Franchise, Multi-Location & Enterprise PPC Management Tactics

Franchise, multi-location, and enterprise-scale businesses benefit similarly from strategic online marketing. SEO optimization, quality content, and a well-orchestrated Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign can make all the difference in their online presence. Additionally (and importantly), it affects the ability to connect with target audiences.

These three types of organizations also have unique needs and face individualized challenges. Every day, our PPC experts at Big Leap tackle those challenges head-on with proven methods that get our clients the exposure they need. So, now we will share a few of our secrets to success! 

We’ll discuss the importance of proper franchise, multi-location, and enterprise PPC management, the hurdles organizations face, and the powerful tactics that help them overcome these difficulties.

What’s the Big Difference Between Franchise, Multi-Location, and Enterprise PPC?

There are similarities in business structure and how franchises, multi-location businesses, and enterprise-scale organizations can approach their online marketing. But, there are also key differentiators.

Franchise

A franchise has a primary brand that grants operational rights to individual owners, whereas physical locations may have different owners responsible for expenses, management, employees, supply chain, etc. 

There may be national brand marketing requirements with franchise PPC that require unique local qualities to capitalize on in paid campaigns.

Multi-Location

Multi-location could also be a franchise and an enterprise, but for the sake of addressing unique challenges and strategies, we’ll define a multi-location business as a single brand overseeing numerous different physical stores, each representing a consistent presence, structure, and approach to marketing. In this case, the same central company owns and operates all its locations. 

Multi-location PPC largely involves coordinating with the same central company entity to uncover unique opportunities for every location.

Enterprise

An enterprise is a large-scale corporation, often operating in multiple states or even globally. Depending on a company’s scope, it may have a headquarters, numerous separate departments handling different aspects of the business, and different kinds of products and services that all fall under the same brand to balance. Enterprise may be more complex and involve a higher level of logistical operations to make all of the moving parts work together. 

Enterprise PPC is unique because it may cover a wide range of services and products and involve multiple teams operating in unison while ensuring that all location-based ads are coordinated yet unique.

Understanding Franchise & Multi-Location PPC Management

Franchise and multi-location share similarities and have a few distinctions when it comes to a PPC specialist’s masterstroke.

Unique PPC Challenges for Franchises and Multi-Location Businesses

First, let’s look at some challenges franchises and multi-location companies present.

Local Competition

Your local competitors may benefit from similar geographical factors, like proximity to the same customer pool and even the same weather conditions. Your paid advertising campaigns are the most effective when your PPC experts can identify unique opportunities to differentiate you from local competition using words specific to your location.

Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization is a challenge that comes from having multiple locations of a business you want to promote online, and you use the same keywords for each location. The challenge can be particularly troublesome for franchises with national brand marketing requirements. 

Using the same keywords in PPC weakens the effectiveness of every campaign because you are competing against yourself for the keywords. This results in fewer click opportunities for every location, and the competition drives up the price of the keywords. 

Another related issue with cannibalization is that you miss out on more opportunities to advertise something unique about individual locations, meaning each ad is less likely to attract foot traffic from local audiences.

Centralized Strategies vs. Local Solutions

Franchises can be operated differently from one organization to the next. In some cases, the franchisor may have specific requirements for how each individually-owned location can market itself, both locally and online. With a centralized plan, each independent owner will rely heavily on paid marketing experts to find unique identifiers to bring in the right traffic without overpaying for more general, less effective keywords.

Suppose a parent company or franchisor needs more direction for online marketing. In that case, every store is left to its own efforts to market online, which can lead to inconsistent public perception, bad reviews in one town, and rave reviews in another. 

Striking the balance between visibility, consistency, and standing apart is one of the great challenges for franchises and multi-location businesses alike.

Unique Opportunities for Franchises and Multi-Location Businesses

For a franchise, it is important to coordinate with your PPC marketing team to identify unique attributes about your area. Is there a culture around local sports teams? Are there local landmarks? Does your town always host unique festivities or seasonal events?

PPC for franchises and multi-location companies can use several strategies that include the following:

• Adjusting ads based on time, weather, and local conditions
• Designing landing pages for specific local and regional messaging
• Using GPS targeting to attract highly relevant people near your location
• Using ad campaign metrics to fine-tune campaigns and ideate new strategies
• Coordinate ads with local sales, promotions, and events

For every individual location of a business, mobile advertising is a huge plus, because the target audience has their device with them and you can target foot traffic to steer them to your location.

Tailoring Your Strategies for Franchise and Multi-Location PPC Success

Not to brag, but one of our strong points at Big Leap is our PPC team’s ability to identify great keyword opportunities your competitors may not consider. By avoiding cannibalization, we also work with you to uncover details about your brand, location, and unique selling points to connect to a highly targeted audience.

