Local Marketing a Rising Priority for National Brands

A new research microstudy commissioned by leading local marketing platform Balihoo and Gatepoint Research found that national brands across a variety of industries understand that driving consumers to locations or local agents is critical to their overall marketing strategy — and that local marketing efforts outperform national campaigns. This is a big change from two years ago, when marketers knew that localized campaigns were important, but still had hesitations about investing. The new study found an 11 percent increase in brands investing in local marketing today versus 2012 (77 percent vs. 66 percent). Also, 50 percent of companies surveyed for this study said that they expect the ROI on local marketing spend to be higher than that of a national campaign, a 13 percent increase from 2012.

However, national brand marketers are running into the same challenges with activating local marketing campaigns today, as they did two years ago.

Despite all of these drivers, brands still aren’t utilizing local marketing automation, citing ‘Measurable ROI” as a deterrent, not realizing that automating local marketing efforts is proven to be both cost-effective and efficient. In fact, national brands that localize their campaigns see a 13:1 ROI¹ on demand generation and relationship building campaigns.

Additional insights from the study include:

• 64 percent of brands said a local marketing strategy is critical
• 73 percent of respondents noted that they spend less than 20 percent of their marketing budget on local marketing
• 16 percent of national brands do not localize marketing campaigns, despite understanding the importance of hyper-local efforts

Download the full infographic to view all of the results of the 2015 Research Microstudy. For full results, insights, and comparisons to the 2012 Digital Microstudy, visit the Balihoo Slideshare page to download the presentation in its entirety.

¹Balihoo