.), it’s essential to make content relevant to a local market.