The Importance of Analytics in Your Multi-Location Local Marketing Strategy

As multi-location marketing professionals, we understand the importance of data-driven decision making. It is often said that the first step toward improving something is to start to measure it. Analyzing website traffic and user behavior at the corporate and local levels can provide valuable insights that can help shape our marketing strategies. In this article, we will explore the benefits of integrating analytics into your marketing strategy at the corporate and local level, and provide tips on how to get started.

Why You Need Analytics in Your Marketing Strategy

• Measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns: Analytics can provide valuable insights into how your marketing campaigns are performing. By tracking metrics such as website traffic, bounce rates, and conversion rates, you can determine what is working and what is not. This information can help you make data-driven decisions on how to improve your marketing campaigns.
• Improve Local SEO: Tracking search rankings of keywords across all your local markets is an essential element of improving SEO for any business. By monitoring the position of your targeted keywords in search engine results pages (SERPs), you can gain insights into how well your SEO efforts are performing in each local market. When you identify which keywords are driving traffic to your national and local websites, you can optimize your content to improve your rankings and attract more visitors. By staying on top of your search engine rankings at the local and national levels, you can make informed decisions about your SEO strategy and continually improve your visibility to prospective customers across all your markets.
• Understand your audience: Analytics can provide valuable information about your website visitors, such as their demographics, interests, and behaviors. This information can help you tailor your marketing messages to better resonate with your target audience.
• Improve your website's user experience: By analyzing user behavior on your website, you can identify areas where users are struggling or experiencing friction. This information can help you make improvements to your website that can lead to a better user experience and increased conversions.
• Identify new opportunities: Analytics can help you identify new opportunities for growth and expansion. By analyzing data on keyword rankings, search traffic, and industry trends, you can identify areas where there is potential for growth and develop new marketing strategies to capitalize on these opportunities.

How to Get Started with Analytics

1. Set up a Google Analytics account: Google Analytics is a free tool that provides valuable insights into website traffic and user behavior. Setting up an account and embedding the Google Analytics tracking code on your websites is easy and can be done in just a few minutes.
2. Define your goals: Before you start analyzing data, it's important to define your marketing goals. What are you trying to achieve with your marketing campaigns? What search keywords and topics is it important for you to be visible for? What goals are different for national and local marketing? Once you have a clear understanding of your goals, you can use analytics to track progress and make data-driven decisions.
3. Track key metrics: There are a wide range of metrics that can be tracked using analytics, but it's important to focus on the metrics that are most relevant to your marketing goals. For example, if your goal is to increase conversions, you should track metrics such as conversion rates, bounce rates, and average session duration. It is critical to track each keyword that is important to your business at the local level for each location you support because this is where the customer is actually looking to engage with someone who offers the products and/or services you do.
4. Analyze data regularly: Analytics data can provide valuable insights, but it's important to analyze it regularly to ensure that you are staying on track with your marketing goals. Set aside time each week to review your analytics data and make adjustments to your marketing strategy as needed. Again, it is critical to look at both national and local marketing efforts separately here because they are so different in overall strategic approach.

Integrating analytics into your marketing strategy can provide valuable insights that help you make data-driven decisions. These enable improvements to your marketing campaigns at both the national (brand) level and at the local level where you have boots on the ground, delivering your products and services. By measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, understanding your audience, improving your website's user experience, and identifying new opportunities, you can stay ahead of the competition and achieve your marketing goals. We encourage you to start analyzing your data today and take your marketing to the next level.

Marketing analytics can be a challenge for a single national brand to manage, let alone at the scale required for many locations. If you need assistance in implementing a scaled solution for managing local marketing analytics across all your local markets, feel free to reach out to us for help.