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November 2013

About the Pie Chart

The data presented in the pie chart is derived from the Q4 2013 Distributed Marketing survey and serves as the basis for this Deep Dive, which provides analyst commentary related to a particular aspect of the topic. The objective is to provide additional perspective and illuminate certain key considerations regarding the implementation of the related technology-enabled business initiative.

Additional survey data utilized:

» Q3 2013 Gleansight benchmark report on Omnichannel Marketing (n=189)

To learn more about Gleanster’s research methodology, please click here or email research@gleanster.com.

Deep Dive

Scaling Digital Marketing at the Local Level

For national marketers that operate in a distributed or local marketing environment, traditional media has played a critical role in brand strategy for decades. But growth in digital channels and customer demand for more intimate and personalized interactions has elevated the need to engage target audiences across digital at both the national and the local level. Nobody knows the customer better than local marketers. Unfortunately, local marketers rarely have the resources or expertise to execute digital campaigns effectively – and when they do, they run the risk of violating brand compliance if they don’t stick to corporate-approved processes. On the other hand, corporate processes can be bureaucratic and time-consuming, reducing the likelihood that local communications in digital channels will be timely or relevant. Quite the conundrum. And while the national brand can rely on corporate marketing relationships with large, expensive agencies for strategy, creative, and execution, it’s difficult to extend these advantages to local marketers. That means it’s critical to develop a local strategy for digital that can mitigate challenges for both corporate and local marketers. How do Top Performing distributed marketing organizations enable digital marketing strategy across the national and local levels? What’s the secret to making it scalable?

This Deep Dive report explores the nuances of scaling digital marketing in a distributed or regional marketing environment. We will explore exactly how distributed marketers should be incorporating digital channels into ongoing

71%

The Percentage of Top Performers that regard “Generate customer Insights” as a top reason to monitor Social Media

68%

23%

Percentage of Top Performers achieving triple digit growth in year-over-year revenue through a combination of online and offline marketing at the local level. Digital has become a critical piece of

Top Performers local marketing strategy.

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Scaling Digital Marketing at the Local Level 2

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Top Performers Defined

Gleanster uses 2-3 key performance indicators (KPIs) to distinguish “Top Performers” from all other companies (“Everyone Else”) within a given data set, thereby establishing a basis for benchmarking best practices. By definition, Top Performers are comprised of the top quartile of qualified survey respondents (QSRs).

The KPIs used for distinguishing Top Performers focus on performance metrics that speak to year-over-year improvement in relevant, measurable areas. Not all KPIs are weighted equally.

The KPIs used to distinguish Top Performers in this Deep Dive include:

• Revenue growth

• Click-through rates on email

• ROMI on Local Campaigns

marketing execution, and we will consider the emerging class of technology called “local marketing automation” that is designed to specifically help make offline and online marketing execution scalable for national and local marketers.

What Is Local Marketing?These days it’s not enough to blast generic communications out to your target audience. You must reach them with relevant and personalized communications that build intimate relationships. These relationships are the key to maximizing the lifetime value of customers and growing share of wallet. It’s hard enough to manage multi-channel execution when a single corporate marketing entity oversees all marketing communications and customer engagement. But in a distributed or localized marketing function the national brand is owned by two constituents that, at times, have conflicting objectives for the brand: corporate marketing and local/field marketers.

Historically, corporate marketing was responsible for brand consistency, while local marketers demanded customization and autonomy. This was largely a byproduct of traditional media channels because local marketers were desperate for ways to personalize the generic brand for target audiences using cumbersome and costly media such as print, TV and radio. However, as digital channels and emerging media became a primary vehicle for customer engagement, national brands invested considerable resources in catching up to consumers to seize opportunities to brand and engage in the new digital frontier. Unfortunately many organizations struggle to scale digital engagement outside of the national brand where investments in agencies and technology tend to be larger. Naturally, local marketers should also be engaging target audiences

via digital channels, but many brands quickly realized they don’t have the time, resources, or expertise to manage digital effectively. A great example of this environment is a bank or financial institution with a corporate brand and hundreds of localized branch offices. The branch offices need a way to engage local target audiences in branch specific social properties (Facebook,

Twitter, etc.) and opt-in lists to receive offers that specifically target the local demographic and geographic attributes such as nationality, income, lifestyle, or the presence of children. But the local brand is unlikely to have resources who can own and manage digital execution.

