Do you own or manage a multi-location business and find it challenging to implement effective digital public relations strategies? You’re not alone. Managing media relations across multiple locations can be daunting, and many businesses resort to generic brand awareness campaigns, overlooking the uniqueness of each location. While this may not seem like a major issue, location-specific campaigns could be the missing piece in boosting your brand visibility and improving search engine rankings.
Solidifying your media outreach and digital PR strategies for each location can help boost website and brand visibility, customer engagement, and credibility across all regions, driving business and increasing expansion even further. Multiple locations mean catering to varied customer audiences and local media outlets while ensuring your overarching brand messaging remains consistent.
Whether you are an e-Commerce website or a brick-and-mortar business, finding off-page search engine optimization (SEO) opportunities through digital PR strategies can help increase your website authority and enhance your positioning among your local competitors in search. Below are my six key strategies for strengthening digital PR campaigns for multi-location businesses. While some old tricks of the trade always reign true, such as being concise and timely, you will notice that regional considerations often prevail when planning and executing digital marketing as a business operating nationally or even globally.
1. Leverage local media and journalists
Expert Tip: When detailing your pitch, don’t include why it is important to your brand—in fact, don’t even include why it might be important to the reporter. Instead, state clearly how and why it will benefit their audience. Audience engagement is always the top priority for journalists and is what will make them consider your story.
When we think of media coverage, national coverage seems initially like the most valuable. However, when it comes down to garnering attention to your location, local media are crucial for reaching audiences that matter most to each specific location. Local media can be reporters, bloggers, and journalists who work in the cities and regions where your business locations operate. Building relationships with these key contacts and outlets can amplify your message at the grassroots level, contributing to overall brand awareness and benefiting your SEO rankings.
Start by building a list of your business’s top publications that you would like to target. This list should include industry-specific outlets as well as national publications that cover all types of breaking news and editorial content. Finding the most relevant contact at each outlet may take some more digging, but it is an important step to ensure the pitch lands.
Figuring out who is writing relevant stories for your business and services starts with tracking the daily news. This type of news tracking can be made much simpler by using tools such as Google Alerts and a variety of media monitoring platforms. Tracking the news for multiple locations at once can feel overwhelming at times; however, as you build working relationships with journalists, knowing where and when to pitch your story will become much easier.
Anytime you are doing cold outreach, tailor pitches to reflect the unique aspects of each location. For instance, highlight local community involvement, an important industry update, the impact of your business on the local economy, or even a feel-good story about a customer. While acquisitions, business anniversaries, and other similar milestones may feel like big news to your team, you have to always think first about what will interest the audience of the media you are targeting. Exclusive regional events and incentive offerings can help pique the interest of relevant media and, consequently, their audiences, helping to get coverage in a way that is beneficial to all parties.
2. Offer expert sources and exclusive interviews
Expert Tip: Keep your pitch short and sweet, detailing the story and who your expert is. Offer to connect them directly, and be sure to have your experts on standby for comment.
Everyone loves getting something exclusive; this is even more true for journalists who are operating in the 24/7 breaking news cycle. Providing exclusive interviews to the media when you have a new story to break or when an opportunity arises to add your expert insight can prove to be a powerful PR strategy. Be proactive, start your outreach early, and drop hints of exclusive data that is going to be published. When done right, this strategy is respected, and more often than not, a journalist appreciates the heads up and extra time to formulate their angle on the story. The resulting coverage also helps you build stronger relationships with the media, showing you’re offering them a competitive advantage.
When announcing a company update, an exclusive interview allows your experts greater control over the narrative, ensuring that key messages are communicated clearly. It boosts your brand’s credibility, especially if covered by a respected outlet, and can create buzz, generating anticipation and further attention.
In addition to traditional journalists, reach out to bloggers and podcasters who have a regional focus or an audience relevant to your industry. These platforms are often more willing to spotlight local businesses and events or even interview executives who can effectively tell your brand story and contribute to meaningful conversations within the circles most impactful to your industry.
3. Clean up your directory footprint
Expert Tip: “Make sure the information in your directory listings match up to your Google Business Profile. This ensures that all the pages would be optimized, which helps make each of your locations more visible on Google.” – Daphne Tse Millar, Digital PR Strategist at seoplus+
To have an organized and cohesive online presence as a multi-location business, you need to prioritize ensuring all information about your business is accurate. By scanning the directories that list your business locations (both local and national), you can audit and correct any old or missing information, subsequently cleaning up your online presence. Additionally, you can further enhance visibility by seeking out additional business listings that are applicable to your brand, helping to build your overall backlink profile.
