Start driving top-line growth and market share in local markets. In this paper you’ll learn: -Why local marketing is a challenge for many brands -Why local websites should be your #1 local area marketing tactic -How local websites can be the hub for all local marketing efforts, including digital marketing and local internet marketing -Benefits of automating local websites with local marketing automation Marketing Tools Included: -The Local Web Test Worksheet

1. LOCAL WEBSITES
Driving Sales Growth for National Brands
» LOCAL WEBSITES: THE FIRST STEP IN “LOCAL WEB”
MARKETING
» MARKETING AT THE LOCAL LEVEL IS A CHALLENGE FOR
NATIONAL BRANDS
» EXERCISE: DETERMINING BRAND PERFORMANCE AT THE
LOCAL LEVEL
» WORKSHEET: YOUR BRAND’S LOCAL PRESENCE
PAPER INTENDED FOR
BUYING STAGE
» Investigation
AUDIENCE
» Responsible for Corporate Marketing at
National Brands
FOCUS
» Local Website Strategy & Education
(what, how, why)
» Exercise for Determining Local
Marketing Presence
ROLE
» Decision Maker
» Influencer

2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1
MARKETING AT THE LOCAL LEVEL IS A CHALLENGE FOR NATIONAL BRANDS 1
GROWING IMPORTANCE OF DIGITAL MEDIA IN LOCAL MARKETS 2
THE SHIFT FROM TRADITIONAL TO ONLINE MARKETING 2
THE LOCAL WEB 3
LOCAL WEBSITES: THE FIRST STEP IN “LOCAL WEB” MARKETING 3
AUTOMATING LOCAL WEBSITES 4
CONCLUSION 4
EXERCISE: DETERMINING BRAND PERFORMANCE AT THE LOCAL LEVEL 5
WORKSHEET: DETERMINE YOUR BRAND’S SEARCH “REAL ESTATE” 9
ABOUT BALIHOO 11
WHITEPAPERDRIVING SALES GROWTH
FOR NATIONAL BRANDS

3. 1DRIVING SALES GROWTH FOR NATIONAL BRANDS
R
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Internet and its mobility have fundamentally changed marketing. Over the past decade, websites have
become the hub for all marketing activities, i.e. the centralized landing pages through which all tactical
programs – both online and offline – can be driven, tracked and measured. Mobile phones have surpassed
PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide. And within the past few years, local marketing has
emerged as the next big frontier in effective demand generation.
For national brands, having a local presence online is now imperative to ensure that the consumer can find
their resellers at the local level. Local websites do this – they are the first step required for national brands
to build a local market presence. They ensure search engines direct customers to the right place at the right
time; they make sure local reseller messages are consistent with national campaigns; and they guarantee
customers aren’t routed to the competition.
This paper explains how national brands can use local marketing automation to create and implement local
websites, and in turn:
• Drive top-line growth and market share
• Leverage the growing importance and strength of local markets
• Maintain control of their national brand further down the sales cycle
• Increase ROI of marketing expenditures
MARKETING AT THE LOCAL LEVEL IS A CHALLENGE FOR NATIONAL BRANDS
For the majority of national brands who sell through local outlets, local marketing is a highly under-served
marketing channel. Brand marketers spend millions of dollars nationally – both online and offline – to build
brand awareness, interest, consideration and preference of the consumer, with consistent messaging that
builds across multiple touch points in the cycle.
However, when it comes to marketing at the local level, where final preference and purchases actually occur,
national brands often lose control of the brand message and the effectiveness of their marketing dollars. The
reasons national brands struggle with local marketing are varied, but they fall into 3 categories:
• Reliance on Affiliates and Partners – National brands typically have to rely on affiliates or channel partners to
execute brand marketing at the local level. This is problematic because whenever responsibility is placed
on separate entities to finish-out marketing programs, it has a negative impact on program adoption,
quality and effectiveness. Local-level partners are often either business owners who are time-constrained
and not focused on marketing or a reseller who also sells competing brands. If a national brand’s programs
are not extremely easy to implement, they often get completely ignored by partners.
• Complicated Customization and Management - Local marketing requires customization of messaging and
graphics across a growing number of mediums at a highly localized level – often across hundreds of cities
with multiple outlets in each one.Without technology, it’s simply not cost-effective for a national brand to
modify and manage all of these elements at a local level.
• Difficulty Measuring ROI - National brands typically have to rely on sell-through or order data from affiliates
and partners to gauge the impact of local marketing efforts, and this data is typically unreliable and dated.
Without good visibility into the ROI and effectiveness of local programs, it’s difficult to justify spending.

