The Commercial Benefits of Local Social Media for Multi-Location Businesses

Nobody is doubting the value of social media as Forbes highlight in this article. Being able to reach consumers in your local community organically with promotions, offers or even just sharing how your business contributes to the local community is a very valuable asset. 

So, social media marketing is a valuable tool for businesses, but how does that scale up when we look at multi-location businesses, like Franchises or Symbol groups? Historically, due to the scale of these businesses, it’s been difficult to manage local social media, but times have changed.

It’s only recently that tools like SocioLocal’s have become available to make social media management for multi-locations, well, manageable. For those of you who are yet to implement a local strategy on social media, I’d read this ->  Challenges to supporting social media for franchisees

Growing your brand equity in your local community is undoubtedly valuable, but how do we measure the impact of local social media marketing? When social media was evolving, the initial indicators that we looked to were CPC, impressions and engagements. We aren’t saying this isn’t important, of course it is, especially at a brand level for brand marketing teams in head office. 

The question is slightly shifting with new tools available to leverage each store's local presence, by doing local social media marketing; What is the commercial impact of utilising local social media marketing?

Likes, Comments, Shares, Reach, and Impressions are great…but what’s it doing for the business, both for the brand at a head office level and for the franchisees? 

We are going to cover 3 commercial gains multi-location businesses can expect from implementing a local social media strategy. We are going to look at time, organic reach and the impact of local advertising on your marketing budget. 

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“Lost time is never found again” Benjamin Franklin

That’s right, we have all heard the phrase, time is money. If a franchisee business with 100 locations used a tool like SocioLocal they would save their franchisees 

150 days in direct time savings, at minimum wage this is €40,680. 

So what’s the math on this? Our customers typically see a 200% increase in local franchisee posts, this roughly translates to an additional 12 posts a month per franchise. So for 100 franchise outlets.

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1,200 posts per month, multiplied by 15 minutes which is the average time for a franchisee to create a post from scratch and then calculate it annually and BINGO. That is a lot of time and hassle removed from Franchisees' lives. But what about the value it brings to the marketing team? Well, we’re glad you asked…Onto commercial point number 2:

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“I’m sticking to the script, I’m putting that organic feeling back in the game” - Kendric Lamar

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So, let's break it down. Reach in social media can’t be paid or organic, Forbes’, Victoria Zalefsky has written a great article explaining the difference. 

With organic reach becoming harder to achieve in the last number of years through brand pages, local social media marketing via tools like SocioLocal’s give a brand the ability to increase their organic reach  at a local level, and if we can increase organic reach, we reduce the need of paid reach. 

So for 100 franchise groups those additional 12 posts, we see translate to:
10.6 million in organic reach per year added, if this was to be achieved via paid ads it would cost a staggering €76.4k a year based on Facebook's average paid reach per 1,000 people. 

So, to summarise so far, you can reduce franchisees' time needed to be active locally on social media and help them better engage their community. As a brand you can reach more people organically at a local level, for a fraction of the cost of what paid reach would deliver….not too shabby! Calculate the reach for your business and its location on our social media calculator. 

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We’re not done yet though; so we’ve spoken about paid and organic reach, but how can local social media marketing benefit paid reach, or can it?

You bet it can!

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“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”-Mark Twain

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So how can paid reach benefit at a local social media level for franchisees, well it’s simple really. Just like turning a brand page post into 100 local page posts the same logic applies to advertising.

With advertising tools built for multi-location businesses, you can run social media ads through the local social media pages for those locations. This distribution of the advertising budget leads to an increase in advertising performance. 

Not only do you get the benefits of ads being run locally from the local pages and consumers seeing ads from the location that is relevant to them. 

You get a reduction in Cost Per Click and IPM (Impression per 1,000 people). 

So how does this stack up when we run the test through our 100-location franchise group? If you wanted to spend €10 per month per location you would reach an additional 6 million people a year for a cost of €12,000.

If you wanted to reach that number of people through your brand page it would cost you €43,140.

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So let’s summarise

In short, when a local social media strategy is utilised across a multi-location business the commercial impacts are:

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• Automate local social media for your locations whilst saving them time and money
• Increase the organic reach of your brand at a local level and reduce your reliance on ad spend
• Deliver ads through the voice of your franchise pages while maximizing your ad spend budget and reducing CPC

If you want to hear more about how local social media can benefit your business and it’s locations, Book a Demo