The key skills required for multi-location marketers

How do multi-location businesses maintain brand consistency while catering to diverse local markets? To begin, they build a robust marketing team with a unique set of marketing skills, tools, and strategies. Multi-location marketers need to be able to act fast and think critically in order to ensure the success of multiple locations and the overall brand. In this article, we’ll highlight the essential competencies multi-location marketers need, highlight the skill gaps in the industry, and lay out a plan for multi-location businesses to build the strongest, most effective marketing teams.

How is multi-location marketing different?

Unlike centralized businesses with a single audience, multi-location businesses must balance two often competing priorities: local relevance and brand-wide consistency. This can pose challenges for marketing teams, such as, inconsistent branding, siloed data, limited local audience expertise, and scaling marketing campaigns. Multi-location businesses are also unique in that the marketing team structure can be centralized, decentralized, or hybrid, resulting in different roles and responsibilities than a traditional marketing team might have.

However, while it may pose unique challenges, multi-location marketing can be some of the most rewarding marketing because it requires the ability to work through a constantly shifting environment all while building a strong brand across multiple locations. As such, teams need to be equipped with problem solvers, experimentalists, data experts, and marketers willing to move fast.

The key skills needed for the modern multi-location business marketer

In the current marketing landscape, some of the key skills for any multi-location marketing team include the following.

Data and analytics – It’s first on the list for a reason. We live in a data-driven world and it’s vital to have someone on the team that knows how to collect, store, sort, and analyze data for the broader brand and for each location. Multi-location businesses have an added challenge of needing to personalize metrics for each location, resulting in a lot of data to manage and sort. If you don’t have someone on the team adept at data and analytics, you risk missing out on building impactful campaigns that get results across the board.
Social media proficiency – It should come as no surprise that social media is a huge revenue and brand recognition driver. In the age of social, a multi-location marketing team needs people that can build creative and impactful strategies and content. It’s not enough to post organically, often advertising on social platforms is also required, and unless you want to hire outside contractors, you will need someone skilled in this on your team.
AI knowledge – AI is here to stay, and the sooner companies engage talent that knows about AI and can work with different AI tools and data, the better. Increasingly, marketing is one of the industries that stands to benefit the most from AI tools, systems, and analytics. Multi-location businesses even more so with the sheer amount of automation and streamlining AI can facilitate.
Localization (SEO and Content) – Multi-location businesses need to be able to localize most marketing efforts to each location to drive traffic and revenue. Ideally, your marketing team will have at least one person equipped with experience in local SEO and local content. This is where a hybrid approach to a team structure will work best as it allows each location to help with localization efforts when given overarching direction from a centralized marketing team to drive the voice, tone, and themes of the content or the keywords and strategy for SEO efforts.
Critical thinking – When teams are decentralized, critical thinking is a necessary skill to prevent delays and ensure localization efforts. You do not want locations waiting on exact instructions, rather you want team members that can apply solutions to problems without needing extensive oversight or micromanaging.
Creativity – Marketing is one area where creative and engaging solutions can mean the difference between success and less than stellar results. Look for team members that love being creative and want to try new things. Not only will they bring a unique perspective, they will be able to engage different segments of your audience and create a relatable brand.
Cross-functional collaboration – If your locations aren’t learning from each other, something needs to change! The great thing about having multiple locations of the same brand is that they can share insights into what works for their audience and some of the experiments they hope to try. As such, all of your team members should be proactive in facilitating cross-functional collaboration rather than competition!

Current skills gaps in the market and how to overcome them

Just because your marketers need to have the skills listed above, does not mean they are prolific in the market yet. For example, data and analytics and AI proficiency skills are more difficult to find because they are constantly evolving roles that deal with new technology. However, just because you do not have someone on your team with these skills does not mean you need to hire for a role, nor does it mean you need to restructure. You have a few options open to you:

Hire an in-house expert – If you have determined that AI tools and systems are the top of your priority list for the next couple of years, consider bringing someone onto the team with specific experience in order to make that happen in a timely and efficient fashion.
Upskill current team members – Most likely, you have a great team of people that are willing to learn new skills. Give them the training and resources they need to learn about localization, AI, or data and analytics. Just make sure it aligns with their professional goals and they have the time to prioritize learning and applying the new skill.
Hire an external consultant or team – Outsourcing makes sense if you need expertise but do not want to add headcount. An agency like MDG, which specializes in multi-location businesses will be able to provide insights and guidance that you can take back to the team. It can be a very cost-effective approach, considering you get a whole team of experts working across your locations.

Multi-location businesses that build teams equipped with the skills above and proactively address skill gaps will be more likely to build successful brands. At the end of the day, it isn’t just about the brand, it’s about the people that make up that brand and bring it to life.