5 Opportunities with Local Advertising
We help our clients bring their national strategy into a local context. It’s great when we hear from clients that want to start a local marketing program. It’s a new channel that’s not easily understood unless you’re like us and you do this as your job. We see several opportunities for new clients that want to start a local marketing program.
There are several opportunities but we decided to limit this list to the top five. These are in no particular order:
1. Localize your mobile website. Local advertising attracts consumers on their mobile devices. Unfortunately, most companies fail to take this into account when creating their mobile website. Most of the time they either try to translate their entire site to make it mobile-accessible.
Think locally when you think about your mobile site/s. We help our clients think deeply about the specific content for mobile-access that answers a customer’s need for immediacy and action. If a local prospect enters a local search query their result should be a mobile page with a local deal, which would very likely result in a high conversion rate.
2. Mobile Loyalty Program. Loyalty programs are a popular way to provide discounts to consumers, but they’re often something like a special offer and consumers either respond or doesn’t.
You can create something more engaging by making mobile the primary enabler of your loyalty program. We can create a mobile application that not only offers discounts, but also tracks how customers interact with your brand and rewards them based on their actions. We try to look beyond purchasing behavior, too. We look for rewards that incentivize a customer to share your brand on social networking sites or sign up new customers.
3. Creative Rewards. If you have a mobile loyalty program, great, but you also need to make it worthwhile for your customers. You don’t want to create a creative mobile loyalty program and end up with a basic 10% discount. You don’t need to necessarily give a larger discount just a more creative reward. Instead, give your repeat customers more enticing rewards like freebies, offers that they can share with friends, and input and insight on new product offerings.
4. Locations include individuals. It’s easy to get lazy about local and focus exclusively on location, but not everyone in a place has the same intentions. It’s important to deploy all of the analytics tools needed to deepen your understanding of your consumer allowing you to target messages more effectively. In particular, try to look at things like location history, past locations, demographics, peak usage time, time spent, mode of travel, and other data gathered over time.
5. Communication based on locale. Even with a website, you can always go local by creating different content and deals based on location. It’s proven that marketing messages that are more relevant drive a higher rate of conversion. Using the same marketing message across all your distributed locations will not work as well as location based messaging. By changing content and deals to be sensitive to location, we’re able to achieve a significant lift in conversions for our client.