Third Door Media has announced its 3rd Annual Enterprise Local Marketing Automation report and for the first time the analyst group is expanding its definition of local marketing automation to cover vendors who offer creative versioning as a core functionality. With this latest edition CampaignDrive by Pica9 has been added to the report, which now covers 17 enterprise-grade local marketing automation tools.
The leading SaaS local marketing automation platform was included in the publication on the strength of its one-of-a-kind template customization capabilities and a consistent focus on providing distributed digital asset management solutions to major brands.
Another major reason the analyst group chose to include CampaignDrive this year was the series of enhancements that were made to the system's local landing page templates.
With the ability for brand designers to take existing HTML designs and easily import them into the system to be used by local marketers, landing page templates in CampaignDrive are a notable differentiator for the product in its peer-group. Local marketers are able to customize these digital pages to their own liking with a simple-to-use editing interface.
Along with these major innovations in local digital marketing, CampaignDrive's best-in-class solutions for print templates and digital asset management have raised the product's profile with the analysts.
The major theme of the Third Door Media report this year is the continuing challenge of managing local marketing content – online and off – for multi-location brands. According to the analysts, although "marketing at the local level has become a business imperative for multi-location enterprises" the move towards effectively addressing this critical business driver are being impeded by a marketplace that is "highly fragmented."
With local advertising expected to reach $168.9 billion by 2020, the report suggests that brands need to get the right tools in place now to be prepared for the on-going growth of local marketing needs.
The authors also point out that local marketers (dealers, franchisees and sales agents) are looking for the simplest tools available to do their marketing. This means that national multi-location brands "need to ensure there is brand consistency across local affiliate websites and marketing campaigns," and need the tools to effectively monitor local activity.
Yet the proliferation of competing local marketing technologies, and confusing terminology and acronyms means that most brands are not prepared to deliver the solutions both they and their local marketers desperately need.