The Ultimate Guide to
Going Hyper-Local
presented by brandnetworks
The Ultimate Guide to Going Hyper-Local
presented by brandnetworks
Table of Contents
Introduction
• The Case for Hyper-local
• Defining Hyper-local
• Hyper-local is Hard
Getting Started
• Establishing Your Hyper-local Presence
• Helping Your Local Partners Succeed
Tools and Strategies
• Why Facebook is a Locus for Hyper-local
• Achieving Hyper-Local at Scale
• Knowing Your Goals
• Measuring Hyper-local and Driving ROI
• Using Location-Driven Paid Media
Case Studies
• National Fashion Retailer Gets Personal
• Whole Foods Gets Involved in the
Community
Conclusion
The Ultimate Guide to Going Hyper-Local
presented by brandnetworks
Introduction
The Case For Hyper-Local
While consumers may interact with larger brands through customer service, websites, and
other national channels, their day-to-day engagement is almost always with their local
stores. These neighborhood brick-and-mortar shops are where build the most frequent and
personal connections. A brand’s national messaging may resonate across the board, but it
won’t impact a certain consumer in the same way that a sale at a local store would.
Moreover, consumers have bought into the “buy local” trend in a big way. People feel
good supporting businesses with whom they have a relationship. For large brands
looking to remain competitive, this means it’s more important than ever before to build
a local presence to achieve the same sort of connection that smaller companies achieve.
Customers want to have the same friendly relationship with big brands that they do with
their local mom-and-pops. So whether you have one, ten or 10,000 stores, it’s vital to
connect with your fans on a hyper-local level.
The always-on nature of social media has created an expectation in consumers for
constant connection, whether that takes the form of a check-in at a restaurant or a Tweet
complaining about customer service. People expect to be able to reach the brands they use
and visit quickly and easily through social media. To that end, it only makes sense for local
and national establishments to capitalize on customers’ connectedness and constant desire
for interaction.
At the same time, brands have to be aware that social media is noisy. They aren’t just
competing with one another for mind-share in consumers’ social feed, but also with their
friends, family, news and entertainment. Brands must find ways to resonate with their
customers and break through the clutter.
When done right, a hyper-local strategy can do just that by ensuring a brand is relevant,
compelling and authentic. This is vital for developing a long-lasting and positive relationship
with consumers.
The Ultimate Guide to Going Hyper-Local
presented by brandnetworks
Defining Hyper-Local
What exactly is hyper-local marketing?
Hyper-local marketing hinges on being in the right place at the right time—producing and
disseminating relevant, unique and timely content based on where each of your customers lives,
not just where your brand is based.
Sounds easy enough; so what’s the catch? When you start talking about the kind of scale
that large retailers and other brick-and-mortar powerhouses have achieved, there are many
complexities to navigate. It might be snowing in Boston, but it’s 80 degrees and sunny in
Atlanta; employing hyper-local content means customers in different cities see messages
that are tailored to their communities and local conditions, from weather to seasons to
sports and beyond.
Hyper-Local Isn’t Easy
Alright, so hyper-local is clearly the smart way to go. The only problem is that it’s much
easier said than done.
One way to start moving toward hyper-local is to re-evaluate how your social media system
is set up. Most brands’ employ a top-down (meaning social media strategy comes from the
central marketing organization and filters down) rather than a bottom-up approach. The
most successful way to build a real local-social marketing program is to empower your local
operators or regional managers to create content on their own. To reach customers on their
terms, brands have to engage with their local teams and clue in to their local marketing
efforts. They’re the only ones who can really have their fingers on the pulse of a given place.
The Ultimate Guide to Going Hyper-Local
presented by brandnetworks
When embarking on a hyper-local strategy, brands need
to empower local teams. Whether it be store managers,
brand ambassadors, or regional managers, these
stakeholders need to have the tools to reach their local
communities using your brand’s voice.
At first blush, it can be unnerving to consider
relinquishing control to local stores. What if they stray
too far from your brand voice or commit a social media
faux pas? Turning over the keys to local managers can
be daunting, but with the right safeguards in place it
doesn’t have to be a risky move.
Brands must place a high level of trust and responsibility
in their colleagues locally to ensure an authentic hyper-local voice, tone, content, promotion
and product assortment. Put simply, you can’t fake hyper-local.
