6 benefits of self-service marketing
The most successful distributed brand managers know that local marketing is a necessary part of a national and global marketing strategy, as consumers look for a personalized and tailored experience that is relevant to their needs and specific to their location. Organizations are looking towards self-service marketing to streamline processes for local teams and facilitate local efforts at the corporate level.
When done right, local marketing offers an excellent return on investment. In 2017, Google found that businesses made $2 in revenue from every $1 invested in local advertising through AdWords and retailers advertising locally on Facebook achieved an average ROI of 152 percent. However, deploying a local marketing strategy across the distributed network can be challenging for corporate marketing teams. To maximize the chances of local marketing success, local marketers need to carry their weight. That's where self-service marketing comes in to play.
6 Benefits of Self-Service Marketing
With self-service marketing, local franchises have access to pre-approved and compliant marketing assets and templates. With target messaging and the ability to customize local details for a personalized brand experience.
When properly implemented, self-service efforts for franchise and affiliate marketing brings a ton of value to distributed entities.
Here are the top six benefits of self-service marketing:
- Lower Costs
Self-service marketing can help an enterprise to control costs in two main areas. First, a local audience is segmented by geography and second, targeted campaigns can run at a lower price with better ROI than mass-market campaigns.
Low-cost, high-impact channels for local marketing efforts include social media, local website, and community event sponsorship. These tend to be lower-cost channels than traditional print or media promotions, but have a high ROI in a local market.
A business can also save money on advertising promotions by pooling resources for several affiliates located within a specific geographic region, increasing the purchasing power of a single location while still maximizing the impact of local messaging.
- Increased Productivity
With the correct self-service tool, marketing processes become streamlined for faster outputs. Local marketers can create on-brand marketing communications quickly, without the need for further involvement at the corporate level.
This also allows corporate marketing and design teams to maximize their productivity and focus on more strategic initiatives. Since local teams already have access to a range of editable and approved marketing assets, they no longer need to make one-off edit requests which are extremely time-consuming for corporate teams to manage, especially when there are hundreds and thousands of franchises.
- Increased Brand Equity
A global organization can improve speed and responsiveness to local markets with marketing assets that can be customized by the local team. Brand equity and integrity can be balanced with local flavor by sending a consistent, but not identical, message to each market.
- Improved Analytics
With the right analytics tools, self-service marketing provides many opportunities for an organization to gather data analytics for valuable insights about the customer journey. Corporate marketers can also track local campaign metrics for better insights into geographic performance.
- Increased Sales
As consumers use digital channels to research products and services before purchase, having relevant local websites, social media and search engine optimization (SEO) becomes more important for businesses.
Google found that nearly 1/3 of all mobile searches are related to location and that 2/3 of smartphone users are more likely to purchase from companies whose digital channels are customized with location-relevant information.
- Improved Time to Market
Self-service marketing allows multi-located businesses to experience improved time to market. For example, a pharmaceutical company relies on quick campaign activation in time for flu season. When the brand fails to deploy flu campaigns in a timely manner, there's a ton of lost revenue.
In this scenario, instead of focusing on updating campaigns for each location, corporate designers can focus on more important brand-building activities. Each location can self-serve and that frees up designers to create more campaigns.
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Kevin Groome founded Pica9, Inc., a leading provider of web-based brand logistics software solutions, with an active user community that spans more than 50 globally recognized brands, such as Marriott, Liberty Mutual, and more than 100,000 local businesses. The company’s customers represent a portfolio of some of the most valuable brands around the globe today. Every day Pica9 helps its clients protect, leverage and activate more than $50 billion in brand driven market value.