For global brands with distributors, dealer networks, multi-location storefronts, and franchises scattered across the country and beyond, one of the biggest marketing challenges is honoring customers’ demands for personalized, consistent connections through localized marketing campaigns. Customers today want to support businesses that build connections with their local communities — and if a brand isn’t willing or able to do so, they have no qualms about moving on to other providers who are. So national teams are tasked with enabling the creation of customized, localized, multichannel campaigns for every local market. Complicating matters further? Local brand representatives aren’t necessarily marketing experts (nor do they have the appetite to be), and national teams have neither the time nor resources to micromanage every single local campaign.
Fortunately, OneTouchPoint is here to help.
We pride ourselves on helping brands empower local franchisees, retailers, or dealer networks to leverage traditional, social, and digital channels to create, execute and monitor localized multichannel marketing campaigns – always keeping your business on message and on brand. Let’s look at how OneTouchPoint supports local marketing across every channel, every step of the way.
U.Connect: Maintaining Brand Integrity & Empowering Local Marketers
The first step to enabling successful local marketing campaigns — with minimal corporate micromanagement and zero risk to brand or message integrity — is to leverage an integrated marketing technology solution that contains everything local marketers will need. U.Connect, OneTouchPoint’s integrated marketing distribution platform, can serve as your centralized hub, streamlining local marketing efforts by providing several advantages:
- A centralized repository where local marketers can access, download, and order the most up-to-date, corporate-approved marketing collateral
- A process by which (approved) local marketers can design and implement their own campaigns using pre-approved marketing templates, from personalizing collateral to running digital campaigns to ordering marketing assets, as well as ordering and distributing printed on-brand materials
- Tighter control over budget distribution and allocation and deeper insights into campaign progress and success—with less hands-on oversight from national marketing leaders
This means local marketers have the power to create and implement campaigns that will speak to their communities without having to reinvent the wheel or wait for support from the national team; and it means the national leaders can rest assured that brand integrity — including design, messaging, and production quality — is fully intact.
Digital Marketing for Local Audiences
While digital marketing makes it easy to create national reach, these online touchpoints are critical for building strong local connections, as well. For example, multi-location brands can tailor their paid advertising, as well as their microsites and landing pages, to local markets, establishing a community focus that helps customers understand specific policies and procedures at their nearest locations. Additionally, affiliates’ Facebook and Instagram accounts can be hubs for brand compliant, localized content, as consumers rely heavily on social media for local information, relationship-building, and engagement with their favorite brands and the people behind them. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
While digital marketing channels are critical for reaching local audiences, these initiatives require intense planning as well as constant management, optimization, and evaluation efforts that many organizations simply don’t have the time or resources to undertake. Here again, OneTouchPoint can help. Our team has over 20 years of local digital marketing experience with multi-location organizations, across various industries and sizes, and we’re well-versed in helping our clients create and manage effective local online marketing campaigns. (Learn more in our Digital Marketing Services data sheet.)
Targeted Direct Mail & Every Door Direct Mail®
It seems like everywhere we turn, there’s talk of the “digital transformation.” But even as we move more and more of our activities and interactions online, traditional mail marketing remains a powerful way to reach local customers. Even more than digital marketing, direct mail helps brands maintain that feeling of personal interaction with customers — especially when they tailor their direct mail to individual recipients by adding their names and customizing details or offers based on previous brand interactions. Postcards and mailers can inform customers of new products and services, new policies and procedures, and exciting opportunities in their local stores. And perhaps most importantly, they can boost digital marketing efforts by making your brand a household name.
At OneTouchPoint, we offer comprehensive mailing services (we mail over 155 million pieces of mail each year!) and have a long history of working with complex postal regulations and requirements. We have USPS experts on staff to ensure your mail pieces meet all regulations and are mailed at the most cost-effective rates possible without sacrificing quality. (Learn more about our EDDM® services here.) OneTouchPoint is also HiTrust certified, ensuring your mail communications are secure and HIPAA compliant.
The In-Store Experience
While your brand may have already connected with customers via social media, digital advertising, and direct mail, a comprehensive marketing campaign also includes the in-store experience.
With COVID-19 moving significant retail activity online, franchise and multi-location retailers, along with distributors, have a steep hill to climb to encourage customers to spend their money in stores. The key is to create an experience that offers value shoppers can’t find online, and the secret weapon is point-of-sale (POS) or point-of-purchase (POP) marketing. This includes materials such as product displays, shelf-talkers, and in-store signage that create a vibrant, sensory customer experience that can’t be replicated on a screen. Online buying does not create brand loyalty or impulse buying. A proper retail execution will lift brand engagement with consumers and drive impulse purchases. Of course, with research showing that consumers are exposed to 3,000 promotional messages per day and a whopping 80,000 items in a given grocery store visit, it’s paramount to create POP and POS displays that ensure your products are the ones that catch customers’ eyes.
Marketers are competing for mindshare, loyalty, and wallet share in every interaction with potential customers, and retail is the point at which a product is connected to every other aspect of a brand’s marketing strategy. OneTouchPoint helps companies maximize these consumer engagements at every touchpoint — and now, with the acquisition of IRG, we’re proud to ensure those engagements culminate in powerful in-store marketing displays.
From the U.Connect platform to our digital and direct mail services to that final, in-store experience that delights customers, OneTouchPoint is obsessed with providing a local marketing solution that empowers companies to create campaigns that increase both brand awareness and revenue in every market. We invite you to contact us to learn more, or request a quote on your next project. Our experts will provide insight and ideas to deliver phenomenal results at a great price.