What Are the Benefits of Localized Advertising Over National Campaigns?

Global brands are spending millions of dollars on localized advertising each year, and the share of advertising budgets being put into local is only growing. What’s behind the shift? When executed correctly, using the latest digital platforms and techniques, brands are finding that localized advertising generates a far greater return on investment (ROI) than national campaigns.

Industry forecasts indicate that total local advertising revenue across all media in the U.S. will reach $137.5 billion in 2021. As advertising dollars shift away from offline channels to digital, brands are finding the greatest rewards when they target consumers on a local level. 

Brands that are exclusively running national campaigns are missing the opportunity to capture the attention of targeted groups of consumers. This is particularly true for multi-location brands, like Target, Starbucks, and Jiffy Lube. National campaigns do very little to drive consumers into physical stores, especially when those campaigns are running in states or cities where a brand’s stores aren’t located. That results in wasted ad spend, and it’s something brands should be working to avoid.

Localized advertising strategies perform best for brands that are looking to drive traffic to local stores. Rather than spending millions of dollars on advertising at the national level, where targeting is based on little more than demographics, brands that dig into hyperlocal advertising are finding that they are able to target consumers based on much more nuanced factors.

Potential targeting criteria include:

• Geographic location
• Demographic criteria
• Interest patterns
• Device usage
• Real-time weather alerts

Brands can use location to boost the relevance of their ads, particularly when localized campaigns are designed to incorporate the latest in mobile technology. Loyalty programs, in particular, provide brands with exciting opportunities to identify customers and reach specific audiences with relevant advertising through weather apps, messaging apps, fitness apps, and games. 

Google has become an important player in the local marketing space. The company’s Ads product can be integrated in several ways with Google Maps and Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business). However, the self-serve tools from Google that small and mid-size businesses are using don’t work well for multi-location brands. Brands with a dozen or more locations are better served by working with an agency, like SOCi, which can design a strategy to take full advantage of all that localized advertising has to offer.

To learn more about the localized advertising services that SOCi provides to brands, click here.