Understanding Local Vs National Campaigns

As a franchise owner, you may be fortunate to receive the benefit of national marketing campaigns that the corporate office is running on your behalf. While national campaigns can contribute to awareness for your own franchise, it’s important to consider how these programs may differ from hyper-local, direct response campaigns.

One common pitfall is the assumption that the national campaign provides enough advertising for you that you do not need to do anything else to maximize customer engagement. In reality, a national-level campaign is designed to compliment a localized digital marketing strategy, not replace it entirely. A national campaign is meant to provide an overall brand awareness for your franchise. The messaging is focused on who and what the brand is, showcasing the brand offering to a broader target audience. Some typical media types for national campaigns are larger format options like connected TV (CTV) or broadcast TV spots, billboards, and print advertising. This is primarily due to the resources and budget needed to produce the creative for these channels.

A local campaign builds upon this brand messaging but specifies and directs consumers to your location. The messaging is “localized” by including your location’s address, phone number, etc. These ads will also direct consumers to your local landing page versus the national site. This applies to all campaign types (Paid Search, Paid Social, etc.). For example, the images used on local Display or Paid Social campaigns could utilize a still image from the national level TV ad.

In fact, the primary source of ads should be your local campaign: “While there’s no one equation that works for every brand, a combination of 75% localized marketing and 25% national/credibility-based marketing is a good rule of thumb to follow. That will help guide you in deploying an optimized balance between national and local marketing budgets.” (1851Franchise).

You want to maximize your local campaigns to get the most out of the national marketing efforts. Here a few questions to take into consideration as you evaluate your current digital marketing tactics:

• Are you putting enough budget in your local campaigns to see maximize results?
• Are there services that you aren’t running because you thought the national campaign was enough?
• Is there a benefit to the national brand media campaigns?

Your strategic local digital campaigns combined with the national campaigns will help you maintain strong brand awareness, bring in new customers, and grow your franchise.