The Right Tools Can Power Local Marketing Campaigns

Local marketing is a smart and effective way to reach consumers, but brands sometimes run into problems when they leave marketing to local owners, leading to confused and dissatisfied customers.

With the right tools, companies can control the message and make sure that everyone is happy.

Letting fans speak for the company and relay their experiences to other customers is a key local marketing strategy, says Business 2 Community’s Ashley Furness.

She suggests using Compendium, a company that “provides tools for brands to creatively encourage, curate and promote customer-created content.” Fifty-two percent of customers rely on other customers’ reviews and experiences to decide whether or not they’ll give a company their business.

A similar tool Furness mentions, Yext PowerListings, helps brands manage their local search listings on sites such as Yelp, Yahoo!, and Foursquare. This saves companies a huge hassle so they don’t have to contact the individual sites to get listings changed. It ensures a more accurate and effective listing since companies can upload photos and add addresses, phone numbers, and websites.

Actual content marketing at specific locations is important as well. Adcentricity, a service that puts display ads in windows, provides location-based shopping apps, in-store television screens, and more, will take care of that outreach, writes Furness.

“This strategy isn’t just about catching the customer on location,” she says. “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.”

Creating a system that allows individual location owners to update their websites, social media messages, emails, and in-store materials is also a way to manage localized marketing, according to Furness.

Companies such as Balihoo and Saepio take care of these strategies, and make it so that “the corporate marketing team doesn’t have to manage individual marketing assets for every location.”

Going about localized marketing in this fashion is a way to make sure the message stays consistent–a problem that many companies face.

Localized marketing is an important asset to all companies. Forty-one percent of marketers dedicate 30 percent of their budgets to local campaigns.