Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #66: How Your Marketing Changes when You Grow Your Geographic Market

Chris Raines: Hey there. Welcome to episode 66 of the Dodgeball Marketing Podcast. My name is Chris and this guy's name is...

Michael Utley: Michael.

Chris Raines: How you doing man?

Michael Utley: Good.

Chris Raines: Let's talk Michael, about the topic that we've decided that we're going to talk about, and that is businesses that are expanding into other markets regionally.

Michael Utley: Yeah. How your marketing changes when you grow geographically.

Chris Raines: Yeah. So this happens all the time. So you have a tanning bed business in Memphis and you want to open that same tanning bed business, maybe in-

Michael Utley: I'll never market tanning beds. Yeah.

Chris Raines: Maybe you're a divorce lawyer in Memphis. I'm just kidding.

Michael Utley: Oh come on, give me something good.

Chris Raines: Will do.

Michael Utley: Maybe you're a commercial, industrial flooring company.

Chris Raines: Commercial flooring company.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: In Memphis. And you want to open up your market to Nashville?

Michael Utley: Yeah. Or you're moving into Chicago.

Chris Raines: Yeah. Chicago anywhere.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: We're going to talk about what you should think about in terms of your local marketing, both on your organic listings, your citations and your links, and all that. And your Google My Business listing.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: So this is all things you should plan for, is a lot of new stuff that needs to get created, a lot of things that need to get changed on various platforms to properly portray you as a Nashville commercial flooring company instead of just a Memphis flooring company.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: So let's talk about it. First thing we're going to talk about is considering how you look now in terms of your current service area and your placement-

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: In search engines.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Yeah. So number one is get a baseline, understand how you're currently present in search engines, so we can for the sake of simplicity, limit this discussion to Google and we'll reference Google a few times. But actually, this applies to Bing and any other search engines.

Chris Raines: Ask Jeeves?

Michael Utley: Yeah. Yahoo. But yeah, for 80% of market share, it's going to be about Google.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: So yeah, you can do things like go out to Google My Business. You should already be doing things like claiming your business listing in Google Maps. You should also be making sure that you have a full and complete profile of your business, hours of operation, URL, description, images on platforms like Google My Business, Yellow Pages, Yelp. And so if you've been listening to the podcast, doing SEO work, search engine optimization, you've probably got some of those bases covered. But if you don't, it's a good time before you get started on expanding to another geographic area of the country, to have a sense of what you're doing.

For our clients that are highly regional, maybe they start off serving two or three states in the United States, we'll have often a full slate of activities that we're doing for those states that they're in. This will include Google My Business, for every office listing, those directories. And then when they're expanding to add more states, we're understanding, okay, what kind of office presence you're going to have. And then taking a look at what we're going to add in terms of those tactics. But yeah, knowing where you are and just getting a snapshot of that before you start an expansion is a really good best practice.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: And that way you've got a before and after to compare, after you do some work and expand.

Chris Raines: Yeah. Awesome. Michael, I want to hear from you, what should people think about in terms... Let's go by our Memphis flooring company.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Expanding to Nashville when hit the national market, in terms of their website, let's talk about new content on their website or how they display things like their service area on their website. What should our Memphis flooring company Epps Flooring think about when they want to expand to Nashville? What new stuff?

Michael Utley: So I think this is a real common... I mean, we work with companies typically that are growing. They're investing in marketing, we're bringing in new leads, new business, new patients. And so it's very common for us to have... Even a real-world example would be a company right now with two locations in Colorado, expanding nationwide over a upcoming year or two. And so for them, it was easy on their website to have the office location and the header of the website. Well, suddenly when we're thinking about architecturally, how are we going to have five or 10 and addresses in that header? Well, we can't do that. And so we need to change the layout of the website. We need to think about header and footer, and it's good to have as much helpful information like that as you can, as close to the consumer as possible. So if you have two or three locations, I think it's good to have those in the footer. But once you get above that five to 10 locations mark, you've got to throw to a locations page. And something that I think is good, no matter what-

Chris Raines: Or sometimes a find your location, if there's a lot of locations.

Michael Utley: Sometimes an app, if you've got... We work with a company that has a hundred locations across the United States. We do marketing for all those hundred storefronts and so that is a real different animal. So for them to have a location finder is just a really different... Then it's user interface design, but something I think, no matter how many locations there are, is good for search engines is a standalone page on your own website for each location.

Chris Raines: Okay. Follow-up question here.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Expanding to Nashville. Nashville is of course Nashville, but it's also Brentwood it's also some of the outlining it's also Antioch, it's also some of these outline regions.

Michael Utley: That's right.

Chris Raines: So do we need pages for each one of those call them smaller, maybe neighborhoods is not the right word, but smaller regions within the greater Nashville area?