Gleanster defines local marketing as the communications that are owned and executed by a distributed network of local or regional marketers. These marketers augment the national brand by engaging a specific localized target

82%

85%

94%

0% 50% 100%

Increase visibilityinto brand

communciaitons

Control brandconsistency in multi-

channel messages

Increase relevanceand personalization

Top Performers

Figure 1: Top 3 Challenges with Distributed Marketing

Local Marketing Automation Survey 2013, n=158, Qualified Survey Respondents n=132

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Scaling Digital Marketing at the Local Level 3

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audience in a more intimate and personalized context. Local marketers have a unique understanding of the demographic, psychographic, and sociographic needs of local customers. Local marketers often own revenue targets and have unique objectives to meet with respect to marketing strategy. Therefore, relevance and speed of message at the local level becomes critical to ongoing execution. It’s about rapidly meeting customer demands across any channel, at any time, with just the right offer.

As the steward of the national brand, corporate marketing takes ownership of brand consistency, the overall communication strategy, and support for local marketers by supplementing marketing investments, creating brand standards, and managing the infrastructure to oversee customer engagement. For corporate marketing, it can be challenging to surrender autonomy to the local level, especially when local marketers circumvent corporate standards or fail to pay attention to changes to the brand. This leads to inconsistent branding, customer communication fatigue, and lack of visibility at the corporate level. Eight out of ten survey respondents indicated brand consistency was a top three challenge for the national brand.

Why Digital is Critical to Local Marketing SuccessLet’s begin the discussion with the understanding that, technically, all marketing is local marketing – or at least it should be. Today the balance of power has shifted away from the brand and toward the consumer. Large-scale generic batch-and-blast communications are approaching diminishing returns for national brands. While they may have worked very effectively five or ten years ago, the age

of the empowered customer demands more personalization than ever before and a willingness to engage customers when and where they prefer to interact with the brand. That’s because customers are inundated with marketing messages across offline and online channels, so the only way to rise above the noise is to engage them in highly relevant interactions. Local marketers bring a level of understanding about local customers’ wants and needs that is invaluable to the brand; the knowledge that resides at the local level is the secret weapon for capturing mindshare from overwhelmed consumers. Brands prosper and thrive when they intimately and personally reach target audiences. But how do you actually harness the power of local knowledge? You move away from batch-and-blast legacy marketing to tactics that incorporate local knowledge and data.

According to survey respondents, the average click-through rate on generic mass email campaigns is now less than 1%, down from 3% just three years ago. In fact, Top Performers who engage in localized marketing communications (owned and executed by local marketers) report an average open rate of 17% and an average click-through rate of 5% from localized email campaigns to opt-in customer lists. That’s three times higher than generic communications from corporate marketing. Digital channels continue to deliver 3-5x higher engagement than traditional media. However, unlike traditional media, digital marketing is prone to large variances in performance, largely depending on the quality and timeliness of the communication. Traditional channels tend to be more predictable, which is one of the main reasons local marketers are reluctant to move to digital. The challenge is finding ways to make this

Balancing Outbound Engagement at the Local LevelWhile digital is critical, sometimes local markets simply don’t have the skills or sophistication to do digital well. As such, leading brands are finding it makes more sense to reverse the traditional equation and have corporate marketing execute digital campaigns for local marketers. Top Performers will often configure workflows that allow local marketers to approve and oversee corporate communications to local target audiences.

It’s very common for Top Performers to develop a hybrid approach to local marketing whereby training and self-managed tools are available to local marketers who have the resources, while other local marketers can opt in or subscribe to corporate-executed local digital communications. This works particularly well in digital channels where local expertise may be limited, but research suggests local marketers are very effective at executing traditional media campaigns. In most cases, it makes sense to leave traditional media execution (radio, TV, newspapers, etc.) at the local level.

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Scaling Digital Marketing at the Local Level 4

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highly personalized digital engagement scalable. (See Figure 2.)

