Webinar Recap: How Manufacturing Marketers Win With Localized Marketing

Return on investment (ROI) is at the top of every manufacturing marketer’s mind. Effective marketing, specifically at the local level, is a great tactic to boost the visibility of your products and win more customers. That’s where localized marketing comes in. 

This blog will recap the top takeaways from our recent webinar, How Manufacturing Marketers Win With Localized Marketing, and share what it takes for your manufacturing company to create a stand-out localized marketing strategy. Let’s get started! 

A Look Into Localized Marketing 

Before diving into how your manufacturing company can build a localized marketing strategy, we must define it. In short, localized marketing is the act of targeting and marketing to consumers at the local level through various channels to drive traffic and sales to each of your company’s locations.

Marketers can break a comprehensive localized marketing strategy into three main components: Local search, local social, and online reputation management. 

For manufacturing marketers, this means working with your retailers and dealers to develop a marketing strategy that incorporates the above components to target customers in their respective areas.  

While marketing at the corporate and national level can bring your products some brand recognition, an emphasis on local meets potential customers directly at key touch points in the buying journey. Localized marketing also establishes brand presence across local channels, such as local search and social, that can ultimately drive conversions. 

Why Manufacturing Marketers Struggle With Localized Marketing 

While it’s clear that localized marketing can differentiate your company and what it is selling from competitors, many manufacturers still don’t leverage it. Let’s examine why more manufacturers haven’t implemented localized marketing. 

Because of the way manufacturers are structured, there isn’t enough awareness around the power of localized marketing. There’s also a need for more expertise on how to work with local dealers to promote your products across various digital channels. 

Who is responsible for creating the marketing strategy? Who executes it? How do you manage your marketing efforts across various distributors and dealers? These are some of manufacturers’ most common roadblocks when developing a localized marketing strategy. 

Tactics to Build a Comprehensive Localized Marketing Strategy 

While localized marketing can seem like a big undertaking for manufacturers, those with a strategy are already seeing success. Those that understand the digital customer journey are winning out against competitors. 

1. Focus on Retailer and Dealer Adoption 

As mentioned, a significant challenge manufacturers face when it comes to localized marketing is getting dealers on board. Without dealer participation, it’s virtually impossible to have a comprehensive localized marketing strategy. So how do you get them on board?

When presenting the idea of localized marketing to dealers, your manufacturer should:  

• Highlight problems that your localized marketing strategy will solve once implemented. 
  • Will it help boost sales at their location? 
  • Can these efforts lead to increased online visibility? 
• Frame these efforts as a solution that will help solve the problems you’ve pre-identified.
  • Ensure the solution has automation features, so it doesn’t create additional work for local dealers.
• Leverage your co-op marketing funds to incentivize dealers to invest in localized marketing. 

It’s important to remember that dealers are already extremely busy. It’s essential to present localized marketing as a tactic that will save them time in the long run while also adding a high ROI. 

For more insight on the topic, read our blog post on common challenges manufacturing marketers face with dealer adoption along with solutions. 

2. Leverage Local Pages and a Locator 

Your manufacturing company can drive more customers to your products sold through dealers and retailers with the help of local pages and a dealer locator. 

A dealer locator is a web page or section on a website that displays valuable information and unique details about each location where a brand’s products are sold. Manufacturers need dealer locators to help online shoppers know where to find their products. Locators are often linked to your local pages.

Below, you’ll find an example of a dealer locator for ECHO-USA.  

Local pages, also referred to as local landing pages, are individual web pages attached to one business listing or location. They help consumers find pertinent information about that specific business location. 

Well-optimized and maintained local pages for your dealers help manufacturers penetrate local markets by ranking high on search engines and improving the user experience. 

Local pages also help to move customers further down the buyer journey. They keep users either on your website or they send them directly to your partnered dealers, ensuring they stay within your sales funnel.

Both locators and local landing pages contain important information about a specific dealer, such as its:

• Location hours
• Business address
• Contact information
• Products or services 
• An interactive map
• Local promotions or events
• High-quality images of the local business
• An about us or mission statement
• Links to social media accounts

Local pages can boost your online visibility if you include keywords and consider local SEO when creating them. Our article, How Manufacturers Can Enhance the Buyer Experience With Local Pages and Locators provides more detailed information on the benefits of locators and local pages. 

3. Refine Your Local Social Strategy 

Focusing on local social media is another critical component of a winning localized marketing strategy. Your company must partner with dealers to share local social media content. 

As mentioned, a co-op marketing fund can be used to get dealers on board with localized marketing, especially a local social strategy. We’ve found that localized content performs 12x better than content that is not considered localized, so a focus on local is a must. 

Give Dealers Access to Your Content Library

If you want dealers to share local social content around your products, you should provide them with a content library. A content library, often referred to as a digital asset management (DAM) system in manufacturing, contains all previous and current social assets your corporate and local dealers can utilize in their social media campaigns. 

Utilize Demographic Data

Leveraging demographic data to understand which platforms your dealers should be posting on is also essential. Demographic data often consists of your target audience’s age, sex, income level, geographic area, race, and cultural beliefs, etc. 

The more specific your demographic data, the better you can understand which platforms dealers should post on, how often, and what type of content to leverage. This leads to less room for errors and a higher ROI. If time and resources allow, consider leveraging user-generated content (UGC), which is organic content posted by customers, to promote your products.  

Our Localized Social Content Guide for Manufacturers provides additional tips manufacturers can use when building a local social strategy. 

Start Driving Real Results With A Localized Marketing Strategy 

Now that you have the knowledge to execute a winning localized marketing strategy, it’s time to start! That’s where SOCi comes in. SOCi empowers manufacturing brands to drive more business to its dealers and stand out as a preferred brand for consumers. 

SOCi has the tools and workflows needed to optimize local engagement to drive more customers to local dealers — while ensuring your dealers and are staying on brand and protecting what matters most — your brand integrity.

Our speakers closed out the webinar by sharing a success story of a manufacturer that found localized marketing success with the help of SOCi. After partnering with SOCi to improve their local pages and locator, ECHO-USA saw a 152 percent increase in page views by month two and a 35 percent increase in time spent on their pages. 

The data speaks for itself. Localized marketing works! 

For additional insight into how your company can leverage SOCi to find localized marketing success and beat out the competition, request a demo today!