When you think of local digital marketing, what type of client comes to mind? Probably a small business, right? While it is true that small businesses benefit greatly from local advertising, they’re not the only type of business that can. Each location in a chain of stores or even national brands are local somewhere. What does a marketing department do with this information? Create local digital marketing strategies. But 77% of brands with multiple locations say that including local digital marketing into their strategies has been difficult, writes Greg Sterling for Search Engine Land.

What Does a Marketing Department do to Convince Clients to Create a Local Digital Marketing Strategy?

The Benefits of Local Digital Marketing

Despite the challenges multi-​location businesses have when implementing local digital marketing into their strategies, many agree that it has several benefits that would be valuable to each location. Some benefits deemed most valuable by multi-​location companies include:

• The ability to identify, claim, and manage local search pages that are not owned: 51% of multi-​location companies agree that this would be a helpful advantage of localized marketing (while 27% said that it would be extremely helpful)
• The ability to update and sync listing across every location the chain owns: 51% (22%)
• The ability to track and analyze listing metrics across the areas of impressions, clicks, photos and search queries: 50% (21%)
• It could help the company manage its local content assets across all of its properties: 53% (18%)
• The potential enablement to listen and aggregate the company’s brand mentions on both owned and unowned pages: 51% (19%)

And those are just the benefits more than 70% in total agreed would be valuable. More than 59% also agreed that incorporating local digital marketing into their strategies could help them in the areas of social media and website posts, manage online reviews, and help identify, claim, and manage social media pages that don’t already belong to the company.

So, with all these benefits, why aren’t multi-​location companies taking the necessary steps to invest in local digital marketing?

The Difficulties Companies are Facing

The main problem companies are facing when it comes to local digital marketing is that they are trying to handle all the responsibility themselves. The problem with that is, it’s a much bigger job than most of them realized. They ended up not having the resources they needed to keep up with the new strategy. Even if they could get it up and running, they had no time left over to address online outreach from customers. When that outreach came in the form of problems and negative reviews posted online, it made the company’s public image worse.

Companies who tried a mix of outsourcing and managing their local digital marketing efforts in-​house didn’t fare much better. Many reported that there were detrimental communications issues between the two groups.

You can offer your expertise in creating and managing local digital marketing efforts for your clients who are sorely lacking in that department. Run a Digital Audit (available on AdMall by SalesFuel) on their local locations and point out the digital areas where there is room for improvement and how you can help them fill in the holes in their local marketing strategy. What does a marketing department do in this situation? Make their clients aware that it’s about time they started reaping the benefits of this type of marketing.