Local Marketing Software 2024: A Complete Guide

Local Marketing is a marketing method that focuses on marketing strategy and implementation on one or more target audiences physically located within small geographical areas, the audience in each such area being treated as a separate marketing target. It is also popularly known as Neighborhood Marketing.

In Local Marketing, promotional messages are created and published to cater specifically to a local audience, and not to a mass market. The crux in Local Marketing is how well the marketer can ‘know’ the locality, its people, and their needs and wants. Messaging is apt to highlight, explicitly or subtly, that the business is “from the neighborhood”, implying that this makes it better placed for value delivery to its audience, as also appealing to people’s sense of belongingness. A common enough example of Local Marketing would be a local restaurant’s menu leaflets inserted into household letterboxes or included in the daily newspaper run.

Local Marketing is deployed through email, SMS, localized search, and other online ads, leaflets, and advertisements in neighborhood newspapers. Presence in local events, sponsorships, coupons, purchasing local outdoor ad space, and festive offers are also favored local marketing methods.

Single store owners and individual outlets of small business chains typically employ local marketing techniques to boost their sales. Franchised businesses associated with big brands also make use of this technique to attract local audiences. They employ this form of marketing to not only attract and acquire new customers but also to drive repeat sales at regular intervals.

Local Marketing tactics must - and usually do - vary from neighborhood to neighborhood even for the same business, based on socio-economic factors, demographic footprints, and purchasing power.

While it is relatively easy for single-store owners to personalize relationships in a limited geography, it is challenging for big brands with large footprints and a centralized command to maintain their brand image and yet localize messaging for consumers in keeping with the geo-social specifics. It is hardly possible to create such detailed publicity material and engage in content publishing if attempted manually. To overcome this limitation, Local Marketing Software is used to automate the whole process.

Small businesses operating in limited geography find it challenging to compete against big brands’ deep pockets and seemingly endless resources or to even branch out to other locations for higher revenue. Survival for such businesses hinges on the effective use of Local Marketing to create and disseminate appropriate messaging to attract new customers. The aim is to nudge and guide the local target audience to conversion as customers. Thereafter, delivering customer satisfaction becomes the key to enjoying further sales, including cross-selling and/or upselling.

Local marketing software enables marketers to design campaigns even without skills or knowledge in graphic design or digital marketing. It empowers them to create mails, email campaigns, print collaterals, social media campaigns, and to develop landing pages for their local traffic.

Similarly, big brands can benefit by creating templates for local users, which improves efficiency and reduces costs. The whole campaign can be controlled and managed from the corporate office. With the use of analytics, they can generate reports to monitor the performance of the campaigns. Using templates, they maintain consistency in the quality of the campaign material by allowing the addition of local flavors while still not diluting the brand message.

Accurate and automated listing distribution, better landing page development, and optimization - all can lead to improved search engine rankings.

Using specialized software for local marketing allows for closer, more nuanced campaigns at much higher cost-effectiveness. Merging this with search utility parameters helps in real-time promotion with rapidly evolving “near me/you” suggestions.

Who are the Users of Local Marketing Software?

End users can be categorized into three broad segments, viz., local marketers - brick and mortar businesses that every neighborhood has in a town or city, big businesses with branches in local geography such as Woolworth, and big brands with a countrywide or even international footprint like Starbucks.

It can be used as a tool by pretty much every industry vertical that has business interests in the retail segment to reach out to hyperlocal to target customers.

Local Marketing Software helps automate the tasks to be accomplished for local marketing. As a business tool, the software is often an enabler and not just an efficiency enhancer for local marketing. Typical components are the following:

Listing Management

Any successful campaign depends on the ease of availability of clean, accurate, and consistent data for listing. The key to drive high rankings in search engines - which will ensure that online searchers find you faster - is to be able to supply as much information as possible in the form of a name, brand, product description, categories, pricing band, payment mode, coupons, special offers, images of products, operating hours of the store, services provided, etc. This is enabled through Listing Management.

Listing Distribution

Such listings are to be shared with search engines, relevant online directories, social media platforms. Listing Distribution enables this.

Local SEO

Local Landing Pages

Local Landing Pages are the first touchpoint for consumers, where they access relevant and detailed local information. The pages get localized for each consumer by requiring location data, usually, the names of the city and the state.

