Local Laryngitis: Brands Need to Help Locations Develop a Voice in Social Media
Sales channel education, coordination, and measurement are three areas that require special focus when integrating in the local sales channel.
Sales channel education, coordination, and measurement are three areas that require special focus when integrating in the local sales channel.
National brands that market their products through local sales channels (e.g., dealers, franchisees, agents, etc.) are missing a big opportunity if they do not engage in social media. Research from the fourth wave of my firm’s Local Search Usage Study, conducted by comScore, shows that 69 percent of consumers are more likely to use a local business if it has information available on a social networking site.
Clearly national brands have begun to understand the power of having dialogues with customers via social platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., as evidenced by the explosion of corporate pages, profiles, and an increasing amount of engagement through ratings and reviews. However, it appears that the very audience best positioned to engage in the conversation (agents, dealers, or franchisees) has been underserved, and in many cases, blocked from engaging with the local audience. Let’s examine the facts on why this is important:
Consumers looking for local business information on social networks are looking to contact a business:
Not only that; the majority of consumers looking to contact a business online are more likely to do so after a social network search:
Finally, 67 percent of consumers looking for local business information on social networks went on to make a purchase:
This is significant because, on average, only 54 percent of consumers go on to make a purchase across all online and mobile platforms.
The reasons are compelling for why brands should allow their local outlets to engage in social media. However, like everything worth doing, there needs to be a well-defined strategy and detailed rules of engagement in order for a local-social program to accurately build a brand.
The Devil Is in the Details
Much has been written about how to architect a successful social media strategy. ClickZ contributing columnist, Dave Evans, author of “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day,” has some great insights which can be found here, so I won’t go over the basics again. However, there are areas that require special focus when integrating in the local sales channel that include:
Sales channel education. It sounds simple enough, but this is the largest challenge to developing an effective and integrated local-social program. Knowledge of how social media platforms work and how best to leverage them vary dramatically by individual and local organization.
Coordination. A number of tools in the marketplace can greatly assist with the sales channel adoption of social media platforms and aid in coordinated messaging. The best tools have a CMS (content management system) to manage the roll-out of what can be thousands of individual social media profiles and pages that contain unified brand imagery and content. Atop the CMS, brands can then develop content farms of approved messaging that the dealers leverage and adopt in their individual communications. Often times, this greatly increases participation from the “interested but not active” group; as it lowers the barriers of creating content which is often the reason many dealers/agents/franchisees abandon after they initially start. While the marketplace for social CMS tools keeps evolving, three providers that my firm has reviewed and experienced are:
Measurement. Here is a mixture of proven methodologies that can be applied.
As social media continues to become part of consumers’ everyday lives (and increasingly important in how they choose local merchants and brands to do business with), now is the time to adopt a brand social media strategy and execution to enlist the support of the channel that can help a brand gain the most traction – the local sales channel.