Why Digital Is Critical for Local MarketersPersonalization is a byproduct of reaching customers through contextually relevant, timely, and engaging communications. Historically, local marketers relied on traditional forms of media such as newspapers, yellow pages, radio, or television. While these channels offer fairly predictable returns, they also tend to deliver lower results than digital channels. In digital channels, you can pay for behavior that physically drives sales (cost-per-click, cost-per-conversion, etc.) which means customer engagement with the brand can be directly attributed to the sale. Digital is a more reliable source of justifiable spend because it can be measured. Furthermore, customers

expect to interact with brands on their terms, wherever and whenever they choose; smartphones and tablets continue to liberate information consumption and empower consumers. Digital is at the heart of these trends. As a result, digital engagement at the local level is essential to the national brand because it’s the most intimate form of communication that can be directly tied to behavior that is known to drive sales. Digital channels such as social networks and email offer a vehicle for interactive dialogues whereby customer engagement can be tracked and used to trigger follow-up communications that offer the next best touch in the customer relationship. (See Figure 3.) For national brands it’s important to be a conduit to customer engagement by linking directly to local marketer’s digital properties such as a website, landing page, social media property or email follow-up. For example, a bike

What channels do local marketers use to represent the national brand at a local level?

How Top Performers engage in these channels

How do Top Performers leverage digital at the local level?

18%

24%

58%

OFFLINE ONLY

DIGITAL ONLY

BOTH ONLINE& OFFLINE

Top Performers were 4x more likely than Everyone Else to use dynamic print collateral which allowed local marketers to customize printed brand compliant collateral for use in local engagement.

90% of Top Performers who engaged exclusively in digital channels allowed local marketers to load and manage lists of local target recipients and execute email campaigns from a corporate managed tool.

Top Performers were 3x more likely to allow local marketers to manage both Online and Offline engagement. This included personalized landing pages, paid search, email, and traditional media.

Figure 2: Online and Offline Brand Engagement at the Local Level

*Gleanster asked survey respondents about the types of campaigns local marketers frequently relied on to engage local target audiences: digital only, offline only, or a hybrid of both.

Local Marketing Automation Survey 2013, n=158, Qualified Survey Respondents n=132

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Scaling Digital Marketing at the Local Level 5

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manufacturer may want to re-direct visitors from the corporate web property directly to the website of an outlet or local store where the bike can actually be purchased. Likewise, if a consumer searches online, the brand may want to entirely bypass the corporate website/dealer finder, and direct the consumer directly to the local store/dealer.

In a distributed marketing environment the national brand tends to have access to more resources and can rely on agencies to support brand strategy, creative development, and multi-channel campaign execution. That means best practices for digital are more likely to reside at the corporate level. Therefore, it generally makes sense to also rely on corporate expertise and resources to configure and support digital execution for local marketers. In this context, local marketers would opt-in to corporate managed and executed local marketing campaigns that are automated and executed at the corporate level, but look and feel like local engagement to the target audience. This also allows customer data to be centralized within corporate so more intimate forms of data used for personalization are readily available in digital campaigns. For example, personalizing local

communications based on weather, purchase history, channel preference, etc.

According to Gleanster, marketers who engage exclusively in traditional forms of offline communication cite “lack of skills/expertise” (57%) and “lack of technology” (45%) as the top two reasons for not engaging in digital communications. As important as digital should be, there is still a significant barrier to digital at the local level. Research proves that local marketers don’t have the sophistication or resources to support digital for relationship marketing. In fact, 89% of local marketers who engaged in digital channels indicate they were primarily using email marketing tactics and minimal personalization (usually the salutation of an email or a drip-marketing campaign to customer segments).

For this reason, technology plays a critical role in helping make digital marketing scalable at the local level. Eight out of ten distributed marketers Gleanster surveyed relied on a centralized campaign management tool that was owned and managed exclusively by corporate marketing.

Why is digital marketing so critical to local marketing strategy

VARIETY OF CHANNELS Email Landing Pages Search Social Media Mobile, etc.

