From franchises and retail stores to financial institutions and multi-location healthcare organizations, businesses with customer facing operations scattered across the country—no matter the industry—have one priority in common: local marketing.
How important is it for affiliates to create campaigns that don’t just showcase your brand but promote it directly to nearby consumers? Well, for starters, 88 percent of mobile online searches for local businesses lead to call or visit within one day, and 72 percent of computer users want to see ads that are customized to their cities or zip codes — and that’s just digital marketing.
Print marketing materials such as flyers, brochures, and catalogs have a longer “shelf life” than digital messaging, since these items tend to sit around on countertops and coffee tables for a while, keeping your brand top of mind for the recipient. And when these assets are tailored to local consumers, they provide a more personalized experience that encourages customers to engage with your brand.
The importance of local marketing is no secret, of course — the vast majority of brand representatives, franchisees, and affiliates understand that these activities are crucial for building consumer relationships and growing revenue. But, just like so many important things, great local marketing is easier said than done, especially when affiliates lack the resources (time, money, human power) or expertise to create and launch robust campaigns.
The right local marketing platform, however, can help brand representatives function as CMOs for their locations, designing and executing powerful local marketing strategies without breaking a sweat.
The Solution for Local Marketers: A Through-Channel Marketing Automation Platform
Through-channel marketing automation platforms (TCMAs) are SaaS solutions designed to centralize distributed marketing efforts, every affiliate and representative to quickly access approved marketing collateral and resources twenty-four-seven. A local marketing platform like this empowers brand representatives to become savvy local marketers in two key ways.
Saving Time, Money, and Effort
A great local marketing platform acts as a full-service brand management software. It offers centralized digital asset management to give local marketers easy access to the latest materials. It also offers automated approval workflows to take the friction out of the sign-off process and easy access to self-service ordering for printed materials.
No more spending precious time digging through files, emailing corporate for access yet again, or creating new assets from scratch, hoping to get the messaging and design just right. No more following up with higher-ups to see if that approval request got buried in their email. No more sourcing print vendors and managing orders ad hoc, preventing national leadership from controlling quality and cost.
Instead, following corporate-approved campaign plans — and tailoring them to each rep’s local audience — is a breeze.
Which brings us to the second benefit of a through-channel marketing automation platform for local marketers:
Making Customization a Snap
Customizable templates and modular content are key to easy personalization, whether you’re in the alcohol and beverage industry and need to adhere to differing state regulations around alcohol promotions or you’re just looking to be sure your brochure has the hours, contact information, and address for your store in Washington instead of the one in Florida.
When messaging needs to change slightly from market to market, local leaders need a way to quickly and easily customize materials for their own audiences without recreating assets from scratch or undermining core corporate branding.
That’s where the right through-channel marketing automation platform saves the day again. Your local marketing platform should enable modular (or templated) content, which allows local reps to easily customize assets by swapping out modules (the smallest possible blocks of content) to drop local details into corporate-approved materials. This means all the customization affiliates need is at their fingertips, with no risk of inconsistent branding or unapproved (and potentially expensive) changes to legally required messaging.
Taking Local Marketing to the Next Level
Local marketing is critical for multi-location brands looking to build their customer bases in different markets, but affiliates often need support in order to create and implement strong campaigns for their unique target audiences.
OneTouchPoint’s TCMA platform is the perfect brand management software for local marketers, offering digital asset management with automated approval workflows, commercial print services to ensure high-quality printed assets for every location, and modular content to make customization a snap. (And that’s just for starters.)
If your organization is ready to level-up it’s local marketing game, let’s talk. Contact us today to learn more about our robust suite of vendor-managed services designed to make every affiliate a CMO.