For companies with hundreds of locations, prioritize a few each month, ensuring each location is properly audited.
4. Build backlinks to location-specific pages
Expert Tip: Have a representative from each location willing to speak with media members on an as-needed basis. When they are credited for their contribution, they are more likely to link to the specific location that the person works at.
A targeted backlink from authoritative websites can go a long way in enhancing local SEO and driving traffic to specific location pages. This boosts your website’s domain authority and can improve overall search rankings as well.
With any backlink-building initiatives, you want to focus on quality over quantity. Before you can start building out a strategy, look inward at the backlink profile of all your locations. Wherever your business is listed online, whether it be Google Business Profiles, directories, or shopping mall websites, you want to ensure there is a link back to your main page or location page that will direct customers to relevant information and that search engines can crawl. Starting your efforts by targeting unlinked mentions can be a lower-effort way of obtaining relevant and high-quality links when a specific location is mentioned in a story.
5. Craft hyper-localized press releases
Expert Tip: Add a dedicated media contact to your press release that will be immediately responsive to any inquiries. Ideally, this will be a real person from your comms team, not just a general information email address or phone number.
Contrary to popular belief, press releases are not dead to public relations campaigns and are an effective strategy to leverage for multi-location success. Before you head to the wire, it’s essential to tailor press releases not just to a general audience but also to the specific geographic regions your business serves. For example, if you are a global company working through the process of acquiring more locations or businesses, use press releases and localized distribution to help get the announcement in front of the right audience.
While national syndications of the release are a given with any distribution service, you should support this through targeted outreach to local journalists and organizations. If announcing the opening of a new brick-and-mortar location, consider adding an incentive within the release to drive traffic to your website and physical location. Whether it be a coupon code or an in-store promotion, offer something that will get people excited to try your product or service and make the media more likely to report on it.
6. Monitor and analyze media coverage
Expert Tip: When results come up lacklustre, it is worth taking an inward look at your messaging. Ensure it is engaging and relevant to your target audience.
Tracking media coverage and its impact on your business is essential to understanding the effectiveness of your media outreach and digital PR efforts. How exactly do you go about doing this? That question has plagued many PR, marketing, and sales teams.
Before you can measure the impactfulness of digital PR efforts, you must start by tracking mentions and engagement. Use tools like Google Alerts, Meltwater, or Mention to track media mentions of your brand across different locations. Take a look at the articles and assess their tone. Was the brand mentioned as positive, negative, or neutral? Are people engaging through comments, or was it shared on social media? How much traffic has passed through the webpage? Additionally, did the website include a link back to your company’s website? If not, you know what to do next (see 4. Build backlinks to location-specific pages).
Many tools can help track traffic, sentiment analysis, and social media engagement. Measuring these KPIs will help you identify areas for improvement and successful outreach channels. However, it is important to note that when positioning your brand in front of niche audiences, the relevancy of the audience trumps the quantity of viewers. A few of the right eyes on your brand will do more good than many irrelevant ones.
Over the long term, monitor which regions generate the most engagement and which tactics are most successful. Adjust your digital PR tactics accordingly, testing new strategies in already successful locations and trying successful strategies in more stagnant locations.
Conclusion
Optimizing media outreach and digital PR initiatives for multi-location businesses requires a blend of tailored local efforts and cohesive national strategies.
Media outreach, in particular, requires careful consideration of messaging, meticulously planned timing, and long-term relationship building. The initial effort in planning is what will bring in long-term gains from your campaigns over time. By leveraging local media and customized digital campaigns, businesses can create a powerful and consistent brand presence across multiple regions, often resulting in boosted SEO rankings when linking is prioritized. With careful tracking of results, multi-location businesses can enhance their reputation, build community engagement, and achieve sustainable growth.
Ready for less hassle and want to drive some results for your multi-location businesses? The digital PR team at seoplus+ specializes in creating tailored, data-driven PR campaigns that amplify your brand across multiple locations. From building strong local media relationships to boosting your SEO rankings with strategic backlinks, we help you craft a cohesive strategy that drives lasting results.