Brands need to remember that consumers are very attuned to marketing-speak and can
spot a tone-deaf “local” effort from a mile away. That said, when a hyper-local campaign is
good, it can be incredibly powerful, and it can make consumers feel like the brand really
“gets” them. But when a hyper-local campaign doesn’t tap into the knowledge and resources
of actual local people, the results can be painful.
For many brands, finding the right technology partner — with best-in-class publishing
and amplification solutions along with the relevant expertise — is essential to achieving a
successful hyper-local strategy.
The Ultimate Guide to Going Hyper-Local
presented by brandnetworks
Getting Started
Establishing Your Hyper-Local Presence
Since we’ve established that going hyper-local is a necessity for big brands, the next step is
to build out your hyper-local presence.
1
Assess Your Situation
Putting a hyper-local marketing strategy in play may not be as simple as recognizing
its importance and moving forward. Often, you will need to gain the buy-in of upper
management and supervisors before embarking on this path. So before you start, do some
research and find out how management views hyper-local marketing strategies. You may be
in a position where you’re already being tasked with employing a hyper-local strategy, but
in other cases you may need to argue your case for hyper-local marketing before you can
get started. In either situation, it’s important to get buy-in and find out what the metrics for
success look like before kick-starting a hyper-local strategy.
2
Devise a Plan of Attack (and Marshall Your Forces)
Once you determine the level of internal resistance, it’s time to start strategizing your plan
of attack. Begin by identifying low-hanging fruit: those opportunities that can deliver the
highest impact with the least amount of work.
Most companies turn to social media as the best place to begin. First, search internally for
people and teams who might already be working on complementary projects. Because
pursuing a hyper-local marketing strategy can be an unfamiliar process, it’s not uncommon
to discover that there are discrete groups working toward similar goals without being fully
aware of one another’s efforts. For example, the retail team, IT, operations, marketing or
social media departments may already be taking hyper-local into account in their plans.
It’s likely your colleagues and possibly some existing internal systems -- such as Facebook
Pages, budgets, information, strategies, data feeds, goals or objectives -- already align with
your vision.
The Ultimate Guide to Going Hyper-Local
presented by brandnetworks
Anecdotally, we often find that clients suddenly discover entire departments that are
striving to achieve the same goals as their hyper-local marketing strategy. So before getting
started, be sure you aren’t creating redundancy and recruit as many like-minded folks to
your side as you can. This will increase your odds of long-term success.
3
Build Your Hyper-local Strategy
Once you’ve cleared internal hurdles and gathered a band of like-minded folks, it’s time
for brand managers to build their hyper-local strategy, usually leveraging the tools and
experience of a technology partner who has taken this approach with success previously.
• Determine metrics for success: Be sure to establish your metrics for success and gain
approval of them from your managers.
• Obtain official sign-off and build momentum: Before embarking, present your strategy
to all of the relevant stakeholders internally to get their buy-in. This is also the point at
which you should begin investigating external technology partners who can help you
execute your hyper-local strategy.
• Select the right technology partner: To effectively scale your hyper-local strategy,
you will need a technology partner that fits your current needs. But you will also want
someone who can shift and pivot as those needs change. Flexibility is key as you will
constantly be testing, learning, implementing and testing again. Look for a technology
partner that can keep up with your business and changes in the social marketing
landscape. You also want to ensure that you will have access to services including
strategic input and technical support. This will help your organization avoid obstacles
these experts have previously navigated.
The Ultimate Guide to Going Hyper-Local
presented by brandnetworks
4
Train Up
The process of “onboarding” local store partners is something that should be refined over
time. Local and regional store managers should be provided with a comprehensive set of
information that tells them how to run campaigns on a day-to-day basis, what to do in case
of emergency and gives them a high-level overview of the strategy. Carefully think through
your messaging and follow-up materials as you produce them. And remember that your
social agency or firm should be heavily involved with this process to infuse their expertise
and best practices.
Helping Your Local Partners Succeed
Creating hyper-local content is not an easy task, and
it is even more challenging if you are sitting in an
office in Brooklyn while trying to post about a store
in Alaska. Empowering local managers to post on the
brand’s behalf will produce more relevant and timely
content that connects more authentically to the
community.
Clear communication is vital to interface efficiently
with the people and services who bring your hyperlocal strategy to life. At the same time, it’s important
to maintain your global brand identity. This isn’t an
easy task, but it points to the importance of having
the right tools and people to help guide you around
common land mines.
