Making a local connection can be a good way to capture your audience’s attention. But, how do you effectively adapt your content to local buyers and markets? Below are some tactical steps for localized marketing.

1. Segment customer groups into personas based on available demographic data and serve different content to each persona. HubSpot’s “Make My Persona” tool is a helpful questioning roadmap in defining relevant customer personas. Once you have your grouped your customers into segments, marketing resource management systems can be used to create target lists (groups of personas) based on segment data. Campaign content can then be localized and tailored to each customer segment.
   
   
2. Check your context: Is your message relevant and localized? As you plan your messaging for local marketing campaigns, consider ClickZ’s example of context(see link point 5), which often varies by geographic region. As the article states, an airline marketing its services nationally needs to recognize that a palm tree means different things to a person in Hawaii than in Alaska. Don’t overlook the frame of context when you’re localizing content.
   
   
3. Partner with local affiliates to localize your messaging. A marketing resource management systemcan be used to empower your field sales force to localize marketing templates. Automated workflows ensure that the correct parties can review and approve customization prior to campaign launch. Enabling customer-facing personnel and partners to easily adapt messaging greatly improves marketing agility and drives competitive advantage.
   
   
4. Consider which channels you’ll use to deliver localization. In addition to considering common individual channels for localized marketing - for example events, direct mail, email, websites, and social media – you should also consider multi-channel localization strategies. For example, a direct mail campaign with a PURL that connects to personalized online content.

Conclusion

Localized marketing is gaining increasing momentum as customers are seeking more personalized and relevant content. Segment data and insights can be applied to localize marketing campaigns, while marketing technology such as marketing resource management systems can be used to build target lists from segment groups and coordinate campaign delivery. Additionally, marketing resource management systems empower companies to leverage insights from distributed sales teams in content localization and can also enable competitive advantage by providing a leaner and more agile path to campaign planning and execution.

Are your processes and technologies optimally configured to enable marketing localization?