Well, it doesn’t. Does it? Every other form of media is rapidly transforming to digital – but local marketing has been left behind. That’s evident in the thousands of tons of paper used on print media and flyers every year. Everything from radio to banner ads to Out of Home (OOH) has shifted to digital and from digital to programmatic, allowing you to collect data, iterate, optimize, and target to smaller, and smaller niche markets in fractions of seconds. Local marketing just doesn’t offer any of that.
More importantly, despite local marketing taking up a significant portion of most marketing budgets, it’s cut off from our marketing strategies. It’s a black hole in your strategy. Not only can you not see how effective it is, but you also can’t see how it fits into the rest of your strategy or use data to optimize it. Chances are that your digital marketers aren’t even involved.
Tools like Adcombi’s hyperlocal marketing change that, allowing any (inter)national multi-location brand to take its local marketing to digital.
Why Digitize Local Marketing
Taking that step and linking local strategies and budgets into digital means linking that marketing into your overall omnichannel strategy. For example, when you build digital ads targeting geo locations in Adcombi’s platform, you can do so with the wealth of knowledge created from other marketing campaigns. When you do, the data you have regarding your customer, who they are, what they like, and how they like to be talked to on a one-on-one basis becomes hyper-relevant.
Integrating Marketing Experts – Rather than (just) creating and printing ads for flyers and brochures, part of your local marketing budget can integrate your in-house marketing experts. Suddenly, local ads have the potential to be interactional, multi-step, and tightly targeted to specific user demographics. In fact, Adcombi’s technology is so specific, you can exclude certain areas or even specific devices– ensuring, for example, that you don’t alienate long-term customers with signup discounts they can’t benefit from.
Shift the Focus Away from Price – Local print marketing is often little more than a race to the bottom. Sarah receives 12 different brochures from her local home living center – with every store vying for her attention. When she wants a new stove, a new shower, a new tub faucet, and she starts from the flyers – often the only differentiator is price. Digital targeting allows you to connect with customers before they know they need the product, creating brand trust and building motivators for the sale that are beyond “who has the lowest price”.
Programmatic – Instead of committing to local ads in bulk, in flyers and magazines, with ad pricing in the thousands, you can commit to ad buys in quantities of 1 – with programmatic. Digitizing your local ads means automating ad buy, so that ads are only served to prospects who meet the exact location and targeting specifications in the DSP. Whether that’s retargeting to draw Ecommerce viewers further into the funnel or to direct them to a local store, targeting by geo-location when customers are within walking distance of an outlet, or offering situationally relevant ads, such as prompts for a hot coffee when the weather drops below 10c in the morning is completely up to the programmer. You set the requirements and the DSP matches that to inventory before placing a bid.
Omnichannel Data – When you shift to digital marketing, you enable data collection. Most organizations already have a wealth of data, on customers, behavior, ad interaction, targeting groups – the list goes on and on. Most of that data does not integrate into other forms of ads. But, as everything shifts to programmatic, it does become relevant, and as a part of a greater (whole) omnichannel strategy. Here, data collected from television campaigns can be utilized across mobile, radio, and yes, local ads. And, that also connects to DOOH, where digital local marketing can align with out of home, with targeting down to the specific screens.
Don’t Just Digitize Local, Localize Digital
As you begin to look into shifting local marketing budgets into digital, it's crucial that you also move into localizing national ads. That means driving more relevance and interest from national-level ads – that would previously struggle to gain traction or clicks.
For example, our data shows that as ad relevance increases, and national ads begin to contain local data like addresses, route planners, and local brand logos, attention goes up. That can result in as much as a 60% increase in click through rate – a phenomenon near-impossible to replicate across standard digital. Integrating local data is a powerful way to grab attention and attention drives engagement, clicks, and sales.
Adcombi offers hyperlocal digital marketing, with the ability to create hundreds or even thousands of unique line items on the DSP. That gives marketers opportunities to deliver unique ads per physical location – putting context and location-relevant data into (national) ad campaigns. Eventually, that means creating a technology-driven approach to local marketing, in which local ads become optimizable, measurable, and data driven. In other words, digital.