MEASURABLE Touch Attribution by Channel

Easier to Track Engagement

Easier to Measure Return

Compare Local vs. Corporate Results 24 x 7

SCALABLE Lower Cost Extensive ReachA Way to Centralize &

Capture Customer Channel or Frequency

Preferences

Easily Integrated with Offline

Channels

Can be Automated by Business Rules

PERSONALIZEDTriggered by

Customer Engagement

Sender Attribution Can be Customized

Dynamic & Interactive Real-Time

Vehicle for Outbound &

Inbound Marketing

COMPLIANCE & GOVERNANCE

Easier to Manage Communication

Fatigue

Automate Lead Routing &

Opportunities

Centralize Brand Standards & Disseminate

Digitally

Rapidly Adapt to Industry

Regulations

Centralized Opt-Out

Figure 3: Benefits of using digital in local marketing strategy

From Marketing Asset Management to Local Marketing Automation

Marketing automation technology has to a certain degree diluted the unique qualities of marketing asset management. But marketing automation is popular right now, mainly because it’s all about enabling intimate relationships that result in sales. That happens to be exactly what organizations with a distributed marketing environment are trying to accomplish. As such, Gleanster feels it is appropriate to help evangelize distributed marketing by jumping on the proverbial marketing automation bandwagon; hence, “local marketing automation” might be a better way to describe these technologies.

Local Marketing Automation is also referred to as:• Marketing Asset Management• Distributed Marketing• Distributed Marketing Operations• Multi-Channel Distributed Marketing• Localized Marketing Platform• Regional Marketing Platform

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Scaling Digital Marketing at the Local Level 6

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A single centralized corporate communication platform means local marketers must submit campaigns for corporate to configure and execute. But this can lead to bottlenecks within corporate marketing, impeding the likelihood that local campaigns executed by corporate will be relevant or timely. There are, however, merits to a centralized approach when the right technologies are utilized. Distributed marketing tools are designed to support campaign execution from national and local markets using the same core system of record for customer data. Distributed marketing technology allows local marketers to access

pre-configured templates for digital engagement (templates that are owned and managed by corporate). Local marketers benefit from all the elements listed in Figure 4, but national marketing now has access to a holistic view of customer data to maximize reach with customers.

Data is the lifeblood of personalized engagement. In order to truly optimize customer engagement the national brand must also find ways to tap into local marketer’s strategic expertise and, more importantly, the customer data from local engagement. When local marketers individually execute digital campaigns, spend is so low it requires

Limitations in digital at the local level

BRAND STRATEGY

CREATIVE

Local Marketers

Corporate / National Marketers

HolisticTarget Audience

Local Target Audiences

TECHNOLOGY

The national brand relies on agency relationships to develop brand

strategy, creative, and media spend. But corporate marketers don’t always

have intimate knowledge of local audiences to engage in truly relevant

and timely relationships.

Local marketers have limited funds and expertise to develop and execute digital campaigns. While they can rely on local media companies to a certain degree, they still need guidance and resources from corporate, especially for digital.

Campaign Management: Corporate owned marketing technology limits local autonomy.

Local marketers have limited time, skills, and resources to run digital campaigns.

Local Marketing Automation: Local marketers can easily customize brand approved digital templates and/or subscribe to ("set it and forget it") programs offered by corporate.

Local Marketing Automation: Corporate creates and manages brand approved templates for digital.

Corporate has access to holistic data on customers and campaign performance at the local level.

DIGITAL MEDIA CHANNELSLocal Email Campaigns

Local Landing Pages

Local Social Media

Local Paid Search Campaigns

Etc.

UN

IFIE

D BR

AND

ACRO

SS D

IGIT

AL

UN

IFIE

D BR

AND

ACRO

SS D

IGIT

AL

Localized Digital Engagement National Brand Digital Engagement

Powered by Local Marketing Automation

Figure 4: Enabling Digital Marketing at the Local Level

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Scaling Digital Marketing at the Local Level 7

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longer investments to collect data that can impact optimization. But when national marketers are overseeing both corporate and local digital campaigns for hundreds of thousands of locations, the data can be aggregated and the entire effort can be optimized more effectively and in less time

Digital is a high frequency communication medium, and the low cost of executing campaigns means it’s easy to abuse. When communications to the same customer may be coming from national and local marketers, this can quickly lead to fatigue and a poor brand experience – or worse, the dreaded opt-out. Managing communication fatigue demands a centralized view of all engagement at an individual customer level. In most cases this demands a centralized tool or reporting infrastructure to manage customer preferences across channel and communication frequency.

