Advertising for a multi-location business, whether in-house or as an agency, comes with a unique set of operational hurdles. Different customer demographics, localized promotions, and a wide variety of creative inventory variations demand tailored strategies for every account or location.
But the reality is that most ad teams are already maxed out. Managing campaigns across different channels and locations requires repetitive data entry tasks, increasing the risk of human error. This can result in misallocated budgets, incorrect targeting, and fragmented messaging.
In short, multi-location ad teams lack the capacity to treat every location with the nuance it deserves (and requires). This jeopardizes results, employee happiness, and client satisfaction.
The good news is that many of the most time-consuming multi-location advertising workflows can be easily tackled with automation. Let’s look at five automation strategies that multi-location advertisers can start using right away for scalable success.
1. Manage search and social campaigns holistically—with one team
Managing multi-channel campaigns at scale comes with a staggering level of data complexity. With multiple campaigns running simultaneously across various channels and locations, the potential for human-made errors is high.
Manual processes, like adding or updating unique location qualifiers, can lead to misaligned budgets, incorrect targeting, and inconsistent messaging. This is a big problem for companies trying to maintain a consistent brand identity across a national or regional campaign. For companies where compliance plays a large role, like those in the real estate or pharmaceutical industries, the stakes for error-free campaigns are even higher.
Tools like Fluency Blueprints simplify these complexities by integrating campaigns across multiple channels—for example, search and social—into a cohesive platform that can be managed by one strategist. This approach allows businesses to manage campaigns directly from centralized data sources rather than using reports or spreadsheets that require updates from the same data sources. Working directly with real-time data sources reduces time spent on repetitive tasks and significantly minimizes human error.
Using a single, centralized platform for multi-channel campaigns streamlines countless operational workflows. There’s no need to log into different systems or compile disjointed efforts from different channel leads. By launching multi-channel, multi-location campaigns from one platform, ad teams can reclaim up to 90% of their time and launch campaigns 80% faster.
2. Make bulk updates across multi-channel campaigns
Your campaign is launched and you can finally take a deep breath. But then your client comes through with a campaign-wide change that needs to be made ASAP.
Unique inventory, promotions, and local events make it difficult to keep campaigns up-to-date manually.
With automation tools, you can make real-time updates directly from a wide variety of data sources including Excel spreadsheets and Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms. Simply add new copy, tags, keywords, or creative assets into your data source, then refresh the data from within the platform. This enables you to streamline bulk changes across any channel or campaign from a single interface.
Making bulk changes directly from data sources ensures that ads remain accurate and relevant even after launch. For anyone managing multi-location campaigns across multiple channels, this functionality improvement is a game-changer.
3. Use pre-built rule sets to codify compliance
Most industries have unique compliance requirements. But some verticals are particularly complex—think pharma, real estate, and medical. Keeping track of these nuanced requirements using traditional tools leaves a wide gap for human error.
Utilizing pre-built rule sets enables ad teams to codify industry-specific compliance standards. This ensures that all campaigns adhere to the most up-to-date regulations. Plus, it simplifies the workload required to implement any regulatory changes: with automation, it just takes a few clicks.
Rules can also apply to wider franchise or multi-location brand guidelines. You can use automation rules to make sure global brand requirements are met at the regional or local level. Without a clear system in place, businesses risk fragmented messaging and visuals that can damage brand integrity.
Using automation in this way ensures that you’re maintaining a consistent—and, in some cases, legal—presence while still catering to the localized needs of each market.
4. Manage custom creative assets at scale
Publishers like Meta, Google, and Amazon are constantly making changes to their ad types and sizes. Reworking your existing campaigns and creative assets to adapt to platform changes can be a major time-suck.
Automation can ease these changes by empowering ad teams to update image ads at scale. There’s no need to manually resize each image to the new size requirements: you can make the changes en masse. When you’re ready, you can apply changes across entire channels with the click of a button.
You can manage other aspects of your creative portfolio, too. For instance, you can instantly swap in new seasonal menu offerings or refresh your real estate image portfolio by adding photos of a newly renovated apartment building.
The same automation functionality can be used to customize ad sets with unique identifiers, such as regional vocabulary, ensuring that creative assets are relevant for every audience.
5. Automate performance optimizations regardless of location
Tailored optimization strategies are important for driving the best results for every audience and channel. But as a multi-location advertiser, you also need to optimize for different locations.
Every location performs differently. What works on social for one region might be best suited for search in another. But manually analyzing and adjusting each localized campaign for optimal performance across multiple channels is immensely time-consuming. In addition to being error-prone, it’s unlikely you actually have the capacity to truly optimize campaigns.
Automation puts optimization strategies back in your hands. You can set strategic rules about how to respond to performance changes: CPC thresholds, positive engagement results, or reallocating spend to your best-performing channels. From here, algorithms continuously monitor campaigns and automatically make adjustments based on the rule parameters you’ve defined.
This data-driven approach ensures that your strategic changes are implemented across the entire portfolio, maximizing ROI and campaign performance across locations.
Enhance your multi-location strategy with automation
Automation is the Swiss Army Knife that multi-location advertisers need in their toolbox. Some of the most cumbersome and manual-task-heavy operations today can be addressed with strategic, automated workflows and rules.
By integrating and automating processes, you can achieve greater efficiency, accuracy, and performance in your multi-location advertising efforts. You can also focus on what truly matters: delivering impactful and localized advertising at scale that resonates with unique audiences.
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