Running a single location is hard enough. Running two, five, ten, or a nationwide franchise is a different kind of challenge entirely, and one that most digital marketing agencies aren't set up to handle properly.
The problems that come with multi-location marketing are specific and they compound quickly. Each location needs to show up in local search for the area it serves. The brand needs to look and sound consistent across every touchpoint regardless of which store a customer walked into or which location's page they landed on. Marketing activity needs to drive results at a national level while still feeling relevant to the person in Queenstown, or Auckland, or Palmerston North. And someone needs to be accountable for the whole picture, not just one slice of it.
Most agencies either work at the brand level and ignore local, or they work locally and have no capacity for the strategic thinking that holds it all together. Getting both right at the same time, across multiple locations, is where a lot of businesses find themselves stuck.
Here's how we approach it, told through the businesses we've done it for.
Franchise and Multi-Site SEO: Making Every Location Visible, Not Just the Brand
The most common problem we see when a multi-location business comes to us is that their SEO is either entirely brand-level with no local signal at all, or it's patchy across locations with some stores ranking well and others invisible. Both versions mean leaving leads on the table every single day.
Mag and Turbo came to us as a well-known nationwide franchise with strong brand recognition for wheels and accessories. The problem was that customers didn't immediately associate them with tyres, which meant they were missing a significant chunk of high-intent search traffic every time someone nearby searched for tyre-related services. On top of that, visibility varied across stores, with some locations performing well and others barely registering in local search results.
We rebuilt their entire search strategy around fixing both problems simultaneously. On the SEO side we optimised the website, improved keyword relevance for tyre-related searches, and worked on strengthening local SEO signals across multiple regions so that each store had its own visibility in its own market, not just a share of generic brand traffic. On the paid search side we rebuilt their Google Ads structure to capture the high-intent tyre searches that were previously going to competitors.
We also created a review generation system because reviews are one of the most powerful local SEO signals available and most franchises either ignore them or handle them inconsistently. We built an incentive-driven process that motivated each store to prioritise review collection, tracked progress on a shared dashboard, and celebrated monthly winners across the network. Simple in concept. Genuinely impactful in practice.
The result was record months for several stores, significant movement in tyre-related SEO rankings across the country, and a noticeable lift in high-quality enquiries network-wide. Read the full Mag and Turbo case study here.
National Campaigns That Drive Local Results: The NOVUS Glass Story
One of the hardest things to get right in multi-location marketing is building a campaign that works at a national brand level while actually driving customers into individual locations. Most campaigns end up doing one or the other reasonably well and sacrificing the other entirely.
NOVUS Glass is a nationwide automotive glass franchise that needed to differentiate itself in a competitive market while appealing to consumers who increasingly factor sustainability and social responsibility into their purchasing decisions. They needed a campaign that would lift brand preference across the country and translate that preference into bookings at individual franchise locations.
We partnered with Trees That Count to build the Chip in with NOVUS campaign. Every windscreen repair or replacement triggered a donation toward planting native trees across New Zealand. The campaign gave customers a reason to actively choose NOVUS over a competitor on something other than price, and it created a genuine story worth telling across every channel.
The execution was deliberately multi-channel and built to work at every level simultaneously. TV and radio to build widespread awareness of the campaign and the brand. Google Ads and SEO to capture people already searching for windscreen repair and ensure NOVUS appeared front and centre. Facebook campaigns to build community engagement and extend the campaign's reach organically. Sponsored content on Stuff and Newshub to strengthen credibility with audiences who needed more than an ad to be convinced.
The campaign launched with Auckland entering its longest lockdown just two weeks in. It kept performing anyway. Bookings increased by 1,900%. Post engagement rates went up 350%. Organic traffic to the website increased by 101%. More than 4,835 native trees were donated in the campaign period, a number that has since grown to over 17,000. Read the full NOVUS Glass case study here.
What this case study demonstrates about multi-location marketing is worth sitting with. A campaign that gives customers a genuine reason to choose you, executed consistently across every channel and every location at the same time, can produce results that no amount of individual store promotion ever would.
Brand Consistency Across Multiple Sites: Winnie Bagoes City and Ferrymead
Multi-location hospitality businesses face a version of this challenge that is particularly nuanced. Each venue has its own personality, its own local crowd, its own feel. Flatten that out with identical content across both and you lose what makes each location worth visiting. Let each location do its own thing entirely and you end up with a fragmented brand that doesn't build the cumulative recognition you need.