An emerging class of technology known as “local marketing automation” is designed specifically to meet the unique needs of distributed marketers. These tools allow corporate marketing to develop branded offline and online templates that can be customized by local marketers. Some aspects of these templates can be locked so brand consistency can be maintained across all multi-channel communications via corporate or local marketing. Templates also ensure regulatory guidelines are being met consistently in highly regulated industries such as financial services or pharmaceuticals. These tools give local marketers more autonomy in outbound communications and eliminate the burden of coding campaigns. At the same time, corporate marketing can oversee brand governance, approve communications, and measure results.

Measuring the Benefits of DigitalGleanster asked survey respondents about the types of campaigns local marketers frequently relied on to engage local target audiences: digital only, offline only, or a hybrid of both. Respondents self-reported average year-over-year (YoY) change in performance across a handful of key metrics. The following chart depicts the perceived effectiveness of online and offline marketing channels across key metrics within local marketing departments. This chart benchmarks the effectiveness of online versus offline at the local level. Some of these metrics, such as growth in YoY revenue, were also used to benchmark Top Performing organizations to determine exactly what these organizations do differently to achieve superior performance. Figure 5 shows All Respondents.

Key takeaways from the data include the fact that organizations that rely exclusively on digital versus offline

Offline Only*

DigitalOnly* Both*

YoYRevenue Growth

+19% +46% +55%

% Change in Cost-Per-Sale

+6% -19% -4%

YoYImpressions +5% -10% +36%

CustomerSatisfaction +10% +4% +26%

in YoYMarketing Spend

+24% +10% +15%

All Respondents: Online versus Offline Performance in Key Metrics

Answered yes to “Are you a local or field marketer?”

Figure 5: Online versus Offline Performance in Key Metrics for All Respondents

* Answered yes to “Are you a local or field marketer?”Local Marketing Automation Survey 2013, n=158, Qualified Survey Respondents n=132

Spend on digital can be largely ineffective without the right strategy behind marketing spend; conversely, the right strategy with digital can deliver some of the highest performance across revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and reach.

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Scaling Digital Marketing at the Local Level 8

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achieved 2.4x higher revenue growth from 2012 to 2013. A core focus on digital seems to lead to more effective execution and therefore higher performance. Additionally, the use of both digital and offline channels at the local level contributes to the highest growth in revenue at 55% average growth suggesting a combination of digital and traditional media delivers the best results. Likewise the use of both channels delivered a 26% increase in customer satisfaction an area that is traditionally difficult to impact. Marketers reported a significant decrease in the cost-per-sale through digital channels (-4%) with a modest 10% YoY increase in marketing spend. This could be a result of diminishing effectiveness from digital spend from the sheer volume of marketing messages in this channel. Alternatively, marketers that relied exclusively on offline channels reported a 6% increase in the cost-per-sale, suggesting that traditional media prices are rising but performance remains the same.

A deeper dive into the data revealed Top Performing local marketers were largely responsible for high outlier metrics in digitally engaged organizations, which is to be expected. However, Top Performers skewed the data, making average performance higher in most cases. It seems the application of best practice digital execution leveraged by Top Performers delivers significantly higher performance compared with Everyone Else, who struggled with negative average cost-per-sale performance. The key finding here is that spend on digital can be largely ineffective without the right strategy behind marketing spend; conversely, the right strategy with digital can deliver some of the highest performance across revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and reach.

Personalization Drives RevenueTechnology plays a critical role in making digital execution scalable at the local level. Figure 4 lightly touched upon the role of technology for executing campaigns. Local marketing automation tools help support the entire marketing value chain for distributed marketers. Gleanster defines the marketing value chain as the strategy, creative, execution, and measurement of marketing communications across both national and local marketing. Historically, distributed marketing technology has largely been justified through efficiency, productivity, cost savings, centralization of digital assets, centralized customer data, centralized workflows & approvals, faster time to market, centralized marketing calendars, and executive reporting. But in the context of digital, technologies like local marketing automation are critical for fostering customer relationships with the brand, which have a real and direct impact on revenue. It’s not just about efficiency, it’s about building personalized and relevant relationships with customers at the local AND national level. Nobody has a more intimate relationship with the national target audience than the local marketer, so making digital marketing scalable at the local level requires tools that are:

• Easy to learn and use by those responsible for local marketing (brands or local marketers), without sophisticated knowledge of marketing technologies.

