balihoo guide - local marketing insights from industry leaders on developing a thriving omni-channel...

LO C A L M A R K E T I N G G U I D EInsights from Industry Leaders on Developing a Thriving Omni-channel Local Marketing Strategy

CONTENTSIntroduction....... 03

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LOCAL MARKETING GUIDE: INSIGHTS FROM INDUSTRY LEADERS

Key Insight #1: Maximizing Your Local Search Visibility at Scale....... 04

There are three main factors

involved in the opportunity

and importance of local search.

First, the size of the potential

audience; second the purchase

intent of that audience. And

lastly, the competitive landscape.

Learn more about each from

internationally-recognized Local

Search Marketing consultant,

David Mihm.

Key Insight #2: Driving Local Sales with Video Marketing...... 06

Online video is both a content

medium and a strategic tool for

for driving demand generation,

sales, and actually impacting the

bottom line. Understand how

to harness the power of video

marketing from the CMO of

Vidyard, the world’s leading video

marketing platform.

Key Insight #3: 3 Secrets to Converting Visitors....... 08

VP of Product at LivePerson, Alon

Waks, shares industry secrets

for identifying the profile and

intent of a high stakes website

visitor, how to intelligently

engage that visitor at the right

time to increase conversions

and decrease bounce rates,

and presents the audience with

real-world examples from Home

Depot and Verizon.

Key Insight #4: The New SearchBehavior....... 09

Shoppers make up their minds

about a product in the blink of

an eye, leaving national brands

scrambling to be front and center

when a consumer is researching

their product. Google’s Strategic

Partner Manager, covers key

trends driving new behavior,

today’s search landscape, and

delves into strategies that can

help your national brand win the

moments that matter using the

Zero Moment of Truth.

About Balihoo....... 12

INTRODUCTIONLast year, Balihoo launched our free, live Local Marketing Webinar Series focused on emerging ideas and trends in the local marketing landscape. We partnered with industry experts, including MOZ’s David Mihm and Google’s Cecelia Choi to empower attendees to stay abreast of new technology, consumer behavior, and shifts in the digital marketing space, and provide them with actionable solutions.

This informative guide features key data, insights, and recommendations from four of our most popular fall webinars:

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Maximizing Your Local Search Visibility at

Scale

David MihmMOZ

Driving Local Sales with Video Marketing

Tyler LessardVidyard

3 Secrets to Converting Visitors

Alon WaksLivePerson

The New Search Behavior

Cecelia ChoiGoogle

For full recordings and transcripts of each of the featured webinars, as well as look at our newest sessions, visit Balihoo’s Webinar page.

KEY INSIGHT #1: MAXIMIZING YOUR LOCAL SEARCH VISIBILITY AT SCALEWebinar Presenter: David Mihm, Moz

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There are three primary factors that play a role in businesses getting visibility and results - Website, Location, and Brand. Your national brand’s ultimate goal should be to connect all three.

Let’s talk about where to focus your brand’s efforts in order to get visibility and results. Essentially, your goal is to connect the three ideas. You need to start by connecting your website with your physical location. By associating your physical location in the real-world with the webpage or website, you are enabling those locations to be found digitally.

BEST PRACTICE

You want one click off the homepage to your store locator, and then that store locator needs to contain a set of pages that include one unique page for each location.

The key things to keep in mind here is that you want a unique page for each location.

UNIQUE PAGES SHOULD INCLUDE:

Your brand nameThe keywords of what you’re trying to rank forFull map for each locationNAP (the Name, Address, Phone Number)Rich content, not only for local results, but for the pages to rank organically

The second thing you want to think about is connecting your website with your brand. In the past few years, Google has increasingly favored brands in the local search results.

BEST PRACTICE

In order to create that second connection, the one between the website and brand, there are a couple of things you can do with Google Plus. First, is activating the real publisher tag via Google Plus. This is as simple as putting one small piece of code in your homepage, and in your Google Plus account you identify the account, making sure the two match up. This really is primarily helpful for branded searches, it will help you get a little more visibility and much nicer looking search results when people look for your brand.

The second piece of connecting your website and brand is to look at your inbound links. Your individual store managers and the employees at your individual stores should be active in the community, they should host events at the store, they should be sponsoring the little league baseball team, those sorts of things. And getting links that include your brand name pointing at your store pages. This impacts several key factors, including your store locator, how data aggregators scrape your website and funnel that information back to search engines, including Google.

Lastly, you need to tie your brand to your physical locations. Essentially, these are signals you send that are associated with your website, but they can again reinforce that brand location connection, saying, for example, Target stores are located at these physical locations in the real world. BEST PRACTICE

GoogleMy business, formerly called Google Places for Business is the best place to start. Upload a spreadsheet of all your locations giving Google an accurate picture of your brand allowing the search engine to identify your domain dot com and all of its associated physical locations in the real world. From there, you can add things like categories, hours of operation, etcetera. Note that this is a really critical piece of your overall local search visibility and really in terms of things you can do off your site, at scale.

