Why local or regional marketing?

It’s a great question. And if you’ve ever met the We Are Acuity team, you might wonder why we get quite so excited about the difference local marketing can make.

But perhaps the better question is:

Why not local marketing?

Because, in many ways, marketing started local.

Trading, or the exchange of goods and services, has existed almost as long as civilisation itself. People produced things and needed to sell them. Other people needed those things and bought them.

Those exchanges generally happened locally, between people who knew their markets, understood their customers and had built a reputation within their community.

At the market or on the high street, expertise was easy to find. Choice might have been more limited, seasonal and localised, but the relationship between the customer, the seller and the product was a close one.

Then things began to change.

From local to national.

The Industrial Revolution brought mass production.

Goods and services increasingly became centralised, moving expertise away from individual communities and towards larger businesses and centres of production.

At first, demand often exceeded supply. If a business could produce something at the right price, there was a good chance somebody would buy it.

This became known as the Production Orientated Era.

As the 20th century progressed, competition increased. Production improved, choice expanded and price alone was no longer enough.

Businesses had to become better at selling.

Brands developed, advertising grew and companies increasingly competed by persuading customers that their products and services were better than the alternatives.

Welcome to the Sales Orientated Era.

By the 1960s, many markets had become increasingly saturated.

Marketing moved from simply helping businesses sell what they had produced to influencing what should be produced, how it should be priced, where it should be sold and how it should be communicated.

The Marketing Orientated Era had arrived and with it came ever greater centralisation.

National campaigns. National media. National propositions. National brand guidelines. All of which created huge efficiencies, reach and consistency.

But there was a trade-off.

Somewhere along the way, brands moved further away from customers.

The drive to centralise, consolidate, standardise and streamline undoubtedly delivered enormous commercial advantages.

But it also created distance.

Brands became national or global, while their customers remained very much local. Their circumstances were local. Their competitors were local. Their communities were local. And many of the people actually selling the brand’s products or services were local too.

Retailers. Dealers. Franchisees. Branches. Venues. Agents. Local sales teams.

That is why we believe we have moved into another stage of marketing’s evolution.

The Local Orientated Era.

And this is the space we’ve worked in for more than 25 years, helping national and global brands make their marketing work more effectively at local level.

Local marketing is no longer difficult to enable.

Technology has changed things enormously.

Brands now have access to systems that can distribute marketing materials across hundreds or thousands of locations.

Advertising can be targeted with extraordinary geographical precision.
Creative can be personalised.
Campaigns can be automated.
Performance can be measured.
AI can accelerate the creation and adaptation of content.
Local Marketing Hubs can give networks access to centrally controlled materials while allowing individual locations to personalise what they need.

In other words, the technology required to deliver local marketing at scale is readily available. But that doesn’t mean good local marketing is easy.

Technology has made localisation easier, but making marketing locally relevant is still the difficult bit.

So what does good local marketing look like today?

Imagine a national brand with 200 retailers, dealers, franchisees, venues or branches.

The challenge is no longer simply creating one excellent national campaign.

The challenge is making that campaign work in 200 different local markets.

A customer in Manchester may have different needs, competitors and priorities to one in Bristol, Glasgow or Brighton.

Local teams know that. But Brand HQ also has an important job to do.

It has to protect the brand, maintain consistency, manage budgets, improve quality and understand what is happening across the network.

That creates four fundamental local marketing challenges.

1. Brand consistency.

How much freedom should local teams have?

Too little, and their marketing becomes repetitive, generic and disconnected from their market.

Too much, and brand consistency can quickly disappear.

The answer is not simply tighter brand guidelines.

It is creating a marketing system that gives local teams the right kind of freedom.

2. Local relevance.

Changing a postcode or putting a retailer logo onto a national advert does not necessarily make it local.

Relevant local marketing reflects the customer’s circumstances.

It might respond to local competitors, events, stock, offers, audience behaviour, regional characteristics or the commercial priorities of an individual location.

The national brand provides the strength.

Local relevance gives the customer a reason to act.

3. Scale.

Producing one excellent local campaign is relatively straightforward.

Producing hundreds of them quickly, cost-effectively and without compromising quality is a very different challenge.

The right combination of systems, templates, automation, people and processes can turn local marketing from a production headache into a scalable operation.

4. Measurement.

If hundreds of local partners are spending money on marketing, Brand HQ should be able to understand what is happening.

What is being produced?

What channels are being used?

Where is budget being spent?

Which campaigns are working?

Which locations are engaged?

Which need support?

Local marketing becomes significantly more powerful when activity across the network can be seen and understood centrally.

How mature is your local marketing?

Here’s a useful test.

Ask yourself:

Can every local partner quickly access current, on-brand marketing materials?
Can those materials be personalised to make them genuinely relevant to each local market?
Can your central marketing team see what local partners are creating and using?
Can campaigns be delivered across print, digital, social, audio, video and other relevant channels without creating an enormous production burden?
Can you measure local activity and performance in a meaningful way?
Do local teams actually engage with and use the marketing tools and support you provide?
Can your national campaigns be translated into local activity without losing the original strategy or creative idea?

If the answer to several of those questions is “no”, “sometimes” or “we’re not really sure”, there is probably untapped potential within your local marketing operation.

And that potential can be significant. Because a national network represents something very powerful.

Hundreds or thousands of people, with local knowledge, local relationships and direct access to customers, all representing the same brand.

The opportunity is to combine that local strength with the strategy, standards, data and resources of Brand HQ.

The question is no longer whether local marketing matters.

It does.

The more useful question is whether your organisation has the structure, content, technology, people and processes needed to do it properly.

That is the challenge we spend our time solving.

We Are Acuity helps brands that operate through networks of retailers, dealers, franchisees, branches, venues, agents and other local partners to make their marketing more relevant, more effective and easier to manage at scale.

Sometimes that means building the technology.

Sometimes it means operating a Local Marketing Hub.

Sometimes it means creating the campaigns and content.

Sometimes it means supporting, training and motivating the network.

And often it means bringing all of those things together.

How well is your local marketing working?

If you’d like an experienced outside view, talk to us.

We can look at how your organisation currently approaches local marketing, where the friction exists and where greater relevance, consistency, efficiency or performance might be unlocked.