Listen, engage, connect: 3 steps for executing a seamless multilocation marketing strategy

Is your brand a large retailer with thousands of locations around the globe? Or a restaurant franchise spanning multiple geographies? Or a financial institution with many different kinds of agents and advisors working on your behalf? No matter what your brand's specific business is, your corporate brand and your distributed teams need to be working in lockstep. If not, you risk off-brand messaging, missed opportunities to connect with customers, and a disconnected experience for customers and your brand representatives alike.

As workforces become increasingly distributed, brands need to achieve a delicate balance: empowering local teams to engage customers on a deeply personal level, while also maintaining brand integrity. And while there are challenges to building your multilocation marketing strategy, there are also significant rewards: increased revenue, deeper engagement with customers, and a scalable, on-brand strategy.

Multilocation marketing strategies can vary widely from brand to brand, but there are a few things they all have in common. First, they need to listen and understand what customers and prospects are saying about their products and services. Second, they need to engage their audience on their preferred channels. And third, brands need to connect with customers on a personal level to build trust and loyalty.

Listen to and understand customers at scale

"Spend time upfront to invest in systems and processes to make long-term growth sustainable."
– Jeff Platt, CEO of Skyzone

Social media and other digital channels have created news to interact with customers. But, simply publishing on these channels, while absolutely critical, is also missing the big picture. These channels have become an always-on feedback loop about your brand, and social listening can help you:

• Understand your target audience
• Monitor your competitors
• Identify new business opportunities
• Stay up to date with the latest trends
• Identify what people are saying about your brand
• Protect your brand reputation
• Discover influencers in your space
• Improve your interactions with customers

For distributed teams, understanding how customers are engaging with the brand globally can help fuel multilocation marketing strategies. From understanding what channels are most effective to identifying competitive advantages that can be leveraged in a local market, listening data helps your teams understand customer behavior and how to engage more effectively.

Engage with customers quickly on their preferred channels

“Businesses adopting the ‘channel of choice’ philosophy and being prepared to respond with authenticity is paramount to advancing the client experience in today’s environment.“
– Paulina Dudzinska, Co-operators

Once you understand what customers are saying about your brand, it’s time to empower your distributed teams to act on that information. Without the right technology, this can be daunting and you run the risk of missing valuable opportunities to engage. But, with a distributed marketing platform, you can automate systems that help you build a flawless customer experience, both locally and globally.

The following features are essential for executing your multilocation marketing strategy:

• Shared repository of on-brand assets: While you shouldn’t overlook personalization, having a library of approved assets helps distributed workforces act quickly.
• Global editorial calendars: Giving distributed teams visibility into global campaigns is critical, enabling them to amplify your brand initiatives at a local level.
• Unified publishing capabilities: The ability to publish content seamlessly across the channels that matter most to customers and adjusted for local preferences.
• Governance and workflows: Automation and AI can supercharge your workflow, ensuring that content and messaging stays on-brand and in compliance across geographies.

Connect with customers personally and authentically

“You don't build a business, you build people, then people build the business.”
– Zig Ziglar

While your central brand team creates the high-level brand strategy and messaging, it is often distributed teams that can really help bring that to life in a personalized way. Empower your distributed workforce to engage customers and prospects in a way that creates a community around your brand.

A few years ago, the only way to reach out to customers was through local marketing with flyers and pamphlets. But, with the advent of social media and other digital channels, there are a number of ways to reach customers in an authentic way. Your technology solution should help you balance that personal touch while still being able to respond at scale. Here are a few features you can leverage:

• Unified Inbox: Help your teams find and respond to messages coming from different social channels, in one place.
• Campaign Subscriptions: Users can ensure relevant content is going out regularly and automatically, and that the content strategy is aligned to the central team’s marketing efforts.
• Stories: Source content ideas through listening based on users’ interests. These can help your teams create relevant “stories” of categorized content more quickly, and share it across teams.
• Brand-approved content: Share assets with local teams using asset boards, which allow your central team to restrict editing permissions to maintain messaging continuity, or to selectively share content across regions.

Remember, not all channels will be relevant for all your locations. Encourage your teams to choose brand-approved content to disperse on the channels that resonate most with their local/regional customers. You don’t need to be on all social channels, find a few where you can share your authentic voice.

Choosing the right technology for your multilocation marketing strategy

For this approach to work, your distributed teams need to execute their multilocation marketing strategy from a single source of truth. Doing so can help you share winning strategies and messaging with employees and brand representatives on the front line, maximizing the potential of your customer data and improving customer engagement strategies across your enterprise. It also helps you control brand messaging, get messages into market faster, and drive revenue.

Sprinklr Distributed is part of Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform, enabling your corporate and local teams to execute your marketing strategies as one brand. Enable your teams. Protect your brand. Ensure a consistent experience.

Learn more about Sprinklr Distributed and how it can help you execute your multilocation marketing strategy today.

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