Effective local marketing: What’s stopping you?

First off…what do we mean by Local Marketing?

If you manage a network of local partners, of any sort, then this is for you. Stores, dealerships, wholesalers, franchisees, chains, venues, channel partners…call them what you will…if you operate through multiple points on the map, then we call that Local Marketing or Distributed Marketing.

In an ideal world, you want your local partners to be consistent with your own brand messages and in synch with your national marketing timings and plans. It’s vital that the customer journey isn’t fragmented or confusing

So what’s stopping that from happening?

We see six very common problems. Perhaps you’ll recognise some yourself. Thankfully, there’s a single solution that deals very ably with each of them and it’s already being used by some of the strongest brands out there.

We often find that there’s quite a knowledge gap at local level. They rarely have specialist skills in marketing and lack the confidence to plan and execute anything other than the most basic activities. The words ‘Localisation’, ‘Personalisation’, ‘Brand Awareness’ and ‘Targeting’ are most likely to be alien concepts.

They are usually busy doing things other than marketing. So they’re too slow to react to any tactical changes in the market because they don’t have the marketing tools at hand to move quickly...this lag stops national from being properly synched with local marketing.

Your own world is totally measurable, but your local marketing isn’t. Your network often can’t see the positive impact that targeted local marketing could bring. If only they had the same tools as you when it came to analysing marketing performance.

Is your national marketing heavily biased to digital media? We guess so. But are your local partners up to speed? It’s seen as very difficult to activate truly localised digital campaigns that promote your local network, there often aren’t the skills or systems out there to make it happen.

Your manager has asked you what the network is doing in the next quarter – it’s the question you hate…if only you had real-time visibility on planned activity and spend out in the network.

Probably the biggest issue we see. You’d love to give your local partners more marketing support but there’s been another round of budget cuts. It shouldn’t cost THAT much to add considerably to the leverage that national and local could give to one another. Is there a way?

There really is.

An online Local Marketing Hub, with a committed local marketing agency team in support, can genuinely deal with each of these problems. And in nearly all cases, the cost of implementation is usually seen as irrelevant given the cost savings on production and efficiencies that follow adoption.

Our Webinar: Precision Local Marketing walks you through the options that might suit your brand, just click the link below to see it now.