Three reasons why Local trumps National when it comes to social media marketing
Do you currently manage your national and local social media marketing centrally from head office?
Are you a company or brand with branches, stores, offices, hotels, bars, franchises, teams, contractors, partners or venues dotted all around the country, each with a local customer base?
Have you considered how the community you have built centrally (and the content you share with it) connects with the needs of local customers?
Most businesses have tended to centralise national and local social media marketing for reasons including cost saving; lack of local expertise, resource or time, brand consistency; reducing risk.
But none of these reasons are about improving the customer experience or driving genuine engagement and trust around the brand.
If you decentralise your social media marketing and management and devolve it to trained team members based locally you can truly empower them to be part of the local community.
With the right technology this can be delivered at scale and consistent with your brand goals.
And when they’re all combined, just imagine the impact it could have on your business:
#1 Community engagement
Smaller communities often have much higher engagement levels relative to their size compared to bigger ones. Local communities can have influence much greater than their size suggests.
#2 Customer reach
While targeted paid social can deliver high levels of reach locally it is still ultimately coming from a distant head office. It can’t compete with the quality of the reach generated by a local community manager engaging and being part of their local community.
#3 Employee engagement
Giving local employees real responsibility to build a community locally and helping them thrive through training and support means they will feel significantly higher levels of loyalty, engagement and trust in the brand.