4. 2DRIVING SALES GROWTH FOR NATIONAL BRANDS
The disconnect between national and local
marketing is particularly interesting when
one considers that local marketing is the
“last mile” of marketing – i.e. communication
a potential customer receives when they are
at their closest point to making an actual
purchase decision – making it highly relevant
when it comes to converting consumers
with purchase intent into buyers of a brand’s
products. There is no doubt that by finding
a way to close this gap, brand marketers can
significantly improve leads and sales at the
local level and increase the brand’s top-line
revenue.
GROWING IMPORTANCE OF
DIGITAL MEDIA IN LOCAL
MARKETS
Within the last two years, local marketing
has emerged as the next big frontiers in
effective demand generation. As partial proof,
comScore recently announced that over 4
billion searches a month have a local intent.
(comScore 2013)
THE SHIFT FROM TRADITIONAL TO
ONLINE MARKETING
When it comes to what works at the local
level, the importance of online vs. traditional
marketing is shifting. is on track to account
for more than one-quarter of all ad spend by
2016 (eMarketer). And with that growth, the
way consumers are buying is changing. In the
last few years, the number of sources used
by consumers in making buying decisions
increased from 5.27 to 10.4. Consumers are
embracing the many sources of information
and including them in their investigation
process. And increasingly, they’re accessing
them while on the go. As of late 2013,
consumers now spend more time interacting
with online retailers on smartphones and
tablets than they do on desktops and laptops
(Internet Retailer).

5. 3DRIVING SALES GROWTH FOR NATIONAL BRANDS
THE LOCAL WEB
All of these new digital outlets for
marketing and accessing information make
up “The Local Web,” an integrated growing
ecosystem of online media channels that
collectively drive online local marketing.
(See Figure 3)
National brands must claim and at least
minimally participate in the majority of
the Local Web’s integrated channels or risk
being invisible in local searches.
So how does a national brand begin to
take advantage of the Local Web? The
first step is by creating and implementing
local websites for their local resellers. Local
websites are at the heart of the Local Web.
LOCAL WEBSITES:
THE FIRST STEP IN
“LOCAL WEB” MARKETING
Local websites serve as the centerpiece, or
hub, for all local marketing tactics – both
onlineandoffline.Theyaresmallervariations
of a national brand’s corporate website,
carrying through the brand’s image and
messages. They allow the national brand
and its local resellers to be “found” at the
local search level. Local websites function
as centralized landing pages through
which all of the local marketing tactics can
be driven, tracked and measured. While
there are other Local Web elements that
are important to take advantage of sooner
rather than later, it’s necessary for local websites to be in place first.
Local websites can take multiple forms. Here are three examples:
• Co-branded affiliate sites with each of the brand’s agents, distributors, dealers, etc., which allow all partner/
affiliate locations to show up individually in location searches and maps
• City sites focused on the corporate brand, which enable all of the brand locations for that city to be listed
in a single spot, and for the nationally branded site to be found in organic search listings for the city
• Promotional sites which enable a brand’s new offers or products to be found in organic searches in each
relevant city
A brand might choose to implement one type of local website or all of them simultaneously in order to ensure
their products and resellers are always found in local searches.
LOCAL
REVIEWS
LOCAL
SEARCH
LOCATION
BASED
SOCIAL
MEDIA
MOBILE
LOCAL
WEBSITES
DAILY
DEALS
THE
LOCAL
WEB
FIGURE 3
RequestThe LocalWeb:
The Linchpin to Successful Local
MarketingWhitepaper at:
Balihoo.com/local-marketing-resources
WHITE
PAPER
Balihoo’s whitepaper“The LocalWeb:The Linchpin to Successful
Local Marketing”explains the elements of the LocalWeb and
provides a high-level view of the impact each element can have
on improving local marketing.

