Shifts in Advertising Are Opening up a Golden Age for Local Marketers

Local marketing has inherent challenges. However, as more budgets move to giant digital publishers (Google, Facebook, Amazon), the immense reach and streamlined workflow of these platforms are bringing unprecedented power and efficiency to local advertisers, says  Joshua Dreller, director of content marketing, Kenshoo.

Recent trends in advertising and consumer behavior may be shaking up most of the industry, but they are actually lining up nicely for local marketers. Traditionally, local marketers faced four major challenges:

1. Scale
2. Full-funnel capabilities
3. Campaign management
4. Campaign optimization
    

In the early days of digital advertising, enterprise marketers would work with dozens or hundreds of publishers and ad networks to push their messaging to audiences. However, for a local marketer with so many locations to manage, the complexity required to work with that many media outlets was significant enough to be a blocker. Often, local marketers would need to scale down their program scope simply because there wasn’t enough time in the day to handle the logistics and workload.

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However, over the last several years, as more and more media dollars have been moving to a handful of the Internet’s biggest companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others, the opportunity for local marketers has grown tremendously. This shortlist of publishers has the reach, targeting, and data features to make them extremely effective for multiple objectives in the local marketing plan.

Today, a combination of publisher offerings and ad tech have combined to solve the inherent challenges for local marketers to deliver results on par with their enterprise counterparts.

Big Publishers as “One-Stop Shops” for Marketers

The surge of investment into this handful of publishers is being driven by a few key advantages: being somewhat insulated by new privacy policies, having tremendous scale, and hyperlocal targeting capabilities across the funnel.

New consumer privacy regulations are dramatically limiting how marketers can target and measure users across the web. But, because users are logged in across the various properties of these big publishers, advertisers can easily retarget/remarket to interested web visitors inside of their “walled gardens.”

These giant publishers also have the scale—even at the local level—that most publishers simply can’t compete with. For example, Google alone has 1 billion+ monthly users across each of its 6 major platforms (Google Search, Maps, Gmail, Drive, Android, and YouTube). And most people are aware that Facebook/Instagram has over 2 billion global active users.

With the hyperlocal targeting tools available in these platforms, local advertisers can target their markets with pinpoint accuracy to fulfill every objective in the marketing plan. For example, with these big partners, brands can drive awareness at scale for their products or services at the top of the funnel. They can also help to stimulate interest and educate buyers in the middle of the funnel. And, when someone is ready to convert, these publishers offer strong value at the bottom of the funnel.

Thus, for local marketers, the robust ad offerings of Google, Facebook, and Amazon with targeting, scale, and full-funnel options can effectively check the box for the majority of their advertising needs.

Marketing Technology Arms Local Marketers to Win

But even with a much smaller pool of publishers to wrangle, all marketers still struggle with the basic execution needs of digital marketing programs. The challenges become exponentially tougher for multi-location local marketers, especially when it comes to social advertising.

“These clients have highly-specific needs,” says John Dobrowolski, GM, Social, for Kenshoo. “And they have historically had limited bandwidth and tools to scale their complex marketing campaigns onto Facebook.”

One of the biggest drivers of marketing ROI is productivity—and there is a direct correlation between advertising success and how efficient it is for marketers to properly manage the channel. Why? Because in digital advertising, the work that really drives ROI is in the analysis of campaign performance to make data-driven optimization changes. If a marketing team gets mired in the execution tasks of managing campaigns, they won’t have time to do the valuable optimization work that truly benefits the bottom line.

So, even though the core value of local marketing technology years ago was being able to run many different publisher campaigns from the same interface, the value today has expanded to how well it can help marketers maximize the opportunity with the Googles and Facebooks of the world. In local marketing, that means creating workflow efficiencies to help with the unique challenges associated with managing multi-location accounts.

Learn More: Why Native Advertising Is (Finally) Opening Up to Mid-Sized Brands

With publishers delivering one-stop shops for ad offerings that are effective across the full funnel and a whole suite of hyper-local targeting options, local marketers can put marketing tech to work for simplified campaign management and optimization. No longer do local marketers need to scale down campaigns to avoid overwhelming challenges; publishers and marketing tech have combined to give them their best chance for digital ad success.