To recap, your national brand must prioritize resources to truly maximize its presence on local search. Square away your store locator, one location, one page, get the map, the name, address, and phone number for each location in HTML. Secondly, manage your location data via Google My Business, along with other major data aggregators. Lastly, streamline the review process. Look at the top sites in your industry and make sure that you are segmenting your email list for Gmail and non-Gmail customers and integrate that kind of process into whichever CRM system your brand is using.

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On desktop searches - about 20% of all searches have local intent.

Meaning that the searcher is looking for a local business, local news, local events, anything which is some or other way related to their geographic location.

On mobile phone that number jumps to 50%. Basically one out of every two searches.

PROOF POINTS SUPPORTING THE POWER OF LOCAL SEARCH

Online video is both a content medium and a strategic tool for driving demand generation, driving sales, and impacting the bottom line. By using video as an engagement tool national brands have the opportunity to bring customers into the brand and ultimately convert them into not only paying customers but into advocates.

THE POWER OF VIDEO

“Enjoyment of video increases purchase intent by 97%.”- Wall Street Journal, 2005

“Over 70% of marketers report that video converts better than other content types.” - Vidyard + Demand Metric

Gone are the days where people would rely on individual sales reps to learn about a product. People are doing all of their research online, and in some cases, 60% to 90% from recent reports. During this research phase, a lot of the purchase decisions are being made, or a lot of the next step actions are being made.

Vidyard’s data captures the power of video. For example, joining a video conference increased purchase intent by up to 97%, because users are presented with the opportunity to get a better feel for what they are actually looking at buying, and either seeing it in action or watching real people talk about the product.

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KEY INSIGHT #2: DRIVING LOCAL SALES WITH VIDEO MARKETINGWebinar Presenter: Tyler Lessard, Vidyard

WE’RE NATURALLY DRAWN TO VIDEO

We’re physically hard wired to respond to movement, the

intonation and pitch of voices, and body

language, all of which create

strong emotional connections.

There’s a part of the brain, the fusiform facial area, which causes us to look at faces to gather information and

determine someone’s credibility. This is why

we’re so intrigued by live action videos

featuring people.

-Susan WeinschenkThe brain processes

visual data 600,000 times faster than text.

-Social Media Today

NOTE When a video is information-intensive, consumers will watch the video 2 or more times!

This means more time spent on your site! -Internet Retailer

Online video is about bringing out the personality of your company and bringing a face to it that really draws consumers in. Video allows those same consumers to truly see what your brand offers, learn about who your brand is, why they should visit a local store or take that next action with you. However, not all video is created equal. There are several key factors to ensuring that you are presenting your target audience with value, and maximizing returns for your national brand.

Other things to consider are three key factors for understanding how your brand’s videos are performing, and if any updates need to be made to ensure that, ultimately, you’re driving conversions and sales.

First, tracking actual engagement makes a big difference. It gives your brand a glimpse into what’s working and what isn’t, providing you with the opportunity to alter the content - i.e. content too long? Shorten the intro and bring the call-to-action up.

Second, analyze engagement and conversion data.

Lastly, and arguably, most importantly, identify how people are converting at the end of a video. Today, most people will end a video with a change to a screen that may or may not have a URL. While it seems like an obvious, having some form of a call-to-action at the end of videos is imperative for continued interaction.

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TIPS, TRICKS& FAQs

How long should my video content be? As short as possible to get the message across! Aim for no more than 60-90 seconds.

What metrics should I be tracking beyond view counts?Viewer engagement and drop-off rates, views by channel, new leads captured, etc.

Should I be using YouTube?Yes, as a place for people to discover. BUT you also want your videos on your own website and this is where you should send people to as a destination!

How do I determine the right style and mood? Depends on type of video, target audience, stage of ‘buying cycle’, and your brand. But don’t be shy to have fun, feature your local employees, and ‘humanize’ your brand.

How can I increase output without blowing my budget?Hire an in-house video producer! Leverage new platforms for turnkey animated videos. Find the right production agency partner and leverage scale to your advantage.

KEY INSIGHT #3: THREE SECRETS TO CONVERTING VISITORSWebinar Presenter: Alon Waks, LivePerson

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At a high level the three secrets to converting online visitors to customers are:

Identify your brand’s target consumers

Learn as much as possible about the consumer’s intent

Intelligently engage those same consumers

Now, let’s look at each of the three secrets in more depth.

To identify your brand’s target consumer, you need to identify the target with the right tools and at the right time. In an ideal world everybody will come to get everything they need with one click, two clicks and done but we’re not there yet.

The second piece is understanding the consumer’s intent. They are coming to your website with a purpose, maybe the purpose changes along the dynamic of the journey, making it important for your brand to be flexible enough to help them in driving them along what is called the positive purchase.