Additionally, we work with our clients to make sure local destinations use real images of their stores and not a centralized stock photo. We make sure authentic local landmarks are mentioned in ad copy or landing pages, and we coordinate event-based ads that resonate with local audiences.

Enterprise PPC Management

Companies operating at an enterprise level are national and multinational organizations with hundreds or thousands of employees, often multiple branded products, services, or chains. 

Every vertical has unique audience demographics, performance goals, local niches to zoom in on, and countless potential layers of intricate details to synchronize with marketing objectives.

Unique Challenges for Enterprise PPC

The following are just some of the unique challenges an Enterprise PPC agency needs to be knowledgeable about to provide the best results for large corporations:

Budget Allocation

There may be hundreds of products to advertise, with different sales, branding opportunities, and seasonal focus. Applying the perfect balance to this in PPC means having a lot of control, confidence, and campaign awareness at every stage, learning what is working in campaigns and what should change continuously. 

This requires precision in allocating the PPC budget so there aren’t any weak aspects of promotion being overlooked. Where there may be budget limitations, it means learning quickly where the greatest opportunities are.

Data Collection and Analytics

Part of any successful PPC campaign is taking metrics, studying what works and what doesn’t, and adjusting the campaign to consistently lean towards optimizations that score hugely for clients. This is particularly challenging with the sheer scale of enterprise-level campaigns.

Integration

Enterprise companies use top-tier ERP and CRM systems to manage their front-end and back-end operations. They will often also want to integrate the metrics learned from PPC into their operations, which means making sure all those connections and external implementations are done correctly and continuously monitored.

Unique Opportunities for Enterprise-Level Organizations

One of the greatest challenges for enterprise-level corporations is also one of the greatest opportunities: diversity.

Because so many products or services are being managed, every audience represents unique cultures, languages, and customs. This means that operating at the highest level of expertise, your PPC marketing partner will labor to take advantage of every distinction to see that ads speak directly to each key audience. This includes regional messaging down to specific locations.

For enterprise organizations, strategy is national or even global, so it’s impossible to overstate the opportunities that can be uncovered by properly researching highly specific keywords, testing different group characteristics, and maintaining sensitivity and awareness of every region’s preferences. This is how the largest organizations can dominate their competition.

Strategies for Managing Enterprise PPC Campaigns

The key to managing a flawless PPC campaign for enterprise-level companies is using all the tools and features available and knowing what to do with the granular data available. The following are central to mastering this level of PPC.

Defining Campaign Goals

Staying on top of thousands of details in your campaign’s analytics and ensuring all bases are covered can’t be done at the highest level of precision without a highly focused plan of attack. Specific campaign goals are necessary for measuring success.

A/B Testing

In addition to diversifying campaigns relevant to every region and culture, gathering data about the highest-performing messages is essential. Compare images, ad titles, and ad copy so you can use the messaging that performs best.

Optimizing the Funnel

Don’t just design ad campaigns driving data to a single landing page. You can use messaging that moves your different audiences through your sales funnel, from awareness to an eventual sale. Create unique landing pages for different goals and demographics.

Using Negative Keywords

You don’t just need to be specific about the best keywords to use; you also want to be strategic about specific terms to avoid. This helps you get the most out of relevance for every campaign.

Focusing on Regional Opportunities

The greater the scale, the easier it is to miss unique opportunities. Identifying regional demographics to focus on can help you with keywords your competitors won’t think to use, getting you a lot more for the same advertising dollar. It’s equally important to know your audience at a local level, so your messaging is at its most vital for different cultures and regions.

Using the Power of Automation

Be detail-oriented and hands-on, but automation is a powerful tool when used correctly. Automate preferences to get the most from every campaign.

Using Retargeting/Remarketing

Remarketing lets you follow your target audience when they leave your ad or landing page, serving your message in secondary formats like banner ads and other online formats. You can continue to keep leads moving through your sales funnel over days and weeks.

Using Lead Forms

Lead forms can be used as an even more powerful version of email campaigns and form-fills. Lead forms allow you to gather valuable customer data without the user having to click away from the site they are on.

Take Your PPC to the Next Level with Big Leap

Getting the most from complex PPC campaigns is no small task. You need to align with specialists who aren’t just going through the motions with your marketing. You want a team that acts as an extension of your brand.

Every organization has distinct qualities and faces individualized challenges. Big Leap loves getting to know our multi-location, franchise, and enterprise-scale clients and aligning with them to develop successful strategies that are just as unique as their brand. That means we’d love to hear from you!

Talk to one of our PPC experts today!