• Capable of delivering dynamic templates that personalize digital communications across online and offline marketing.

• Capable of managing and optimizing succinct paid search strategies that prevent local marketers from

Limitations with Corporate Owned Campaign Management

A corporate-owned campaign management tool can be used to centralize all communications with customers. But as demand for more relevant and personalized communications increases at local levels, corporate marketing becomes a bottleneck for engaging local audiences. Local marketers, in turn, seek disparate local-owned technologies to manage their own communications (email marketing, web analytics, social media engagement, local agencies, etc.). The real victim is the customer who receives inconsistent messages, who may be driven to opt out of communications.

According to the Q4 2013 Local Marketing Automation survey, two-thirds of organizations that operated in a distributed environment (defined by the industry the company engaged in: financial services, franchise, retail, manufacturing, and automotive) managed marketing communications via a corporate-owned campaign management tool. Of these organizations that utilized a single campaign management platform, 71% rank brand consistency and fragmented customer data as top two reasons to invest in local marketing automation tools that augment local marketing execution and support local communication with target audiences. Additionally, 64% of these companies reported local marketers had invested in their own local marketing technologies that were disconnected from corporate marketing technologies, creating customer data silos across the national brand.

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Scaling Digital Marketing at the Local Level 9

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competing with national paid search campaigns.

• Capable of measuring overall effectiveness of all outbound communications, as well as engagement or utilization with traditional media such as print collateral.

Scaling Local Marketing with TechnologyMarketing technology for distributed marketers has evolved considerably over the last decade. For the first time, distributed organizations have access to tools that are specifically designed to help corporate marketing extend brand-compliant strategy, creative, and campaign execution systematically to mitigate constraints in local marketing resources or skillsets. Local marketing automation solutions provide role-based security so local marketers only see customers and capabilities they are supposed to have access to. The tools provide a scalable infrastructure for creating templates for local marketers and some solutions allow local marketers to subscribe to campaigns that are executed by the national brand. For example, local marketers could opt in to a birthday email campaign that corporate marketing automatically executes for local markets in real time, on a monthly or daily basis.

Let’s take a look at some of the other capabilities that local marketing automation provides for local marketers:

Email Campaigns. With local marketing automation, corporate marketing can create branded email templates that local marketers can customize and send to local email recipients. This eliminates the need for local marketers to support stand-

alone email platforms and reduces the technical burden on local marketers to support brand standards within email templates (no CSS or style sheet coding, no need to understand HTML, etc.). Local marketers can also outsource email execution directly to corporate marketing by subscribing to pre-configured email campaigns such as a birthday mailers, new client welcome emails, or special offers.

Local Websites and Landing Pages. Local marketers are not always equipped with the technical skills required to create customized website properties or landing pages. Some local marketing automation tools allow corporate marketing to create branded landing page templates that can be personalized for local audiences. This extends digital capabilities to local marketers in an easy-to-consume turnkey interface, leading to a more personalized brand experience for customers. This also eliminates the need for local marketers to purchase one-off landing page tools or engage local agencies to create dedicated website properties. A local marketing automation tool also centralizes engagement data in a single tool for reporting and access to larger volumes of data for rapid optimization. Likewise, some local marketing automation tools are capable of creating dedicated and personalized landing pages for local sales reps to deliver highly personalized touches with customized collateral, contact information, or even automated personalized email communications from the sales rep (that can be initiated by corporate on behalf of the sales rep).

Paid Search Management. One of the biggest challenges with paid search for a national brand is the fact that national and local marketers often compete for the same keywords, unbeknownst to

Companies that use offline and online marketing tactics see a 55% YoY growth compared to a 19% YoY growth of companies that use offline only.

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Scaling Digital Marketing at the Local Level 10

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marketers. Local marketing automation platforms can help extend the paid search strategy at the local level to ensure local marketers are purchasing highly targeted keywords while the national brand covers the more generic and costly terms. This extends existing budget at the national level, leading to lower cost-per-click engagement and higher return.