Michael Utley: Yeah. I would take a two-tier approach to this. So if you have a new office opening up, that's a new, what I would call a map pin, that's going to go in your Google My Business profile. But if you have a new service area open up, that could be a little different, because your street address is one thing, but your service area is something else. So when we're thinking about either that office location page or that service area page on your website, I would make sure that you have all of the local and colloquial identifiers included on that page. So in our example of the flooring company spreading from Memphis to Nashville, Tennessee is broken up into three geographic regions. We don't say Western Tennessee, it doesn't mean that way. What it means is everything from the Tennessee river over to the Mississippi river, that is a geographic region known properly as West Tennessee.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: And so I would have phrases in the one... Nashville, middle Tennessee. If they service an area outside of Tennessee, I would include Mid-South. And if they service all of middle Tennessee, I would say, have a list of cities served and include things like Nashville. I would have number one, Nashville, but then I would go Brentwood, Green Hills. And I would even do neighborhood listings like Cool Springs, because some of your higher value, growth, and new office buildings, it's not even are in Cool Springs.

Chris Raines: And that's not even a municipality, that's just a region.

Michael Utley: It's not even a real city but they've got their own chamber of commerce. If it's got its own chamber of commerce, it needs to be a headline on your page.

Chris Raines: Right. Yeah.

Michael Utley: And so yeah, I would list all those municipalities and colloquial identifiers that people use.

Chris Raines: Awesome.

Michael Utley: You want to use the language of your audience, whatever they're using to identify where they are is what you want to have listed on that location page.

Chris Raines: Awesome. Let's talk about-

Michael Utley: Oh wait. And the second tier is once you do all that, it's okay to consider standalone pages for each of those locally identifiers.

Chris Raines: But don't prioritize those. Lower input.

Michael Utley: Yeah. I wouldn't do that first, but yeah, long term, it's okay to have standalone pages. You're not going to link to them or make a user work their way through them to get help, but you can have a hundred of those pages created and indexed, and they're going to be number one when somebody looks up Cool springs flooring contractor.

Chris Raines: Yeah. Right. The three people that search for that in a quarter.

Michael Utley: Yep. And all those three people are all absolute gold in terms of sales leads.

Chris Raines: Awesome. Okay. Let's talk about the Google My Business or Google Maps listing. So we're in Memphis moving to Nashville, we're going to need a new pin in the map that's attached to that business.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Now is that a different Google My Business profile or is that a sub-profile under the main one?

Michael Utley: Yeah. So you have an interesting situation with Google, it's changed a lot over the last couple of years. So what we do, I don't know if I know the answer to that question, if it's a different profile. I can't remember, I'd have to check and let you know.

Chris Raines: I think it's a different location, but you're still an admin of all locations.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Taco Bell has hundreds and hundreds of profiles.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Hundreds.

Chris Raines: They all roll up onto one brand, but it's not like a sub, they're all their own profiles, with their own ratings and their own reviews and all that stuff.

Michael Utley: Yeah. So the key for me is making sure... So there's always a little bit of a gap between people making decisions inside our company and then whoever's executing that data to all of the Google My Business listings. What I would do is have all of this discussion internally in one spreadsheet. So I would have a spreadsheet where you have a column with the street address and then another column with the stated service areas. And then make sure you have a separate Google My Business listing for each of those office addresses, where you are correctly loading the service area. And it's not the end of the world of some of those service areas overlap, but you want to make sure that you've got a clear understanding. So for example, we have a client in Boston that with their Boston office serves all of Massachusetts, but they have a handful of other offices in the state as well.

And so how should they do that? Well, they have to decide what the services are and what the service areas are for that office and make sure those are loaded correctly to Google My Business. And then just decide how to handle the other locations. And so yeah, this stuff gets really tricky, but my big piece of advice is load it all in a spreadsheet, look at it all in one view, because once you're popping in to different accounts, you're not seeing it all in one place at one time. And so yeah, you're probably going to end up with one admin view with all those map pin listings.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: And then for each of those map pins, you're going to have selection of services and selection of service areas.

Chris Raines: Yep. And so do both. Do the pin and the service area.

Michael Utley: Yeah. I would have all that in a spreadsheet and make all the decisions before it's handed off for implementation.

Chris Raines: Yeah. One other thing I thought of, is not really on our list here, is phone numbers.

Michael Utley: Oh yeah.

Chris Raines: So you're expanding from one location to two from two to three...

Michael Utley: Two different area codes as well.

Chris Raines: Area codes.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: And if you're two locations, it's simple, here's the Memphis office number, here's the Nashville office number. But as you grow and as you expand into other territories, you might not want to have eight phone numbers.

Michael Utley: The trade-offs-

Chris Raines: Obviously at the low end, I would say adding the phone number is a step you need to take to communicate, yes, we service this area.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: And then at a certain point, roll that up into a singular number that one person answers, right?

Michael Utley: Maybe. It depends on the business.

Chris Raines: Okay.

Michael Utley: I would say that's true, I don't know, maybe half the times. But I actually go the other direction, I would say having a local phone number on each location page that is also the number that's on the Google My Business listing for that location, I think that's [crosstalk 00:11:54].

