Businesses with wide-ranging consumer bases often struggle to reach all their customers. While they want to appeal to their broad demographics, it’s important to personalize marketing for customers in different geographic areas.
Achieving quality local marketing can be difficult for brands with customers from various locations; but with the right approach, it’s certainly possible. We asked a panel of Forbes Agency Council members how businesses can make their marketing campaigns appeal to local consumers. Their answers are below.
Members of Forbes Agency Council offer methods for businesses with wide-ranging customer bases to make their marketing more local.Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Research The Communities You Want To Serve
Every community, no matter how diverse, tends to have common threads, such as the things they care about or come together to support, shared concerns, and so on. Doing the research to understand the tenets of these communities and what matters most to them enables you to appeal to the larger group by showing you understand and support the issues and nuances that make that community unique. – Whitney Fishman, Wavemaker
2. Find a Unifying Purpose
Purpose-driven brands are winning in the long run. Finding a purpose that audiences can unite behind is a great way to simplify the brand’s message while connecting with a wide-ranging customer base. Patagonia’s push towards saving the environment is a great example of a strong purpose exercised well, propelling the brand ahead of its competitors. – Ahmad Kareh, Twistlab Marketing
3. ‘Localize’ Your SEO Efforts
Optimize for local terms and search intent. Generic content is great, but it’s also very broad. I recommend creating geo-specific content via landing pages in order to increase awareness locally through organic means. – Tom La Vecchia, MBA, X Factor Media
4. Try Geotargeted Paid Ads
Use geotargeting in your paid media. Geotargeting not only lets you test local markets on Google and Facebook, but it also forces brands to use more local messaging, which can help fuel local interest. In addition, your actual ad creatives should feature images or video that speak to the local demographics. Think of an image of Millennials taking pictures of their coffee in downtown Los Angeles. – Bernard May, National Positions
5. Combine Acquisition Email With Ad Retargeting
When it comes to customer acquisition, we use our highly targeted email data to assist large brands, as well as small to midsize businesses, to zero in on local markets. Taking it a step further, we recommend combining acquisition email marketing with ad retargeting—such as on Social Media—for a multichannel approach to effectively reaching consumers or businesses in a specific geography. – Paula Chiocchi, Outward Media, Inc.
6. Set Up Your Google My Business Profile
Google My Business is one of the most overlooked SEO and Social Media channels. It’s crucial for businesses to be on it and updating it. They’re continuing to come up with new features, and it enables you to appear as a strong local company with local reviews and presence. – Darian Kovacs, Jelly Digital Marketing & PR
7. Dig Into Google Ad Data
Google has made a lot of strides with their local ad formats, enabling multi-local brands to have a much more relevant local experience. Using business data and dynamic local ads, brands can deliver customized local messages at scale. For example, brands can pull useful info like local weather data for local ads, target local audiences or show how many locations they have in Houston versus Chicago. – Dan Golden, Be Found Online
8. Take Advantage Of Google Maps
You might have a wide-ranging customer base, but if you have locations in multiple cities, you can use each of those outposts as a hub for your local marketing efforts. One easy way to start is by encouraging local reviews of your company via Google Maps, which ties customer experiences to your specific location. It can make a national company also seem like a local one. – Scott Baradell, Idea Grove
9. Understand How Your Local Markets Use Technology
Global companies need to know how local markets use technology to communicate and understand not only which marketing channels represent their brand, but also which are more contextual to their audience or user base. It’s not enough to create a Local SEO listing or translate a message. A successful company creates a relevant inbound strategy that finds and appeals to people where they digitally interact. – Megan Groves, InterimCMO
10. Try Direct Mail Campaigns
Individualize your marketing efforts to take into account nuances of specific local markets. Merchandise, creative and copy could all vary depending upon where the consumer lives. And, when driving a consumer to a retail store to transact, provide information about the store closest to them. Direct mail is a great tool to use to incorporate all these components of personalization. – Lori Paikin, NaviStone®
11. Immerse Yourself In The Local Culture
Tell your story in an authentic way and deliver it through inspiring experiences, but to do that effectively you need to learn how locals talk, what values they believe in, what needs they may have and how you can help. You are talking to real people in their own area; therefore, if you want them to listen, you need to develop an empathetic relationship and use their language and slang. – Daniela Pavan, The Ad Store New York
12. Encourage Word-Of-Mouth Referrals
The best way to tap into a local grapevine is to start an advisory board of influential people who are well-known in many networks. Convene the group regularly and give them “inside” information about your business that they are the first to know. People love knowing something others don’t know, and sharing it gives them a feeling of power. The community will soon be buzzing about you. – Jeff Bradford, the Bradford Group
