Franchises and businesses with different local branches have a unique marketing challenge – each branch has specific requirements. Imagine you’re a clothing retailer with stores in Mosman, Sydney and Mossman, Queensland. Different locations, different tastes, different needs.
Every location, every suburb and every market is unique. So how does a brand manage the marketing needs for such a diverse collection of areas when no two are the same?
Enter Local Area Marketing (LAM).
Here’s how LAM can help your marketing department and wider business connect with audiences on a uniquely personal level.
What is LAM?
Local Area Marketing tools are an online environment or application that houses marketing assets in the form of pre-approved artwork templates. They’re for use by store managers and similar roles within a business. It isn’t a Digital Asset Management system, but rather a repository of editable client assets.
The assets held in the LAM app are available to anyone with access to the system and cover a wide range of marketing collateral including printed collateral, in-store POS, digital content and press advertising.
They feature variable data fields that allow branches and individual stores to tailor marketing creative to suit their individual needs, ensuring local continuity at a store level, and static items that can be ordered as needed. Ultimately, they ensure that franchisees and store managers are producing and executing marketing material that is on brand, every time, without needing intervention and oversight from marketing managers.
How does LAM work?
As part of operating a storefront, a manager will need to use a variety of static and editable marketing items throughout the year for any number of day-to-day activities. Rather than contacting the marketing department with a request, they’re able to log into a web portal and download or order the creative they need, whatever it may be.
Through the portal, store managers and other staff within the store can order what they need down to an individual item, with everything within the portal assigned a pre-agreed and pre-set pricing.
Consider this scenario. The editor of a local paper (yes, they still exist) rings a store manager with the offer of some distress space advertising available for half price. Through a LAM, pre-approved templates – with fonts, palettes and other brand identity aspects locked for editing –with editable sections for addresses and other localised information, are made available.
Now a store manager doesn’t need to contact marketing with the creation of an asset, and is able to get it over to the paper with a quick turn around and secure the advertising space before they miss their chance.
Store managers can run a successful promotion with effective marketing material always at their fingertips.
Value-added flexibility
A LAM solution allows marketers to concentrate on their primary responsibility of working on initiatives to generate additional revenue now and into the future, instead of responding to low-level asset creation tasks.
By removing the creation and hands-on aspect of developing marketing material on a case-by-case basis, marketers can deliver their true value to a business. No more getting bogged down in the minutia of branch-by-branch marketing needs or answering calls and emails from store managers all day. Through the LAM portal, branches can service their own needs.
At the same time, a LAM solution delivers the ability for store managers to take advantage of an opportunity that may present itself in their market. Be it a short notice advertising space in the local paper, or the chance to support a local school event or sports team, raffle or fundraiser, store managers can run a successful promotion with effective marketing material always at their fingertips.
Square pegs for square holes
Too often, branches and franchisees are expected to make the best use of whatever form-filled marketing material is made available to them. Square pegs for round holes. But through LAM, store managers with expert knowledge of the local market have access to the marketing material that best fits their – and the store’s – needs.
With the ability to access bespoke signage, in-store POS, merchandise, print and digital content and more, store managers have at their disposal a powerful marketing tool that empowers them to make impactful local marketing decisions for different audiences, at high speed. And marketers within the business are left free to do what they do best.
Local Area Marketing solutions are whatever you want them to be. And give users square pegs for square holes.
Want to get ahead with your local marketing?
Get in touch with our team today to discuss your options.