Marketing to a local audience

When marketing to a local audience it’s all about the personal touch. Make sure you are seen in the right places, at the right time and with the right people. Often PR is a more useful tool than marketing when appealing to smaller communities…

It is important to make connections and build relationships with journalists at local publications including newspapers and glossy magazines. Ensure you know their deadlines and printing times in order to produce content at the right times. If they are given good quality content, when they need it then they are more likely to provide you with beneficial coverage, which is in effect free advertising.

Engage with the community as a whole, this could be by sponsoring a local football team or helping out a local school sports day and even litter picking. Businesses need to make sure they are giving something back to a local community and ensure they do not have a detrimental effect.

Word of mouth is extremely important within communities, with individuals talking between themselves on a daily basis. It would be a big mistake to ignore the effectiveness of word of mouth marketing and also the consequences of negative comments.

You could encourage positive word of mouth recommendations by offering a referral incentive, offer discount for people who have printed out a voucher from the website or cut it out of a local paper or for those who live within a certain radius of the business itself. Deal with negative word of mouth by engaging with the individuals, meet with them at public meetings or send a letter/email responding to their comments.

Keep up to date with local opinion and ‘hot topics’ by building relationships with local people, taking part in community engagement and act as a member of community yourselves. By doing this, businesses can make sure they are in the loop and not missing out on anything important. Another way to do this would be to monitor local press and follow any topics that may affect the community.

Most importantly however make sure your marketing has a local focus, focus on issues or problems that are prevalent in the community. Just like you wouldn’t approach a women’s magazine with a story about a new item of gym equipment for men, you wouldn’t market to a local community with a campaign with no relevance. Take a moment to find the angle.

If it is a larger corporation who are looking to market on a local level it is important to ensure that the campaign remains integrated with the rest of the businesses marketing efforts and non of the elements contradict each other.

As with marketing to any market – know your audience, what they want and tell them you can provide it!


Article Written by Carli Smith


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