5 Lessons From Belgravia Leisure’s 250+ Venue Marketing Workflow

Table of Contents 

• Lesson One. Visibility is the foundation of distributed brand governance
• Lesson Two. Local authenticity requires structure inside a unified marketing workflow
• Lesson Three. The highest cost in multi-location marketing is rework, not creation
• Lesson Four. Reporting becomes actionable only when execution is unified
• Lesson Five. Adoption is the strongest signal of whether a system is designed well
• Final Thoughts 

What large franchise and multi-location networks can learn from a real operational transformation.

If you talk to any CMO or Head of Digital inside a multi-location network today, you start hearing the same themes repeat: AI is no longer an experimental add-on. 

AI in local marketing is showing up in everyday workflows with AI Overviews and ChatGPT increasingly becoming search visibility drivers for multi-location brands. At the same time, boards are asking tougher questions about brand governance, data accuracy, and compliance. Frontline teams feel the pressure too, as they are expected to post more content with fewer steps and less support.

All of these forces expose the same underlying issue: most marketing stacks were never designed for the scale, complexity, or operational demands of modern multi-location networks.

That is what made our recent conversation with Felix Tang, Head of Digital at Belgravia Leisure, feel so relevant.

Belgravia Leisure runs more than 250 venues across Australia and New Zealand. Aquatic centers, recreation facilities, golf courses, and caravan parks. Each with its own rhythm, audience, and expectations. Few networks manage this level of diversity with consistency.

Their shift to a unified workflow wasn’t a creative exercise. It was the kind of operational rebuild many large networks eventually have to tackle.

Here are the five lessons that stood out, written to help other multi-location and franchise leaders avoid the same friction and and improve local marketing performance, search visibility, and operational alignment across regions.

Lesson One. Visibility is the foundation of distributed brand governance

Before anything could improve, Belgravia hit a basic but painful barrier: they couldn’t actually see how the network was performing day to day.

Felix put it simply:
“We just didn’t have the visibility and the accountability that we were really looking for from a governance perspective.”

This isn’t a Belgravia-specific issue. Distributed brand governance has become a board-level topic across the industry. Search visibility and trust now depend heavily on accurate, consistent local signals – especially with AI-driven discovery engines like Google’s AI Overviews.

Practical application:

• Move social, listings, reviews, and reporting into one system.
• Standardize user permissions and approval flows.
• Treat daily execution as data input for AI and search, not just marketing output.
• Build audit-friendly workflows so you can see activity without asking for screenshots or spreadsheets.

When visibility isn’t in question anymore, it’s important how you protect the brand, keep teams accountable, and stay competitive in search.

Lesson Two. Local authenticity requires structure inside a unified marketing workflow

Belgravia’s venues live deeply in their communities. Parents know their swim teachers. Councils stay involved. Caravan parks each have their own character. If everything suddenly sounded corporate, it would flatten the brand, not strengthen community reputation.

Felix captured this tension when he said:
“We’re not trying to be Belgravia Leisure when speaking to local audiences. We want to sound like local swim teacher or Caravan Park.”

Total freedom leads to inconsistency. Too much control makes local content sound generic. The answer sits in the middle: structured flexibility that respects local context while keeping the brand safe.

Practical application:

• Provide templated content that is flexible but not unstructured.
• Clearly define which elements are editable and which are locked.
• Give examples of local voice done well so venues have a model to follow.
• Use structured workflows that allow personalization inside brand-safe parameters.

When the guardrails live inside the workflow, local teams find their voice with confidence. The industry is shifting from controlling the field to guiding it.

Lesson Three. The highest cost in multi-location marketing is rework, not creation

Most leaders assume more locations require more content, more approvals, more tools. Belgravia realized the real drag wasn’t creating work. It was fixing mistakes across 250+ locations.

Felix explained the real source of friction:
“The waste of time came from doing things at scale and then rectifying issues afterward.”

This is where networks quietly lose days. A wrong asset, outdated event details, or a post meant for another region – each mistake triggers hours of silent rework.

Practical application:

• Build one workflow that every location follows.
• Introduce segmentation rules directly into the system instead of relying on lists.
• Provide a deep template library so teams do not improvise.
• Use tagging to automate which locations receive which assets.

Eliminate the rework, and scale finally becomes real. Only then does automation deliver its full value.

Lesson Four. Reporting becomes actionable only when execution is unified

Belgravia did not gain insight by adding more dashboards. Insight emerged only when all locations began working inside the same environment.

Felix highlighted the turning point:
“Being able to make reports with ease, depending on who the report’s for, that’s really been a lot easier with this platform.”

And for the first time, they could see how marketing actions influenced participation and engagement:
“We can see in the data there’s a correlation between our efforts and uptake, and output in social posting and activity.”

Every network runs into this. HQ needs clarity, regions need actionable insight, and local teams need direction. None of that works when reporting is stitched together manually.

Practical application:

• Map every local action to the same data structure.
• Build campaign tags that track outcomes by segment, region, and venue type.
• Standardize how local teams publish so performance becomes comparable.
• Train regional managers to read the same dashboards as HQ.
• Use AI to surface patterns instead of manually searching for them.

Lesson Five. Adoption is the strongest signal of whether a system is designed well

Belgravia evaluated ten to fifteen vendors before choosing a model that worked. What made the difference was not the feature list. It was how naturally the system fit the way venues operate.

Felix summarized the outcome: “We’ve gone from not much to a majority uptake, and it’s still growing.”

Adoption isn’t about motivation. It’s about usability. Frontline teams are operators, not marketers. If the workflow feels hard, usage collapses. If it feels natural, adoption climbs on its own.

Practical application:

• Offer mobile-first tools that align with how locations work.
• Simplify workflows until the path is obvious for non-marketers.
• Provide templates that solve recurring scenarios.
• Use AI Assistants to guide teams through daily actions.
• Treat adoption as a KPI, not a side metric.

When the work feels doable and stress-free, participation becomes the default.

Final Thoughts

Belgravia’s experience shows how multi-location marketing succeeds only when infrastructure supports it.

Once the workflows are unified, segmentation is baked into the system, templates remove the guesswork, and reporting finally reflects real activity, teams stop struggling with the basics and start delivering consistent, on-brand content.

And while Belgravia’s specifics are unique, the foundation isn’t. Every growing multi-location brand will need the same backbone in the coming year. The networks that win are those that invest in unified marketing workflow, distributed brand governance, local content at scale, and marketing automation for locations.

>> Watch the full conversation here.