New Forrester Report Urges Brands to Seize the Local Marketing Opportunity

“Now is the time to initiate a local marketing strategy…” That’s a key takeaway from a new report from Forrester Research, “The Local Marketing Opportunity.” In the report, analyst Shar VanBoskirk and researcher Collin Colburn urge marketers to amp up their local marketing  in order to achieve benefits such as generating brand awareness and driving customers to brand locations.

For too long, a crucial element has been missing from local marketing: the ability for large enterprises to scale their local efforts. According to “The Local Marketing Opportunity,” automation technologies help brands eliminate some traditional challenges to scale local marketing. Without automation technology, it has been too time consuming and inefficient for large brands to perform essential tasks such as optimizing local landing pages across thousands of locations. “But business listings management technologies . . . now automate the updates of location-related content for all of a company’s locations across multiple websites, making the process much faster and more affordable,” VanBoskirk and Colburn write. “For example, with the help of SIM Partners’ Velocity platform, U.S. Bank can update content on its local sites in 48 hours, an exercise that took several weeks without SIM’s support.”

The brands that have learned how to scale their local marketing are already seeing strong benefits such as improved visibility and foot traffic. For instance, AAA Carolinas gained improved brand awareness when the organization indexed 1,200 landing pages for search engines (instead of indexing only 51 pages). And Staples used local marketing to increase store visits by 33 percent.

Forrester urges businesses to take advantage of technologies to launch local efforts with paid and organic search. The authors spell out a number of steps to get going with local, such as establishing a local visibility baseline, correcting inaccurate listings, creating location-specific content, syndicating accurate data, and optimizing performance. SIM Partners is pleased to have our Velocity platform highlighted by Forrester as a technology solution to help brands take advantage of the local marketing opportunity. Our Velocity platform is cited for its ability to create, store, and manage all relevant and unique location-specific data and content — at scale.

To read the report in more detail, please visit resources.simpartners.com/report-the-local-marketing-opportunity/. Now is the time to get closer to your customers by initiating a local marketing strategy. Watch for a forthcoming SIM Partners report that will show you how to maximize the value of local marketing.