You’re a national brand. Sure. You’ve got an agency roster managing your national advertising, your media planning, & your social channels. Your brand recognition is improving. That’s great.
But have you considered what’s really happening with your brand & its competitors at ground level, in the streets of our cities, amongst the communities of our towns? With your local customers & prospects?
If your target is individual consumers, who live in individual markets serviced by your network of individual local partners whether branches, retailers, dealers, franchisees, or affiliates, then pause for a moment.
A little lateral thinking would suggest that your customers in, say, Bradford are going to respond differently to your customers in Ipswich or Glasgow. There’s culture, community, context, & competition that will all have a significant impact on how individuals respond.
Common sense says so, but centralised marketing often doesn’t. It says that all consumers are the same & can be addressed the same, wherever they live, whatever they do, however much they earn, whatever their likes & dislikes. It treats implementation as a tick box exercise after the national creative has been completed. Which if you sit down & think about it, is complete & utter tosh. And, extremely wasteful of precious & increasingly squeezed marketing budgets.
Let’s get practical here. If you have a national network of outlets, you’re already halfway to being able to precisely target the customers who come in through your front doors & you know what’s important to them. You are also most probably sitting on a huge stockpile of generic marketing assets that could easily be called into action but with increased local relevancy, so their return is maximised.
So, what would that look like? The options are limitless really but here’s some simple examples. Town centre fast food outlets near offices? Then campaigns targeting office workers with lunchtime promotions. Suburban coffee shops near schools? Then upsell cake to parents following the school drop off. How about pre-theatre inner-city restaurant dining offers for weekend culture vultures? These examples are for F&B, but your local partners will understand their customers whatever the sector, just empower them with the right central marketing campaigns to fit their local audiences, not the other way round.
Of course, targeted promotions are nothing new. But what’s key here is your local partners could do all their pre-approved, on-brand local promotions & implementation with very little involvement from HQ Marketing teams, leaving Marketing Managers & Marketing Directors free to focus on big picture strategy rather than the granular time-consuming detail of local activation. It also saves significant implementation budget.
How is this done?
Well, whether you call it Through-Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA), Marketing Asset Management (MAM), National to Local Marketing, Marketing Resource Management (MRM), Channel Marketing Automation (CMO), Distributed Marketing or Partner Relationship Management (PRM) using an Integrated Local Marketing Platform, Distributed Marketing Platform, Creative Automation Platform or Local Marketing Hub its a potentially complex & confusing area to the uninitiated.
Our latest white paper makes local simple, and is available for FREE here: https://www.weareacuity.com/whitepapers/so-you-think-youve-got-a-marketing-asset-management-system
Or if you'd like to read more about Local Marketing have a look at our blog page "Local Thinking': https://www.weareacuity.com/local-thinking-our-blog
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