Winnie Bagoes has been a Christchurch institution for decades. When the Ferrymead location opened alongside the existing City venue, the goal was a social and digital presence that felt unified as a brand while still reflecting the distinct character of each restaurant and the local community it sat in. One brand. Two personalities. Executed consistently enough to compound into something bigger than either location could build alone.
We built a social media strategy with distinct but complementary content styles for both locations, running regular creative collaboration sessions with the team so that the content always reflected what was actually happening in each venue rather than being produced at a remove. We introduced Google Ads for the first time across the business, with proper tracking set up from the start so that results were visible and attributable from day one. And we invested time coaching the team to become confident on camera themselves, because a social presence that relies entirely on an agency to produce every piece of content is fragile in a way that one where the team can create authentic content themselves is not.
The result is a consistent, on-brand social presence across both locations with increasing engagement and post interactions, a team that now leads its own content creation confidently, and paid search driving new visibility and conversions on top of the organic foundation they'd already built. Read the full Winnie Bagoes case study here.
Multi-Location Retail: Getting the Most Out of Traffic You're Already Paying For
Multi-location retailers face a specific version of the digital marketing problem that often goes unaddressed. They're spending on advertising to drive traffic to their website. The website serves every location. And somewhere between the ad click and the sale, a large percentage of potential customers are dropping off without anyone investigating why.
For Tradestaff Workwear the issue was hiding in plain sight. Customers wanted to use Afterpay. Afterpay was available. But it wasn't visible on the product pages where the buying decision actually happens. It only appeared deep in the checkout process, by which point a significant number of people had already left. Every location in the business was losing sales to a UX problem that nobody had thought to look for.
We used custom development to place the Afterpay option clearly and prominently beneath the price on every product page across the site. One change. Implemented once. Applied across every product, every page, every location the website served.
Afterpay orders went from 36 to 90 in the month of implementation. A 111% increase. The highest monthly sales in six months. No additional ad spend. No new traffic. Just removing a barrier that had been quietly costing the business money across every location it served. Read the full Tradestaff Workwear case study here.
The lesson for any multi-location retailer is that when you fix a conversion problem at the website level, you fix it everywhere at once. The return on that kind of work across a multi-site operation is often larger than any single-location campaign could deliver.
Multi-Location Restaurants and Takeaway: Driving Orders Across Every Site
For hospitality businesses with multiple locations, the challenge is not just getting people to know the brand. It's getting the right person in the right location to take action right now, whether that means walking in for dinner or placing a takeaway order.
Little India operates across multiple locations and came to us with a Google Ads account that was technically running but producing almost nothing useful. Campaigns had no negative keyword lists, which meant ads were showing to people searching for restaurant jobs rather than people searching for food. There was no proper conversion tracking, so nobody could tell which clicks were turning into orders and which were burning through budget with nothing to show for it.
We restructured the entire campaign from scratch. Negative keyword lists built to eliminate every irrelevant search term. Budget allocated using the 80/20 rule to concentrate spend on the hours and days when people were actually ordering across their locations. Proper conversion tracking set up so that every dollar spent had a measurable outcome attached to it.
The result was $258,000 in takeaway sales from $11,000 in total ad spend, with an 18.5% conversion rate across the campaign. Read the full Little India case study here.
For any multi-location hospitality business that has tried Google Ads and seen underwhelming results, the question worth asking is not whether the channel works. It's whether the campaign was built with enough rigour to make it work across every location it was supposed to serve.
What Multi-Location Businesses Actually Need From a Marketing Agency
The businesses above are in completely different industries. Automotive glass. Tyres. Hospitality. Workwear. Restaurants. What they share is the specific complexity that comes with operating in more than one place at once, and the need for a marketing partner who can hold the strategic picture while executing at a local level across all of it.
That requires a different kind of agency relationship than most businesses are used to. Not a supplier you brief and receive deliverables from. A genuine partner who understands your business well enough to make good decisions on your behalf, who is accountable for results across the whole operation, and who is proactive enough to find the problems before you do rather than waiting to be asked.
That's what we do at Digital Influence. We don't just work for you. We work with you. Across every location, every channel, and every challenge that comes with growing a business that operates in more than one place.
If that sounds like the kind of relationship your business needs, the conversation starts with a free strategy call.
Book yours at getdigitalinfluence.com/contact and let's talk about what's actually possible.
Digital Influence is a digital marketing agency based in Christchurch, New Zealand, with experience working with multi-location and franchise businesses across hospitality, retail, automotive, trades, and more. Browse all our client case studies at getdigitalinfluence.com/client-case-studies.
