LIL 2013: The CMO Survey on National/Local

Shane Vaughn, Chief Marketing Officer at Balihoo, spoke today at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local Conference and shared findings from a new CMO Council research study on how national brands will leverage local channels to activate local customers. The report can be downloaded here: http://balihoo.com/resources/cmo-council-report.

How important is localized marketing to demand generation and revenue in your organization? Vaughn reported that in a survey of national brand Chief Marketing Officers, “59% say it is essential.” However, he added that, “only 7% of the brands believe that they have “highly evolved campaigns and measurements in place to activate customers at the local level.” Some of the big challenges are resources like money, people, and know how. For example, Vaughn gave a case study of a national floral brand that had thousands of independent local florists with different sites and varying looks and feels. By adopting a common, local automation platform, the national brand drove 8% higher CTR than corporate PPC campaigns. Average ROI increased over 300+.

Vaughn provided a case study of a Balihoo client, a national auto brand with 3,000 independent, local entitities each running their own websites. By migrating to a local automated website solution, the results were very encouraging. Vuaghn shared that, “in the first six months of the program, the local sites had driven over 60K unique incremental web visits and were converting browsers to leads at an astonishing 27%. Beyond that, the ad builder solution is estimated to be saving their local entities greater than $1M in 2013, and their local folks couldn’t be happier.”