6. 4DRIVING SALES GROWTH FOR NATIONAL BRANDS
For example, a manufacturer of utility sheds might sell the sheds through 1,000 resellers – including national home improvement
stores, local mom-and-pop hardware stores, and local remodeling contractors – in 300 different cities. To ensure their products are
always found at the local market level, they might set up:
• 1,000 co-branded reseller/affiliate sites that link to each and every reseller’s website
• 300 different city sites that list all their partners in a given city
• 300 promotional sites (one per city) per quarter to promote their most important offerings
All these local website variations will ensure the manufacturer’s brand and resellers are always found at the
local level by customers who are looking to buy a utility shed, regardless of whether or not a reseller has a
good web presence or might be promoting a competitor’s similar product at the time.
For national brands, relying on resellers to help implement such a large number of local websites would not be
feasible, but it’s possible to scale to this level using local marketing automation.
AUTOMATING LOCAL WEBSITES
Marketing automation makes implementing a large number of nationally branded local websites easy. First,
brands build and offer local website templates to their affiliates and resellers, providing them with as many,
or as few, customization options as they choose, and a brand message appropriate for each region’s local
presence. Then, using automation, it’s possible to launch hundreds or even thousands of sites simultaneously.
When it’s time to make campaign updates, with the same effort it would take to update one site, hundreds of
sites can be updated simultaneously.
Automation of local websites enables national brands to:
• Drive top-line growth and marketshare by ensuring that a brand’s products, services and dealers can be found
locally and influencing the customer experience closer to the point of purchase.
• Increase ROI of marketing expenditures. Automated local websites offer a simple way for resellers to engage in
marketing with a national brand – they can even be implemented without any direct effort by the reseller.
This helps increase reseller participation in marketing programs, resulting in more leads being driven to
the reseller.
• Maintain control of their brand’s image and message further down the sales cycle while driving leads to local
resellers.
• More efficiently manage reseller marketing programs. Automation enables brand updates and promotions to be
quickly and easily disseminated across all websites, to all markets, at once.
• Track and measure ROI at the local reseller level. Local websites provide outstanding, measurable performance
as a landing page for digital marketing efforts, such as pay-per-click (PPC), email marketing and banner
advertising.
CONCLUSION
Without effective local marketing strategies that take advantage of the Local Web (i.e. the integrated growing
ecosystem on online media channels), national brands risk losing visibility and sales at the local level. Local
websites are a strategic way for national brands to combat this problem. They are the hub of the Local Web
and the first step in building a local-market presence. And with local marketing automation, they can be
implemented efficiently and cost-effectively.

7. 5DRIVING SALES GROWTH FOR NATIONAL BRANDS
EXERCISE: DETERMINING BRAND PERFORMANCE AT THE LOCAL LEVEL
Any brand can get a gut check on how well their marketing is performing at the national and local levels
through an easy exercise. The objective of the exercise is to determine the percentage of “real estate” your
brand and product categories own or strongly influence on“Page One”of search engine results pages (SERPs)
in brand name searches and in searches with local intent. The higher the percentage, the better your brand
is performing. We will start with an example and then provide you with a worksheet for your own brand
calculation.
Example: How to Check Your Local Marketing Visibility
In this example, we’ll use a Converse brand,“Chuck Taylors,”as the brand, and“basketball shoes”as the product
category we’re measuring. Google will be the search engine. The search will be performed on a laptop. The city
we will be searching in is Boise, Idaho.
We will run the three searches listed below and determine the results.
1. Brand Name Search (Chuck Taylors)
2. Brand Name + City Search (Chuck Taylors, Boise)
3. Product Category + City Search (Basketball Shoes, Boise)
For each search, we will determine the results for Paid Opportunities, Local Listings (e.g. Google Places) and Organic Search by
counting the number of times the brand shows up in the results for each of those areas and dividing by the total number of results
returned for each area.
The results for our Chuck Taylors example is shown on the following pages.

8. 6DRIVING SALES GROWTH FOR NATIONAL BRANDS
BRAND NAME SEARCH (EXAMPLE)
CHUCK TAYLORS
EXERCISE: DETERMINING BRAND PERFORMANCE AT THE LOCAL LEVEL
SEARCH RESULTS:
Search Results Total “Your Brand”Owns or Influences “Your Brand”Results
Paid Opportunities 5 5 100%
Local Listings 0 0 0%
Organic Listing 11 11 100%
Total Search Real Estate 16 16 100%

9. 7DRIVING SALES GROWTH FOR NATIONAL BRANDS
BRAND NAME SEARCH + CITY SEARCH (EXAMPLE)
CHUCK TAYLORS + BOISE
EXERCISE: DETERMINING BRAND PERFORMANCE AT THE LOCAL LEVEL
SEARCH RESULTS:
Search Results Total “Your Brand”Owns or Influences “Your Brand”Results
Paid Opportunities 1 1 100%
Local Listings 0 0 0%
Organic Listing 10 1 10%
Total Search Real Estate 11 2 18%

10. 8DRIVING SALES GROWTH FOR NATIONAL BRANDS
The results of our example show that Chuck Taylors performed well in the broad search for the brand name,
garnering 100% of the paid and organic listings. However, searches at the city level for both the brand name
and product category were dismal at only 18% and 0%, respectively. It’s also worth noting that the local
results returned in all three examples were 0% each time. Ideally, instead of no listings, the top retailers who
sell Chuck Taylors would show up in Google Places listings.
These results are fairly typical for national brands. But by shifting a relatively low level of resources and
budget to local marketing, brands will see a dramatic, positive shift in their local marketing results. And
by implementing a local marketing automation solution to ensure local partners are found and actively
marketing the brand, channel organizations will quickly see measurable increases in channel program ROI.
PRODUCT CATEGORY + CITY SEARCH (EXAMPLE)
BASKETBALL SHOES + BOISE
EXERCISE: DETERMINING BRAND PERFORMANCE AT THE LOCAL LEVEL
Search Results Total “Your Brand”Owns or Influences “Your Brand”Results
Paid Opportunities 2 0 0%
Local Listings 0 0 0%
Organic Listing 10 0 0%
Total Search Real Estate 12 0 0%
SEARCH RESULTS:

11. 9DRIVING SALES GROWTH FOR NATIONAL BRANDS
WORKSHEET: DETERMINE YOUR BRAND’S SEARCH “REAL ESTATE”
Use this worksheet to gauge the local marketing visibility of your own brand.
NOTE: You may want to run the results multiple times for different brand names, product categories, market segments and cities in
which you play. For example, in the Chuck Taylors exercise, the exercise could also be run for“Chuck Taylor,”“Converse Chuck Taylor,”
“Converse,”“Jack Purcell”and“Converse Hoodies.”
Instructions
For each search outlined below, run the search and tally the results in the corresponding spreadsheet before
moving on to the next search. Follow these three steps for each:
1. For Column A, count up all of the results that show up for each of the Paid, Local and Organic search areas, regardless of if they
relate to your brand or not, and enter them in the appropriate row. Add the numbers in Rows 1, 2 and 3. Enter
the total in Column A, Row 4.
2. For Column B, count up the results that relate solely to your brand within each of the search areas (i.e. Paid, Local and
Organic). These can be your national brand’s paid ads or search results, ads paid for by your partners, local
listings for your partners, and/or directory listings (such as Yellow Pages) or web pages for you or your
partners, as long as they clearly relate to your brand. Enter the results for your brand in the appropriate row
under Column B. Add the numbers in Rows 1, 2 and 3. Enter the total in Column B, Row 4.
3. For each row within Column C, divide the number in Column B by the number in Column A. The results in Rows
1, 2 and 3 are the percentages of real estate your brand owns for each respective search area – Paid, Local
and Organic search. The results in Column C, Row 4 are your brand’s total results, or “real estate,” for Page
One of that particular search. The higher the percentage, the better.
COLUMN A COLUMN B COLUMN C
Search Results Total “Your Brand”Owns or Influences “Your Brand”Results
ROW 1 Paid Opportunities 2 1 1 ÷ 2 = .5 or 50%
ROW 2 Local Listings +4 +0 0 ÷ 4 = 0 or 0%
ROW 3 Organic Listing +10 +1 1 ÷ 10 = .1 or 10%
ROW 4 Total Search Real Estate 16 2 2 ÷ 16= .125 or 12.5%
INSTRUCTION SAMPLE STEP 2 STEP 3STEP 1

12. 10DRIVING SALES GROWTH FOR NATIONAL BRANDS
COLUMN A COLUMN B COLUMN C
Search Results Total “Your Brand”Owns or Influence “Your Brand”Results
ROW 1 Paid Opportunities
ROW 2 Local Listings
ROW 3 Organic Listing
ROW 4 Total Search Real Estate
BRAND NAME SEARCH
YOUR BRAND
COLUMN A COLUMN B COLUMN C
Search Results Total “Your Brand”Owns or Influence “Your Brand”Results
ROW 1 Paid Opportunities
ROW 2 Local Listings
ROW 3 Organic Listing
ROW 4 Total Search Real Estate
COLUMN A COLUMN B COLUMN C
Search Results Total “Your Brand”Owns or Influence “Your Brand”Results
ROW 1 Paid Opportunities
ROW 2 Local Listings
ROW 3 Organic Listing
ROW 4 Total Search Real Estate
BRAND NAME SEARCH + CITY SEARCH
YOUR BRAND + ANY CITY IN WHICH YOUR BRAND IS SOLD
PRODUCT CATEGORY + CITY SEARCH
YOUR BRAND’S PRODUCT CATEGORY + ANY CITY IN WHICH YOUR BRAND IS SOLD

13. 11
ABOUT BALIHOO
Balihoo is the leading local marketing platform, helping national brands activate millions of data-driven
campaigns at scale. Our cloud-based technology incorporates a full suite of solution modules, ranging from
traditional tactics like direct mail to local digital tactics, including local websites. Each module marries powerful
technology with data, allowing national brands and agencies to scale campaigns and track results.
Leading national brands, across a multitude of industries, use the Balihoo local marketing platform to activate
millions of data-driven local campaigns for over 300,000 local outlets.
Ready to rethink local? Request a live demo, or contact a Balihoo team member for more information.
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