Chris Raines: Or a contact page that lists the locations, like which ones you want to contact.

Michael Utley: Yeah. I mean, you could have that maybe in addition to, but I would have the phone numbers on each location page. I'm treating every page on the website like it could be the first and last page someone sees.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: So if someone searches for Cool Springs commercial flooring company, they get a page and it's got a phone with their local area code.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: And they're calling and somebody's answering who's right there, a butt in the seat in that city.

Chris Raines: It's a lot more friendly than dialing an 888.

Michael Utley: I think so.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Yeah. So I think if we're going to take the onus off of the consumer and do more of the work ourselves to close the sale, we want to get as close and intimate to them as we can. And I think a local area code is a good tool for that. And I think it's worth doing the work.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: And we've often created local profiles for companies and not virtual offices, but skeleton crew offices for companies that needed to have a local footprint and run people through a more localized experience.

Chris Raines: Yeah. All right. Let's talk about content planning. So I want to look at it broadly, so you got content on your website.

Michael Utley: Yep.

Chris Raines: You've got social media content that you produce?

Michael Utley: Yep.

Chris Raines: You've got email content. So what are things that businesses think about that are expanding to different regions on their content strategy?

Michael Utley: Yeah. So one of the questions we've gotten quite a few times, is a company comes to us and they say, this is a real example. "We have a real strong presence in Chicago and we serve the state of Illinois. And we just bought a company in Texas and now we need to market ourselves in Texas." So now as a marketer, I've got two non-contiguous geographic areas. That's a challenge. That was a real challenge with Google. Now it's gotten a lot easier with some of the improvements they've made on the admin screen of Google My Business. But one of the questions that came up for them was, "Do we need different social channels for Illinois versus Texas?" And so the way we landed with that program, was we said no to creating different social channels.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: It was an advantage that they were a national company with national reach. And so we just leaned into that and said, "When we're in 50 states, we're not going to have 50 different sets of social channels. We're not going to have 150 social channels, but we are going to have 30 offices, eventually."

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: "And state the service area, the 1, 2, 3 state service area for each of those, probably two different offices of California eventually. So you're going to end up with maybe, 20 to 30 offices." So whatever your eventual footprint of map pens is going to be for offices, is your strategy for your maps listings and your content on your website.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Standalone page for every office location, very thorough articulation of service area on that location page and on that Google My Business profile page or listing. And then you can develop ongoing content on your own website that is linking to your location page that might be relevant. Like if you have a case study page and it's relevant to a, a handful of locations, link to those pages with a keyword-rich link.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: And then on your social media, you're going the other direction. You're saying, "Hey, shout out to our California team. Look at this cool project they did." So you're actually going reverse on social and email by highlighting something that's more local, because there you've got control of message.

Chris Raines: Even if it's on one roll-up account.

Michael Utley: Even if it's on one roll-up account, you're saying, "Shout out to the team in California, look at this great project." And that's an environment where you not creating confusion for SEO or in your Google maps by having weird stuff like the Miami office serving California.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: You're not creating confusion, it's more streamlined, but it's just a shout-out to something that's more regional.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: But it's building inbound links to that California locations page too.

Chris Raines: Yeah. I would say for businesses that don't operate under a franchise model, there's different owners under the same brand, it probably usually makes sense to just keep it with one profile and not try to spin up. If you got 30 locations across the state that are owned across the US that are owned and operated, don't try to create 30 local profiles, because it's just unmanageable.

Michael Utley: Yeah. What we've always done and recommended is a cooperative marketing program, where those owners are putting dollars into a marketing fund in the home office.

Chris Raines: In the franchise model.

Michael Utley: In a franchise or an independent ownership model, either of those.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: Well, which I guess is just another kind of franchise. But yeah, for any of those, we think that it's often counterproductive. And just the programs that we've happened to work with, it could be different for a number of franchises. But I think consumers get really confused if they see something like, I don't want to go head to head with anybody on this, but social channels for CertaPro Painters, Nashville.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: To me it's a weird deal in the social space to have thousands of things like that.

Chris Raines: We did a campaign for a restaurant, fast casual restaurant, that's known nationally.

Michael Utley: I believe I was a model in that campaign.

Chris Raines: You were. And they have a number of locations in Nashville and they did that model. And it's strange, because people identify with the greater brand, because it's more well known.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: But they don't really identify with this specific location, so social was always odd.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: So I always lean away from that, but yeah, I think when you're growing a brand into additional regions, there are lots of implications for your marketing channels and they all play out differently. All right.

Chris Raines: Awesome. All right. That was good. I hope that was helpful if you're looking to expand in another region, there's some good stuff here to just go through. Watch again, once you start expanding and start check those things off the list, and hope that was helpful.

Michael Utley: Yep. And Matt, if you're watching this, we've got all this stuff covered for you. Don't worry about it. And everybody follow us on social media, check us out, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, follow us, subscribe, comment. Send us your questions. And that's it, we'll see you on the next one. Everyone have a great rest of the day.

Chris Raines: Later, later.