If you are a locally-based business, connecting with nearby customers and community influencers is vital for your business. Word of mouth can be as important, if not more important, for neighborhood businesses as traditional advertising, and this is where activating your local customers to act as your advocates can have a real impact on growing your customer base.
It’s no secret that customers trust word-of-mouth above corporate advertising: according to Nielsen, 92% of consumers trust peer recommendations and only 53% trust content that you create and post on your website.
Even for national companies, the benefits of thinking local can be impressive. Drug store chain Duane Reade recently initiated a campaign to boost their New York City customer base through localization strategies that focused on user-generated content to reach new audiences. Duane Reade partnered with brand advocate bloggers who are “not actual employees, but we treat them as such [and] we offer incentives and introduce [them to] initiatives before the public” and allow them to amplify the corporate message at a local level. The result was a 28% lift in year-over-year sales, a 5x ROI, and 20 million impressions over the entire period of the campaign. “[We had] almost 2,000 pieces of original content being generated over this campaign, so it was huge for us,” said a Duane Reade spokesperson.
Via massimo facchinetti
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This blog post is an example in a trend that is deeply embedded in the emerging marketing paradigm: A trend towards the re-localization of brands, even those who have reached a national audience in the past. Historically, the development of long-distance transportation (train networks, cooling trucks) and communication (telephone, TV) allowed brands to push into a national (and later global) market.
Today, we see the (simultaneous) reverse trend of developing local partners and ambassadors. Sure, you might say that is similar to geographic market segmentation or adapting your communication to a certain local as in classical international / cross-cultural marketing, but I still think that something else is going on here. It is a re-opening of the marketing function of a firm to many other people outside the company, at a certain place. It is a more networked approach to marketing, which can show impressive results:
"Drug store chain Duane Reade recently initiated a campaign to boost their New York City customer base through localization strategies that focused on user-generated content to reach new audiences. Duane Reade partnered with brand advocate bloggers who are “not actual employees, but we treat them as such [and] we offer incentives and introduce [them to] initiatives before the public” and allow them to amplify the corporate message at a local level. The result was a 28% lift in year-over-year sales, a 5x ROI, and 20 million impressions over the entire period of the campaign. “[We had] almost 2,000 pieces of original content being generated over this campaign, so it was huge for us,” said a Duane Reade spokesperson."