Third, when the consumer needs help with something along their journey, your brand must have tools in place to help complete the journey. These three together are truly the focus of driving online conversion to excellence.

CONSIDER THIS DATA Today, around 7% of all e-commerce is driven by everything online and 25%, very soon, will be driven by mobile which will go up to 75% by the end of the century.

We’ve seen that with conversion rates of over 25% increase if a brand personalized offers and personalized the consumers’ experience along their journey with your brand.

KEY INSIGHT #4: THE NEW SEARCH BEHAVIORWebinar Presenter: Cecelia Choi, Google

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We no longer live in a linear world where we are reactively receiving information. Instead, we are proactive information seekers and we want to seek that knowledge first hand and right on the spot very, very quickly. In fact, 80% of decisions are formed before entering the store and that’s an indicator how crucial the moment before the store is.

There has been this mental model we, as marketers, have used for over 50 plus years of marketing. You have the stimulus which is perhaps the advertisement that drives the first moment of truth where we’re actually in front of the product at the shelf. The consumer then takes the product home, they use it, and they are either dissatisfied

or satisfied. They form an opinion and they choose to either repeat that purchase or not repeat it. However, a lot of newly published data leaves us to question that traditional three-step mental model.

Google did a consumer barometer study that shows that 61% of Internet users actually research online prior to the purchase. This could be purchasing online or offline, going into the store, and interacting with the product, but 61% of Internet users do their research and they form an opinion even before interacting with that product.

Among those, almost 70% use a search engine somewhere along that path whether it’s Google or Yahoo. Motorola Solutions shared a report looking at smartphone users and reported that 50% research for offers while they’re actually in the store at that point of time.

Traditional Three-Step Mental Model

“According to Procter&Gamble, shoppers make up their minds about a product in three to seven seconds, just the time it takes to note a product on the store shelf.

This time lapse is called (by P&G) the “First Moment of Truth,” and it’s considered the most important marketing opportunity for a brand.”

- Wall Street Journal, 2005

All of this leads us to believe that the three-step model needs to be updated. And in 2011, Google introduced a four-moment model.

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You can see here you have a stimulus that leads to a Zero Moment of Truth, that leads to a first moment of truth, and then to a second moment of truth. As a marketer, the questions that you should be asking is, are we still thinking with a three-step mental model that bypasses the research phase, the Zero Moment of Truth? And are we doing things to win consumers at that point of research which is almost as crucial as winning at the point of purchase.

Consumers don’t really move in a left to right motion. They can actually circulate and research as long as they want really and the key is that the consumer is self-directed.

And as a marketer and thinking about your brand and your business, you really can’t leave any part of that research phase unattended.

So when you think about a search query, especially on a mobile device, it’s hyper local and they want to make sure that that business or that product is conveniently found within their area. So it’s clear that search is a critical component of the overall consideration and purchase cycle.

Now, for you as a marketer, what does that mean? Well, you have to invest in a great website because you want to think about it as your digital storefront, just like you would think about your brick and mortar store, thinking about the design and attracting consumers that are walking along the street to come in. A digital storefront is just as empowering if not more so just because of the sheer amount of users that are online today. The things you want to think about are clear headings, very high quality photos, promoting special offers. You also want to have your contact info, your address, any sort of social media so that they can look at different reviews, very easy navigation throughout the website, making it a seamless user experience.

If you have videos, that’s also highly interactive and engaging. And you want to keep your content on your website very fresh, updated, easy, relevant and if you do have an e-commerce type of site, you want a very simple checkout process. This is your digital storefront.

Mobile devices are everywhere and mobile really matters. One in five searches actually originate from a mobile device. If you think about specific services or products, that number can be as high as 50% or even above 50%. Mobile searches have increased by 500% over the last two years, so you really want to think about the number of Zero Moment of Truths that are happening on a mobile device. Are you optimized as a business and ready to do that?

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YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE ALREADY ONLINE

Shopping starts online

94% of consumers research products online before buying

Customers rely on online sources for local information

97% use online media when researching products or services locally

Online shopping continues in store

75% search before or during a shopping trip

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COPYRIGHT © 2015 BALIHOO. All RIGHTS RESERVED.

12LOCAL MARKETING GUIDE: INSIGHTS FROM INDUSTRY LEADERS

Balihoo’s Local Marketing Cloud redefines how national brands reach local consumers. The Balihoo LMC enables national brands to automate and scale targeted, local multi-channel marketing campaigns ensuring a consistent, quality experience at every step of the customer’s purchase journey - from the national website to the local store.

The Balihoo Local Marketing Cloud encompasses all of the modern local multi-channel marketing needs of national brands, including digital channels such as Display Advertising, Social Media, and Paid Search, as well as traditional channels, including Direct Mail and Co-op.