Louis Guerrero
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Social @ Skai
Localized Budgets. Social advertising can take a lot of effort to execute—and when you have many different locations to manage, it can be painfully time-consuming. With Skai Social’s new Localized Budgets, marketers can manage multi-location accounts almost as easily as a single location account.
Let’s face it, while we know advertising is effective, it sure isn’t easy. Advertisers struggle learning marketing platforms, understanding best practices and even how to effectively optimize their campaigns once they’re launched. While all marketers face similar struggles, very few marketers are challenged more than franchises and multi-location brick & mortar businesses. 
According to Steve Buors, CEO of Advertising Agency, Reshift Media, at the local level, managing Facebook advertising can be a complicated and time-consuming process. The more powerful and effective advertising opportunities are becoming increasingly complex to set up and manage. Local owners wear many hats, so it is often impractical for them to spend their scarce time managing a digital campaign.
In a franchise system, it is often the case that different locations require different approaches. What works for one location from an advertising perspective may not work in a different region or even with a different local owner. This is why these franchises (or any multi-location business) need to separate their ad sets to be able to apply their own unique budgets and strategy.
That entire process takes plenty of time for one location, but imagine if you had dozens or even hundreds of locations with individual budgets that had to be managed for each one?
For multi-location businesses—such as auto dealerships, retailers, big box stores, fitness centers, and food chains,—all of these logistics can be a nightmare.
Managing multi-location businesses for social advertising can be painful
Managing multiple locations in social advertising isn’t easy
Until today (more on that later…) social advertisers had two options when managing budgets for multi-location businesses:
1. Add all locations to one ad set. Even though this makes managing all of these locations easier, this is not a great solution because the budget will be randomly spent across all accounts at the same time. Not only does the marketer lose all control over individual budgets per location, but some locations may actually end up with very little or no advertising impressions.
2. Create individual ad sets for each location. Using this method, the marketer has full control over each location’s budget. However, for advertisers with hundreds of global locations, building campaigns this way can literally take hours to set up. And then every time there’s a new change (such as targeting or creative), that change needs to be applied to each and every ad set. This method gives marketers the control they need, but can literally take hours to accomplish. And then there’s more wasted time throughout the year making changes to all of those ad sets.
Neither of these two solutions is a true solution. There’s either the trade-off on granular budget control or a trade-off on time savings.
But multi-location marketers need both!
Localized Budgets for Skai Social
Localized Budgets, a new feature of Skai Social, makes it possible for marketers to easily manage a multi-location account by enabling a smart workflow that saves time and reduces errors. In fact, it feels like you’re just managing one big account.
Manage many locations easily with Localized Budgets from Skai Social
Using Localized Budgets, when a social marketer creates a campaign in Skai, they are able to select an option to split each of their locations into their own respective ad set then easily apply a custom budget that reflects the location’s marketing budget. This removes the manual and extensive work retailers on Facebook have been used to, allowing them to focus on optimizing their campaigns and driving more sales.
“Localized Budgets removes the extensive, manual work regionalized businesses on Facebook have been used to,” says Shai Maoz, Skai’s Senior Product Manager, who worked closely with retail clients to develop this feature. “This allows them to focus on optimizing their campaign strategy and driving more sales instead of wasting time building and re-building ad sets for each geolocation.”
Managing these budgets is also an easy process. Marketers can easily copy and paste hundreds of store locations into Skai Social, then input a budget to be applied to all of their franchise locations. This makes creating hundreds of unique campaigns per location a copy, paste, and click away.
“This is a unique solution for a unique problem that only multi-location social advertisers face,” says Crissi Cupak, Senior Director of Product, Skai. “Skai is dedicated to helping marketers save time and drive performance, and Localized Budgets is the answer to a hard problem that our clients asked us to solve.”
Skai Social has Localized Budgets and more
When was the last time you checked out Skai Social? Not only does it have amazing time-savings and workflow features such as Localized Budgets, but it delivers outstanding performance optimization tools and enables knowledge-based decision making with insightful analytics and reporting.
Schedule a free, brief demo with our team today to see the platform.
