National brands are still trying to figure out the right path to digital advertising on the local level, years after smaller businesses jump in head-first. Behind the hesitation: difficulty pushing change in sprawling organizations, challenges to finding ad scale at the local level and ensuring a return on investment before spending major bucks.
That was the message from a panel of marketing experts at Street Fight Summit in New York City. But the gathering of hyperlocal publishers and platforms also had this to say: local digtial advertising is here to stay and the same challenges facing local content publishers are being tackled on the ad side, as well.
Jamie Tedford, CEO of Brand Networks, said corporations find it scary to change their advertising and organizational strategies.
“I think organizing digital on scale in a local way has been the biggest challenge,” Tedford told the audience. “Facebook is a local player, but the idea of going from a national publishing and advertising strategy, which is relatively straightforward, to thinking about publishing at the storefront and advertising at the storefront and thinking about store managers, operators, franchisees with the ability to publish local, is scary.”
Tedford cited Starbucks as an example of a company that started out with local Facebook pages, then took its marketing strategy national, and now is bringing it back local.
Luke Edson, vice president of national markets for YP, said some businesses think they can get by with a simple strategy of creating a local-targeted website and optimizing it to appear in Google search. But businesses should be focused on “creating the best experiences for the consumer,” not the brand, he said, and making sure the right information is online.
Rajen Ruparell, senior vice president of global sales for Groupon, said he has seen a lot of change since five or six years ago with new Facebook, Groupon and Twitter advertising options aimed at local markets.
He pointed to national golf equipment retailer Golfsmith as a good example of a brand that is adapting its marketing to the local level. The chain has grown rapidly — from 12 markets to over 70 — and felt advertising campaigns didn’t make sense for all locations at the same time.
“They leave it to their independent managers in their stores, even though it’s all corporate-owned, to make those independent decisions, and I think you’ll see that happen more and more with retailers,” Ruparell said.
Edson cited insurance as one vertical that is doing local-digital better than others due to the industry’s reliance on local agents and brokers to generate sales and create customer relationships.
Getting a return on investment — always front and center in conversations about digital marketing — remains a focus and a challenge at the local level.
“We have moved beyond the search for ‘Likes.’ Smart marketers are invested in measurement platforms to determine, if I put a product in a News Feed that’s localized, can I track the ability to drive sales of that product in that store?” said Brand Networks’ Tedford. “You can bet as sophisticated a marketer as a Walmart, a Macy’s or a Starbucks is, they all have built-in systems usually working with third-party platforms. The money’s only going to flow if we all operate in an ROI-positive place, and doing the hard work of tracking.”
