Localized marketing is among the most effective ways to make your brand relevant to the customer. Unfortunately, it's also among the most difficult, expensive and cumbersome.
But leaving it up to franchise owners and resellers jeopardizes brand consistency and is nearly impossible to track. Never fear! Here's four strategies to make the practice easier, less expensive and more automated.
Deliver Customizable Marketing Assets to Local Affiliates
Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems have long been used to make branded materials available to local marketers. But they aren’t specific to a location, nor do they track the promotion’s execution.
The Saepio MarketPort platform overcomes this challenge by automating fulfillment and delivering assets that are customizable. The technology delivers flexible national-quality digital assets to local teams, who can add in their own addresses, logos, social media buttons and other localized content. Resellers and franchise owners can also choose from a library of layouts and multiple channels such as email, landing page, social and more.
The technology maintains many of the same features of a traditional DAM--such as organization in folders, lists or icons. But adds dynamic content creation and marketing fulfillment automation capabilities. The speeds up the process and adds oversight for the national marketing team.
Meet Your Local Content Creators
Personal stories and recommendations are extremely powerful in today’s Yelp-ified world. Thankfully, companies such as Compendium allow brands to creatively encourage, curate and promote customer-created content. Patrons are invited to contribute their story in-person, through email marketing or “tell us about your experience” forms, among other avenues. Customers write about their experiences and submit photos specific to that location. They are then served tools to instantly share those posts with their own social networks.
The savings come in not having to create unique content for every location, while maintaining control over what is published. Tracking codes can be added each article to reveal successes that can then be used in other marketing materials.
Use On-Location Displays and Shopping Apps
Companies such as Adcentricity operate a network of in-store television screens, location-based shopping apps, in-window displays, digital projectors, radio partners and interactive gaming stations. This strategy isn’t just about catching the customer on location. Marketers can target segments by choosing geographically relevant settings. For example, if a company wants to target younger buyers, Adcentricity might suggest media channels in and around colleges. The technology can also auto-personalizes the message for the store, day or time.
Take Control of Local Search Listings
Several companies were launched in recent years specifically to help companies manage their local search listings across varying search platforms such as Yahoo!, Yelp and Foursquare. The technology makes sure the correct address, website and phone numbers are listed. Also, marketers can also add images and timely promotions adjacent to the name of the company and address on the local search results page. Other companies couple the platform with location-specific pages and mobile sites. These sites have the local entity’s address, hours, phone number, photos, videos and other information. These pages are optimized to be indexed local by the large search engines.
A Good Start
These technologies are really just the tip of the iceberg for localized marketing. The importance of being relevant to a place will only continue to rise. So, now is the time for national brands to lay the ground work, or they risk being left behind.
