Look beyond your corporate headquarters to see real opportunities for your company

3 advantages to bringing multiple locations and offices into focus

Your company headquarters is the center of your organization. It’s the hub of activity, where decisions are made and the bigwigs are based. That doesn’t mean it should also be the focus of all your public relations efforts.

When your business includes multiple stores, branches and offices, it’s important to have a centralized location for the purposes of workflow management and standardization of services. However, you can’t stop there when it comes to communication, promotion and customer engagement. For these areas, it’s vital to have a localized presence, and the right PR firm can help.

Three benefits of having localized PR

Finding the local story angle.

Most news organizations are responsible for covering a specific area. They look for newsworthy stories that will be of interest to their audience in a particular location. Customers are most interested in issues that affect their lives right now in their own little corner of the world.

For example, an item of interest to readers in Florida might not resonate with residents in Georgia. This could also be true for different cities or regions. What attracts the attention of someone in Tallahassee might not necessarily interest a person in West Palm Beach. Therefore, if your headquarters is in Atlanta and you have stores in Miami and you want to announce company news to your entire network, it’s important to do so in a way that will appeal to customers in each place. Often, big stories start out as local stories.

Building relationships.

The best way to attract media coverage is to have a prior connection with individual journalists and editors. For a national or multinational company, it can be difficult to build these relationships with so many reporters. When you use a PR firm with ties in your targeted areas, it can make the task much easier.

Community relationships are also vital. If you are planning events or corresponding during a crisis, it’s important to have boots already on the ground that know venues to use, whom to talk to and how things get done quickly in each area where your company has a presence. This knowledge comes from developing the right relationships and being visible long before you need assistance, and you can’t do it sitting in some corporate headquarters many miles away.

More reach and visibility.

To focus only on your corporate headquarters location does a disservice to your entire company. Multiple locations can mean a multitude of news stories to share, and if you are not capitalizing on that, you are missing out.

Studies shows that customers today travel through more than half of the sales cycle before ever making contact with your company. They are reading online reviews, collecting information on social media and conducting their own research to learn all about you. Hopefully, some of the information they find will be positive news articles about your activities and events. The more you focus on individual stores and branches, the more stories you will find to publish, which can significantly increase your visibility. You can highlight these stories on your website and use them to engage customers in the same area through social media.

At Axia Public Relations, we use our unique, hyper-local PR solution to help companies with multiple branches and offices achieve greater notice and outreach. We can help whether you have five or 5,000 locations. To learn more, contact us or download our e-book Maximizing Your Public Relations Investment.

Lisa Goldsberry is a blogger for Axia Public Relations with more than 15 years of public relations experience. She specializes in business and technology PR. Lisa has worked for Axia since December 2013. Learn more about Lisa Goldsberry. Connect with Axia on Twitter @axiapr or tell us what you think in the comments below.