The Ultimate Guide to Going Hyper-Local
presented by brandnetworks
Once you have onboarded your local colleagues and given them the keys to post, you
should continually explore ways to lighten their load. The fact is, this is not their primary
role, and they are probably extremely busy with their everyday tasks. Instead of relying
on them for all local content, use data to identify trends that you can act on. For instance,
at Brand Networks, we are able to leverage historic and real-time weather data modeling
based on our clients’ sales data. This can help us predict purchasing behavior, and we can
determine relevant posts to publish using our automated software. Weather, in particular,
is a great tactic to achieve a high level of hyper-local authenticity without a lot of input from
busy local managers.
Finally, it’s important, especially when first building your local presence, to establish a
safeguard system to avoid inconsistent or inappropriate posts. One way to achieve this is to
have a team in place that reviews and approves all content for tone and voice, grammar and
brand voice. Before a brand starts publishing to their local pages, it is imperative that tone
and voice, content strategy, posting cadence and best practices are clearly established and
shared with local partners.
Tools and Strategy
Why Facebook is a Hub for Hyper-local
Once you have a hyper-local strategy in place, it’s time to determine the best platforms
for your social marketing efforts. It’s often most efficient to fish were the fish are. In other
words, Facebook is an ideal social network for hyper-local marketing efforts because local
store managers are often already leveraging Facebook to create a social community; you
are rarely starting from zero here.
Additionally, with the recent improvements to Graph Search and introduction of Local
Awareness ads, it’s more important than ever for individual stores to have a hand in
information and opinions regarding their brand on Facebook.
The Ultimate Guide to Going Hyper-Local
presented by brandnetworks
Achieving Hyper-local Scale
You may be wondering at this point how exactly
big brands can build a network of hyper-local
profiles yet maintain a consistent voice. Typically,
big brands have an established and codified brand
voice that has been honed by internal and external
marketing teams. The challenge with hyper-local
pages is translating the voice of the brand to a local
level without losing the recognizable qualities of the
brand.
In many cases, the key is to take a similar tone but
trying to making it more relatable, approachable and relevant to a specific region rather
than the brand as a whole. In other words, if your brand is all about strength, athleticism
and competition, that tone should show through on the local level, but posts should focus
on local competitions, sporting conditions and teams.
Brands should always ask these questions when posting to local pages:
• Is this relevant?
• Would this post make sense on a different page?
• Is this content recognizable to those in the community?
• Is what I’m saying timely?
If the answers aren’t clear, be sure to connect with a local partner to ensure authenticity.
The Ultimate Guide to Going Hyper-Local
presented by brandnetworks
Know Your Goals
There are two primary goals for which hyper-local social media marketing and advertising
can be a valuable solution:
1. Reaching more people
2. Driving more sales
Hyper-local content is ideal for building awareness and relationships with existing and
potential new customers. To create awareness messaging and targeting that is relevant for
local costumers, incorporate proximity to store, previous purchasing experiences or even
local weather patterns to engage consumers in a way that a national blanket advertising
campaign could not.
The second goal of hyper-local media targeting is to increase sales. Once a relationship at
the local level has been established, advertisers can leverage that conversation to drive
users to purchase. In order for this work, brands need to deliver actionable, valuable,
and ideally exclusive information to consumers through local messaging. Letting your
target audience know where to buy a specific product and what special events or sales are
happening in the area will increase the likelihood of conversion.
Measuring and Driving ROI
Measuring the outcome of a hyper-local campaign is dependent upon having clear
objectives. For example, you should strive to increase awareness, build new consumer
relationships, or drive conversation and brand engagement.
Consider the message you are communicating in your local advertising, and then evaluate
when users took action in the way you expected. If the correlation is there, then you can bet
you have created a successful local campaign. If you are using hyper-local targeting to drive
users to purchase, then measuring conversions and in-store sales increases are great ways
to be sure your marketing is working.
The Ultimate Guide to Going Hyper-Local
presented by brandnetworks
Questions brands should ask themselves include:
• Was there a lift in sales for specific products messaged to this audience?
• Have advertising or marketing efforts produced positive ROI? Keep in mind that while these outcomes are extremely valuable and conversion rates
may be strong, without the necessary reach, hyper-local campaigns can still fall flat. It is
important not only to convert members of your local audience into buyers, but to do so in a
scalable way.
