Actionable Insights to Prepare You For The Olympics Like A Champion

🏅3 of 4 articles about Paris 2024

When fractions of a second can make the difference between a medal and going home empty-handed, how do Olympic athletes give themselves the best possible chance of success? Ask a top coach and they’ll tell you that it comes down to marginal gains. Tiny tweaks to training routines, diets or sleeping arrangements ensure that competitors show up ready to give their best performance. Bring all of these together and you turn yourself into a contender.

The same principle of marginal gains adding up to a decisive difference applies in location marketing. An event like the Olympics creates opportunities worldwide for businesses in the right shape to take them. Making the right changes now to the way that your locations show up will help you to win a bigger share of footfall and revenue; and it's a team effort.

In this third (out of four) articles of our Olympics blog series, we present to you actionable insights for a successful marketing campaign.

Lay the foundations with complete listings

Businesses with complete profiles get 7x more clicks than those without. Including all of the details that help shoppers take the next step in buying from you increases clicks, conversions and revenue. It also improves your ranking, as search algorithms prioritize businesses that have more helpful info to share. Every step that you take to build more complete business profiles delivers different gains for your locations. Google reveals in our Neighborhood Nurturing guide, that 96% of customers prefer businesses that display operational opening hours, a visible phone number makes 90% of customers more likely to visit and businesses with photos see a 42% increase in direction requests.

Building a complete profile for a location will drive immediate gains in how that location is ranked. However, the biggest benefits come when you ensure every one of your locations turns up with good-quality photos, opening hours, calls to action and more. Take the opportunity now to audit listings for all of your business outlets, so you’re 100% complete and ready when the opening ceremony begins.

Get in the Games by making the Olympics a local marketing tactic

Consumers will find it hard to switch off from the Olympics during the summer, and that creates a huge range of creative opportunities to grab their attention and stand out. Connect your digital and physical storefronts to what’s happening in the Games through themed menus, special offers linked to competition results and celebrations of local athletes’ success. Creating social media profiles for each of your locations is a great way of building awareness and a sense of community around what you’re doing. It’s easy to underestimate just how much enthusiasm the Games generates once the opening ceremony gets underway. Paris 2024 will dominate the news cycle - and preparing your marketing plans in advance will help make sure your locations benefit.

Start recruiting international fans before the Games begin

Don’t wait until next summer to start building awareness and interest among international visitors. Amplify the reach of your location pages on social media with ad campaigns and organic content, such as games and themed polls, connecting future customers to your current ones. Games visitors and other travellers will have plenty of options to choose from, so introducing them to your locations ahead of time, makes it more likely that they’ll be heading through one of your doors.

Train your review response muscle

A recent study by Whitespark confirmed that reviews and star ratings are a major ranking factor when it comes to local SEO. They make your locations more visible, and they make searchers far more likely to choose you. Uberall data shows that a star rating increase of just 0.1 could increase the conversion rates of a business location by 25%. Your online reputation matters, and if you want to be in the best possible shape for the Olympics, now’s the time to start honing it.

Get into the rhythm of responding to all reviews for your locations, whether they’re good or bad, and even if they just involve a star rating, rather than written comments. Aggregate review data to identify common themes that you can address and key actions to pass onto store managers. Finally, don’t forget to ask happy customers to share their experiences, and make it part of the culture for your frontline employees to do the same. It helps when you have an overview of how ratings translate into revenue for all of your different locations, with top performers providing a framework of best practice for others to follow.

Equip your team with high-impact tools

Staying on top of reviews for every location? Reaching out to engage audiences before they travel? Preparing for the Olympics can feel like an overwhelming task. However, as athletes can testify, it’s amazing what you can achieve when you have the right training regime, and the right tools.

With Uberall’s AI-powered Review Assistant, you can respond to reviews in a way that’s real-time, personalized, creative and scalable. Add in our AI-powered Messaging Assistant and you can hold thousands of conversations with customers, for all of your different locations, with the confidence that you’re coming across in a way that’s human - and true to your brand. Olympic champions know how to maximize the impact of everything they do. With natural language processing and the next generation of location marketing tools, you’ll be able to do the same.

Uberall has all of the data and insights that you need to drive the marginal gains that matter for all of your locations. We’ve gathered them together in our Gold Medal Location Marketing Guide, which is yours to download SOON!