Other components of Local Marketing Software are used thus:

• Social Media Management for regular social media postings, market surveys, and social media campaigns

Modules

An ideal Local Marketing Software Suite would include all or any of the following Modules:

• Search Engine Optimization

• Web Presence

• Display Advertising

• Online Market Analytics

• Lead Conversion

• Communication Management modules for Email and Chat

• Ability to store catalogs

• Online maps and GPS System

• Mobile Optimization

• Reports and Dashboard

All these modules deployed together or in parts in a phased manner depending upon the business needs can completely revolutionize the way one does Local Marketing.

While the above-mentioned components would form the basis of software adoption by individual store owners, the big brands do it a little differently for their own locations or franchisee locations. They do not allow the franchisee locations to create their own localized content on the whole, for fear of diluting the brand message. The software provides them with templates to localize their messaging for individual markets. Brands enable their franchisee partners with such templates to align localized messaging with brand messaging. They also provide content management tools to store and organize text, pictures, animations, videos, and creative content.

This software acts as an enabler for the local marketer to run print advertisements, digital signage, digital marketing campaigns. It assists users to prepare reports for particular needs, customized workflows, and scheduling features. The scheduling feature helps the local marketer to sequence and schedule their posts on several social media platforms.

Some of the emerging trends in the Local Marketing segment include Google My Business which is emerging as a testbed for organizations wanting to get initiated into this space. Facebook recommendations are being taken seriously and this has a direct influence on the buying process. With the continuing increase in the density of mobile phones, it is imperative to have content optimized for mobile phones. Accuracy of locations is also a key parameter. Expect to see soon how specialized software enables the expert management of all these and more in local marketing.

The first thing to do before deciding on buying a Local Marketing Software, it has to be said, is to firm up the local business strategy and identify the goals to be achieved. Once that is done, it is important to set up key performance indicators to measure them. This will drive the buying process and help decide which modules/ features would be instrumental in achieving the desired goals.

It always helps to seek a product demonstration to get a good sense of the performance of the system. It not only gives you a firsthand experience that would help you incorporate it into your goal plans, but also helps you assess more accurately if it would serve your intended purpose in achieving these goals.

Major factors that need to be considered to choose the right-fit software

Size of the Business

Point Products or All-in-one Platform

Localization

Since Local Marketing is all about local businesses, it is important that the software provides extensive localization support around language, currency, and local directory listing.

Feature Set

Ease of Use

This is imperative for all the software that needs to cater to SMB. It should have simple install, deploy models. It should also be easy to use without extensive technical support and also easy to customize. Users should be able to create content either through templates or through self-designs with minimal effort.

Integrations

Cloud or On-Premise

Before buying the software, it is important that the local marketer - or her organization - decides whether they want to use this tool as an off-the-shelf product, implemented on-premise, or as a hosted service, implemented as a cloud-based solution. Small and medium enterprises may elect to go the cloud-based model route, while large enterprises are likely to opt for the on-premise model. The cloud-based model would be subscription-based, at a monthly fee, and frees the subscription holders from worrying about necessary hardware, maintenance, management skills, etc. On the other hand, if the on-premise model is chosen, then, more than anything else, it would require that the organization has the wherewithal to acquire and maintain the right kind of skill sets in-house to make the implementation a success.

More broadly, when shopping for Local Marketing Automation, seek answers to these questions: Is onboarding to this platform going to help you create better Segmentation of your customer base? Will you be able to choose and use the best Media platform to reach out to your customer base? Will it ease the process of creating Messaging to your target customers and help them to generate more revenue? Lastly, is there a Measurement tool to evaluate marketing campaigns and rate the results?

ROI of Local Marketing Software

Individual stores and big brands would differ in the yardsticks they use to measure ROI, and hence, there is no single formula to arrive at a number. But as a general principle, ROI would be measured by cost savings and an increase in revenue due to the implementation and use of the software. In order to quantify these two variables, several parameters relevant to each business can be considered in combination. Below are some parameters that can be considered:

• Time and Wages of the Design Team

• Local Marketer Costs

• Agency fee for the distribution

• Storage fee

• Time taken to deploy and run a campaign

• Increased asset creation – creating multiple and localized messaging out of one design template

• Spike in Online Conversions

• Better response rates

• Customer Reach

• Better margins at same value points

• Repeat purchases

• Upsell and Cross-sell opportunities

• Asset Utilization

• Asset Performance – Tracking and monitoring of the campaigns

• User Behavior Pattern- Frequency of login, interest in campaigns, location, time, etc

• Campaign Status – Feedback mechanism