Creating effective field marketing initiatives can be a complicated process. At the local level, it is important to align messaging and branding with corporate headquarters to present a consistent consumer experience. At the same time, buyer preferences are constantly changing. Companies must adapt to provide a more personalized reliable user experience, especially at a local level.
An effective local field marketing strategy is more important than ever, especially when complying with corporate branding guidelines.
Here are some common mishaps to avoid when creating and managing your enterprise's field marketing initiatives:
Failure to Localize Marketing Materials
To successfully create field marketing initiatives, it’s important to include location-specific content including special promotions, contests, and testimonials. A thoughtful social media strategy can also be helpful to connect with a local community, by creating a location-specific social media page or local group. Location-specific ads with personalized content is another great way to reach your audience with relevant messaging. Each field marketer should have the tools to customize their marketing materials for their unique community and be able to easily personalize pieces of collateral to location specific information.
Lack of Cost-Benefits Balance
Budget constraints are common within local branches, especially when each location needs its own marketing materials. Rather than having corporate marketing and design teams field these individual requests, which reduce their time to focus on strategic initiatives, large enterprise companies with hundreds or even thousands of should carefully consider the marketing assets they create so they can be used at both a national and regional level. A templating system that allows local marketers to customize their marketing materials reduces the manual local iterations, while allowing field marketers to be nimble and have access to all of the promotional materials they need.
Not Optimizing for Mobile
Mobile is becoming more important to customers searching for local businesses. In the past two years, Google found that there has been a 500% increase in searches that include the phrase ‘near me’. More consumers are looking for local businesses using mobile search, making it vital for websites to optimize for mobile functionality.
A bad mobile experience doesn’t only affect the users directly accessing a site, it also affects recommendations and reviews. 57% of users surveyed by socPub said that they would not recommend a business with a badly-designed mobile site.
Speed to Market
Time is of the essence. Field marketers should have the ability to swiftly deploy marketing campaigns in the matter of minutes. They shouldn't have to wait for corporate to approve each piece of creative and corporate shouldn't have to be stuck in this redundant, manual process. What distributed brands need is a tool that allows field marketers to access pre-approved brand assets that can be used on the fly. Marketing is all about delivering the right message, to the right people, at the right time. It's important for field marketers to have the freedom to be agile and not held back by dreaded corporate approval processes.
Inconsistent Messaging
Although field marketing campaigns must be personalized for a local audience, they must still remain consistent with the corporate brand and messaging. A promotion or campaign inconsistent in branding can be harmful to the company identity, and prove confusing to customers.
Many enterprise companies turn to brand asset management system, like CampaignDrive, to ensure consistent messaging at both a national and regional level. With CampaignDrive, corporate designers are no longer stuck handling one-off requests from the field. Brand marketers can upload pre-approved marketing assets that comply with the brands colors, logo, and messaging for local teams to use. These teams can then easily locate and customize assets to include special promotions, addresses, and other localized elements to match their targeted audience.
Creating a distributed, local marketing plan that balances brand identity with a location-specific twist can prove difficult without the right tools. CampaignDrive’s platform empowers marketing teams, from corporate headquarters to local branches, by helping them avoid common mishaps and speed up creation and distribution processes.
Connect with a Local Marketing Expert Today to learn how aligning local and corporate marketing teams can ensure brand consistency.
Sources:
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/near-me-searches/
https://www.socpub.com/articles/the-5-mobile-marketing-mistakes-infographic-14849
https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/local-consumer-review-survey/