Dynamic Templates (Email, Landing Page, Collateral). One of the key differentiators between a local marketing automation platform and campaign management tools is dynamic template capabilities. Templates within the local marketing automation technology are owned, configured, and managed by corporate marketing. Specific aspects of the templates are locked to control brand consistency across channels. Local marketers can then customize or personalize graphics or copy in the templates for the local target audience. This single feature eliminates the need for local marketers to support separate marketing technologies at the local level. Additionally, most dynamic template capabilities are designed with ease of use and simplicity in mind so even the least sophisticated local marketer can participate in personalized local communications.

Security and Workflow. Local marketing automation tools are designed specifically for the hierarchical relationship between the national brand and local markets. Local marketers are given access to the data they own and maintain, but corporate marketing still has holistic control over the entire target audience for the national brand. This allows corporate marketing to centralize customer preferences (opt-in status, channel preferences, communication frequency, etc.) while also seeing system-wide results and ROI.

Multi-Channel Integration. Today, local marketing automation tools are very good at managing email, landing page, paid search, and customized collateral. While social media is frequently a component in these tools, it does not replace some of the more robust features found in social media marketing platforms. The social media strategy between national and local marketers is a critical piece of the marketing puzzle, and local marketing automation platforms need to do a better job creating capabilities for executing and monitoring engagement with national social media properties as well as local social media properties. For the most part what you will find in Local Marketing Automation platforms is integration with social media on outbound campaigns (such as social sharing links), making it easier for recipients to engage via social media. This is valuable, but not fully baked. We expect to see increasing functionality in this area among leading LMA players.

Integration. Despite the benefits of local marketing automation platforms, they are unlikely to fully replace all marketing technologies at the local level (and definitely not at the corporate level). There are some marketing technologies that will likely continue to play a critical role in customer engagement. For this reason, look for local marketing automation solutions with open APIs and pre-configured integration modules that will allow customer data to flow seamlessly in and out of the system.

SummaryDigital marketing is critical to the national brand because it allows marketers to engage in real time with the local target audience and track this engagement over time. Local marketers typically have limited resources and

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Scaling Digital Marketing at the Local Level 11

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expertise for executing optimized digital campaigns. Local marketing automation tools allow corporate marketing to extend corporate strategy and corporate branded resources to the field through templates and subscription access to campaigns. Local marketers have the most intimate understanding of customers, so it’s

important to give these marketers the tools they need to foster relationships, not just communicate messages about the brand. Bottom line, national brands need to have a local marketing strategy and the right technologies to take advantage of their national brands strengths and the local marketers knowledge of the customer.

Deep Dive Talking Points• All marketing is local marketing – or at least it should be.

• According to survey respondents, the average click-through rate on generic mass email campaigns is now less than 1%, down from 3% just three years ago.

• Top Performers who engage in localized marketing communications report an average open rate of 17% and an average click-through rate of 5% from localized email campaigns to opt-in customer lists. That’s three times higher than generic communications from corporate marketing.

• According to Gleanster, marketers who engage exclusively in traditional forms of offline communication cite “lack of skills/expertise” (57%) and “lack of technology” (45%) as the top two reasons for not engaging in digital communications.

• Successfully scaling digital marketing at the local level requires the right strategy, and the right technology, but done correctly, it can deliver some of the highest performance across revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and reach.

• Companies that use offline and online marketing tactics see a 55% YoY growth compared to a 19% YoY growth of companies that use offline only.

• Digital channels such as social networks and email offer a vehicle for interactive dialogues whereby customer engagement can be tracked and used to trigger follow-up communications that offer the next best touch in the customer relationship.

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Scaling Digital Marketing at the Local Level 12

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Related ResearchRecently published research that may be of interest to senior industry practitioners include:

Local Marketing Automation

eBook: Marketing Automation- Disrupting the Status Quo

5 Powerful Strategies for Distributed Marketers

eBook: The State of Customer Lifecycle Engagement in Mid-to-Large B2C Companies

How Top Performers Rein in the Chaos of Disparate Marketing Data

How Top Performers Drive Relevance and Revenue in Distributed Marketing Environments

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