Local Marketing: Is templating a viable solution?

As a multi-location national brand with local partners, you’ve decided that Localising and Personalising your brand’s advertising is crucial to the success of your network, whether branches, retailers, dealers, franchisees, venues, affiliates or other channel partners.

 And you’ve probably experienced some of the obstacles to Effective Local Marketing.

But have you considered an distributed marketing strategy and some kind of online SAAS platform solution, to bring your local marketing to life?

We’ve spent the last fifteen years working with some of the world's biggest brands who are using the best software solutions on the market. We see, every day, just how efficient and cost-effective a great platform combined with an engaging agency team can be.

Basically, you have two key options:

Digital Asset Management (DAM) - also referred to as an Asset Library.

Asset Libraries or DAM portals allow you to SHARE your assets.

You spend a lot of money creating the assets that makes your national advertising and marketing work so well. With an Asset Library you can make them available for your local partners too. It’s a great way to keep their marketing consistent with yours and helps prevent them from sourcing or creating off-brand, off-message activity. All file types - images, video, audio - can be accommodated and because it’s centrally managed it means that you can keep it constantly up-to-date.

You could even run an artwork ordering service on the Asset Library for work to be produced offline.  

Marketing Asset Management (MAM) - also referred to as a Local Marketing Hub.

Local Marketing Hubs or MAM portals allow you to ACTIVATE your assets.

These portals can do everything that an Asset Library does, but will allow your local partners to plan, personalise and localise them, via templated assets. It makes local marketing so much more achievable, whatever the skill level of the local manager.

The choice depends very much on your own marketing landscape, but the benefits of a Local Marketing Hub to those brands with a broad spectrum of local partners cannot be over-estimated. It’s worth listing them, one-by-one.

It wasn’t that long ago that the original Local Marketing Hubs could only spit out a simple bit of Direct Mail, but the world has of course changed. As quickly as your national marketing opportunities have grown, the best Local Marketing Hubs have kept pace. It’s now possible to have templated materials available for your local partners for all channels, including those digital ones that they are crying out for.

2. Personalised and localised.

Your local partners will be able to access the templates and create their own, locally relevant marketing materials, and personalise them in as many ways as you allow them to. They could create their own price points, offers, event promos, awareness campaign. In fact, their marketing could be as sophisticated as your brands’ national marketing. Digital Display, Facebook, Email, Print, OOH…every channel is available for templating. The time and money saved with this type of marketing automation actually makes the cost of implementing a Local Marketing Hub seem pretty insignificant.

3. Planning.

We all know that a well-considered and carefully-implemented marketing plan is the only real way to succeed, but this is an area where most local marketers really struggle. The best Local Marketing Hubs will include a proper planning tool, where your local partners can map out their marketing for the next month, quarter or year.. And the module can even be pre-loaded by the brand with exemplar media plans that show likely outcomes versus spend… a real boon for local partners that often need that kind of help.

4. Budgeting.

Having a Budgeting module included with your Local Marketing Hub adds even more professionalism to your local partners’ marketing. For them to be able to plan their spend and to see where the ROIs are strongest has to be a good thing. And, if you operate any co-funded advertising with your local partners, it’s essential that everybody has visibility on where the spend levels sit.

4. Targeting.

There are a number of 3^rd party tools that can be introduced via a Local Marketing Hub. Geographic, demographic and behavioural data can be introduced to inform audience building for the key digital channels. And it can be integrated with your own, and your retailers own CRM data to ensure consistency of marketing, and effective targeting, throughout the customer journey. The possibilities in this area are incredible and will only be limited by your ambition, if anything. And, it’s of particular interest for those sectors and retailers that have difficulty finding conquest sales opportunities.

6. Media buying and trafficking.

This has become a real minefield for local-level marketers. With so many channels available it’s virtually impossible for them to keep tabs on the various media-buying opportunities, specially when it comes to the newer digital spaces. But having everything available via the Local Marketing Hub including specially devised pre-packaged campaigns, makes the process much more manageable. And the same goes for trafficking – everything can be sent, automatically via the portal.

7. Reporting.

With a Local Marketing Hub that has a suite of reporting tools on-board, your local partners could be enjoying the same visibility that you have. Dashboards showing the best-performing activities - by channel, campaign or product – is the least you should be looking for. And this type of reporting can be made visible to HQ and Field Teams, for example, so that you can see what’s happening too, right across your network.

8. Integrated Business Services.

Every brand will have its own way of doing business. And every brand will already have tech solutions in place that are integral to its marketing strategy. The smartest Local Marketing Hubs recognise that, and will integrate with all the key proprietary marketing players out there…like Salesforce and Amazon Web Services, for example.

9. Agency Team.

Depending on the amount of assets you have and the turnover of new material, you’ll need at least one person who’s responsible for making it current, compelling and useable. A more involved Local Marketing Hub will be a slightly different proposition. Determining a strategy for templates that are relevant at local level yet consistent with national marketing requires a specialist team. It should reach out to your network to interrogate demand, need and feedback…basically you’ll create a mini-agency that acts on behalf of your whole network. A great portal needs a great team to really make it work.

Summary

Making a decision about which is the best route for you will depend largely on how important you feel localisation is for your network.

A good Asset Library or DAM system should provide your local partners with all the materials they need to start advertising with an element of consistency and brand compliancy. It’s far better than leaving them to find their own way.

But a first class Local Marketing Hub or MAM, with an engaging team behind it, can take them to a professional-level when it comes to executing locally-relevant, personalised marketing that uses proven planning, strategy and media options to fully leverage your national and global messaging and ensure the customers’ journey is totally joined up.

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