Guest article | Andrew Mitchell - Storyteq, CEO APAC
We are delighted to have Andrew from Storyteq share insights around incredible marketing technology software which is helping multi-site businesses manage social media “on-brand” by enabling content ownership at a local store level. We noticed he hasn't specifically talked Kiwi brands, but examine the image to the left and think what other brands are related. Quite the network and we can attest it is priced perfectly!
On one hand, most marketers agree that the more personal, more relevant, and more local your marketing can be, the better. On the other, they also realise that marketing activity must also be scalable, cost effective and efficient to manage.
Traditionally the latter of these two opposing forces has usually won out, resulting in most brands taking a generic, national campaign based approach to their marketing, leaving the consumer to connect the dots to the brand’s local store.
Social media, despite some significant benefits of a local approach, resides in the same basket. Managing organic posts and ads across multiple local pages, and dealing with local community management, is seen as way too hard. But is it?
The short answer is no. The tools exist to take most of the heavy lifting out of a localised approach to social media and more brands, from supermarket heavyweights to smaller franchise operators, are seizing the opportunity to gain a local competitive advantage. Storyteq’s social automation software has been helping some of New Zealand’s largest retail and brands ‘act local’ with an easy-to-manage, scalable workflow. Key features of the software are below:
fully automated publishing and geo-targeting of paid and organic Facebook and Instagram content, plus Google Adwords, down to each local store account with the content dynamically localised.
ability to target groups of stores with certain posts or ads.
ad budget can be managed for each store.
monitoring, community management and analytics for all local store accounts in one dashboard.
for cooperative or franchise models, local stores can select from a library of pre-configured campaigns and fund with their own budgets.
all results are tracked both nationally and by location.
campaign optimisation happens automatically in real time across all local campaigns.
So what’s the win from a local approach to social? Brands employing Storyteq software say that enabling a local approach does, in many cases, lead to improved ad effectiveness. People simply engage more with an ad from a business in their area. And from a brand perspective, it allows a deeper connection with the community through the automation of localised messaging. In the case of a locally owned retail model, making it easy for stores to fund their own campaigns is a big win for both the brand and the store. And politically, it breeds a good feeling in a network when each local page is being curated and promoted in highly professional manner.
Research from Shopify indicates that 53% of consumers in North America said their changed shopping habits because of the pandemic are here to stay. This is important to note because the same report says 63% of consumers between 18-34 years old seek out local businesses, which is not far behind those 55+ years old (57%) and 35-54 years old (53%). Additionally, of those who shop locally, 79% said supporting their community or protecting local jobs were the motivating factors for doing so.
Local social media automation gets even more exciting when combined with creative automation. Creative automation is the ability to scale multiple versions of a piece of content with the push of a button. For example, this might enable the ability to create a localised static or video asset for every store in your network, something retail networks could only dream about in the past. You can even automate down to a customer level – a video or the header banner in an email tailored to their buying behaviour or interests.
Contrary to popular belief, implementing a local store approach to social media is not necessarily challenging, but it is about understanding the need, and then executing the strategy via automation tools like Storyteq to gain advantage in your local markets.
Andrew Mitchellis the APAC CEO of leading martech provider Storyteq.
Storyteq helps brands create content and distribute it much faster through advanced automation, brand portal and social media publishing technology.
Storyteq was recently recognised by Gartner as a leader in their martech sector.
Drop Andrew a line at Andrew.mitchell@storyteq.com or visit www.storyteq.com.