Using Location-Driven Paid Media
Hyper-local advertising is a great tool for Retail and QSR brands with special offers and
prices that may vary at the regional, state or store level based on factors like inventory or
weather. Additionally, hyper-local media can be used to promote new store openings or
invite customers to a local event.
Being able to target consumers with messaging that tells them exactly where to shop and
what they can expect at that location can help drive in store for purchases, increasing sales
in a way that more generic ‘go to your closest retailer’ messaging may not.
There’s no shortage of methods to run a local media campaign, however the following are
two of the more successful strategies that we’ve utilized:
Local Awareness Ads: One of Facebook’s newest advertising objectives, Local Awareness
ads can be used by Business Pages to hone in on customers located anywhere between 1 –
60 miles from their store.
Unpublished Page Posts: For large brands that want to control messaging from their
central Page, Unpublished Page Posts may be a better route to explore. Using Unpublished
Page Posts, brands are able to publish one, or hundreds, of messages to the News Feed of a
specified audience, without showing that content ever appearing on their national Page.
The Ultimate Guide to Going Hyper-Local
presented by brandnetworks
Case Studies
By now you might be wondering exactly how this
plays out in the real world. Below are a few case
studies from some of our clients who are doing
hyper-local right.
For many of our retail clients, the first step to
getting started with a hyper-local campaign is to
create new Pages on Facebook for each of their
local outlets. In some cases, we will begin with
a test over a certain number of stores and then
ramp up over time. This can be a great way to get
a hyper-local off the ground in a manageable and
efficient manner.
Once the Pages are created, our industry leading Brand Networks Platform can publish to
one or thousands of individual Facebook pages, enabling our clients to publish hyper-local,
hyper-relevant content at scale. Since local store managers know their markets best, they
are able to own these channels and publish to their page, with moderation guardrails in
place if needed.
The Ultimate Guide to Going Hyper-Local
presented by brandnetworks
A National Retailer Gets Personal on Facebook
When a top American retailer came to us with a desire to take their social strategy and
extend it to a hyper-local level, we developed a plan to publish local content and empower
local store operators at each of their 4,000 stores. Using local factors such as weather,
holidays and charity events, we were able to personalize the content on Facebook pages
across all of their local stores while maintaining a consistent national brand voice.
Over time, we have uncovered that their local fans are more valuable than their national
brand fans. On average, their local fans:
• Spend more than non-fans
• Visit their local store more frequently
• Spend more after liking their local store Facebook page
There is no doubt that this retailer spent a lot of time and resources to institutionalize these
local pages and educate their local store operators and regional managers. However, the
results prove that a hyper-local marketing strategy can generate local store loyalty and drive
incremental sales lift.
A Major QSR Empowers Local Managers
A major QSR chain wanted to empower local restaurant operators to post high-quality,
relevant content, on their individual Facebook pages. To support both corporate initiatives
and hyper-local content, the individual store managers, as well as regional marketer
managers, are now posting via the Brand Networks Platform on mobile.
The Ultimate Guide to Going Hyper-Local
presented by brandnetworks
To ensure the success of this program:
• During an in-depth Social Blueprint Workshop, BN helped the client define program
goals, restaurant-level tactics, and a consistent social brand tone and voice.
• BN has helped educate over 100 restaurant operators and regional managers on
social media best practices, specific to overall brand messaging and each region’s local
community.
• To help home-office teams distribute key messaging to local restaurant Pages, BN
created and consistently updates a custom content library with over 160 pre-written,
program specific posts and images.
In addition to posting BN’s pre-written content, store managers have created a great deal
of original messaging in real-time via BN’s mobile publishing app. To date, there have been
thousands of logins.
Conclusion
As you can see, hyper-local is a great strategy for big brands looking to establish themselves
on a local level and build more trust and connection with consumers. It’s the best way to
deliver a personal experience at scale. Of course, it can only be undertaken with the help
of local colleagues who can respond to ever-changing conditions with timely and relevant
content. Giving up the reins to local managers is a smart strategy, and with the right
guidelines in place, it doesn’t have to be a scary one. Once you choose the right technology
partner to help you go hyper-local, the benefits to both your brand and your bottom line will
be measurable and rewarding.
Want more information about how you can scale your hyper-local strategy?
Our team is comprised of experts who have executed successful hyper-local campaigns for
Fortune 500 brands across a wide range of industries.