The benefit of owning a digital marketing franchise is the global brand recognition that comes with an established name. And while the national recognition lends credibility, you need to focus on building a local marketing strategy to leverage the brand to reach your local customer base. 

How to create a local marketing strategy for your digital marketing franchise

Your digital marketing strategy should always touch on aspects of social media marketing, content marketing, and SEO, but it needs to go so much further to reach your local audience. Take these aspects into consideration when building your local marketing strategy:

Know your local audience

As with any marketing strategy, you need to know the audience that will be interacting with, and supporting your digital marketing franchise. You can’t rely on using the larger franchise audience as an absolute measure for marketing to your audience. Research your local audience and get to know their demographic characteristics (age, gender, language, and so forth) as well as psychographic information such as their needs, hopes, and desires. You’ll also need to find oudigital marketingt what they are interested in, what their pain points are, and how you can address these issues. 

Understand your competition

The research doesn’t end with knowing your local audience. You should also get a clear understanding of your local competitors. Understand their weaknesses and strengths and find ways to model your service offerings around what they lack. If you can’t compete in certain areas, you will need to leverage your strongest service offerings to remain competitive. 

It is important however to keep in mind that digital marketing isn’t confined to local audiences and competitors and you should widen your research to target competitors and potential customers who are not located in your direct vicinity. 

Offer personalised content and offerings 

Once you have a deep understanding of your local customer base and competitors, you can start refining your service offerings to entice local audiences to interact with (and support) your organisation. 

Personalised content and offerings can address major differentiating factors such as language or be customised to even finer areas such as preference. If you have a proper understanding of your local market, you’ll be able to identify key areas where you can personalise your content and offerings. The most important aspect of personalisation is to strike a balance between refining your content and offerings to a smaller local audience without losing too many potential customers in a very small niche.

An example would be to offer a discounted rate for creating social media strategies for small business owners in your area. This limits the audience to small businesses, but still gives you a large enough pool of potential customers to justify the time you’ll spend on customising the offer. An example of going too small with your market would be to offer this same discounted rate only to English-speaking, female business owners in the beauty industry. 

Build your reputation 

In the digital marketing industry, credibility is one of the foundations for success. If your audience doesn’t trust you, they won’t value what you offer. An essential aspect of building your reputation with local audiences is becoming a part of the community. Your business can do this by interacting with local customers, hosting events, interviewing local business owners for your blog and by giving back to the community through charity and employment opportunities. If you are out of reach to your local audience, you will be out of touch, and you won’t be in mind when they look for someone to solve their digital marketing challenges. 

Use your resources effectively 

Every business has limited resources. What sets a successful business apart from competitors is how effectively the company can use its resources. You need to be strategic in managing costs and understanding your return on investment will be crucial to proper resource management. Effective resource management can mean undertaking business activities yourself, but often, outsourcing can provide better value. Here’s how to determine if you need to outsource:

  • Does the activity have a steep learning curve?
  • Does it take too much time that I could spend better elsewhere?
  • Is there a reliable, affordable alternative to doing it myself?
  • Is outsourcing this activity more sustainable than doing it myself?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then you need to look into outsourcing the activity instead of doing it yourself. 

Owing a digital marketing franchise can be incredibly rewarding, especially if you are leveraging your local marketing strategy to attract a loyal customer base. For more information on opportunities to own a digital marketing franchise, reach out to Unibit Solutions