The post is a part of a series of blogs about traditional media’s data quality versus digital data.
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You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.Â
In this last part of this series I want to talk about the benefits of local media. Depending on the size of your market, local media will be around for a while or forever. (If you come from a really small market you might lose your newspaper like my hometown just did.) But print media will be in decline in the coming years but TV seems to be on the upswing. Jackson recently launched another local network. But how can you leverage these local mediums to your advantage?
Local Media Works great if:
1. You only sell locally. If your product or service is used nationwide, local marketing might not be a great idea. If your product is national there will be lots of and lots of markets to focus on and unless you are large enough to hire a national ad firm this will be an exhausting process. Local products and services go well with local media because of the local audience. While online ads might be great for targeting people locally who are currently looking for your product and local media can increase brand awareness.
2. Offer a specific deal. As covered in the first post, we should look skeptically at the data that local media outlets give us. They have no good way of measuring the eyes and ears that take in their content. But think of ways you can measure the effect of an ad. Can you make a specific offer for each campaign. Maybe you can create a second URL for people to go to for the promotion? Maybe you can activate a second phone line for a particular ad campaign? There are different ways to try and measure the ads that you are sending out.
3. Position as an expert. Local newspaper and radio can be great ways to position yourself as an expert in the community. This is a soft sell tactic. Use their medium to broadcast free knowledge to the public to help them realize that you know what you are talking about. While not measurable it is a great marketing technique and I would bet more effective than regular ads(without a specific offer).
4. Have lots of money: If you have money to spend local advertisers can use as much of it as you want. One of the keys with local ads is repetition. Repetition takes time and money. If you are going to run a traditional campaign plan spend enough to make effective.
If you want to talk about your marketing plan. Send me an email: kevin@kadelseberger.com