Chris Keller

A few months ago, Susan Tormollen, our Balihoo Director of Education showed me a poster she sketched that illustrates "local marketing." I've included my own sketch of the idea below.

Please pardon the lack of art, but consider the brilliance in Susan's idea.

You've heard it before: a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, this picture would be worth $1.2 Trillion dollars for the top 10 Global Brands, according to Interbrand's 2010 Report. What is the worth of your brand picture?

When I saw the first sketch I resolved that every national brand should have one of these—they probably do—and every local marketer whether a franchisee or a channel partner should have one too—and they probably don't. If not, map it! A picture of your brand.

Here are six things you can do with your own brand map:

1. Make Tangible the Abstract Idea of Brand Building—Brand building is a nebulous marketing topic that is hard to grasp. This picture links your brand building advertising efforts—a bill board, a newspaper insert, a radio jingle or an email—to the life of your consumer. 
2. Keep Your Customer In Focus—This map should represent the profile of your ideal customer and begs questions that keep you close to them: Where do they spend their time? Where do they spend their money? What do they value? What else competes for their attention? What does your brand mean to them?
3. Perfect Each Touch—Brands are built one touch at a time. You know this and such a map keeps that top of mind.
4. Focus on Local—As I've covered in the past, local marketing is much more than a trend. This map fits with the think global, act local business approach and puts the focus on local markets. Whether international, national or regional, your consumers live in local markets. Enabling your local partners to effectively market is a significant competitive advantage.
5. Share Your Vision—Whether used in one location or shared with thousands, this picture facilitates you sharing your brand building vision in a scalable fashion and could coincide with training or leadership events.
6. Facilitate Planning—This map could be the central point of individual market campaigns, or brand repositioning efforts with subsequent slides that focus in on the touch points and the mediums that touch a prospect there.

What visual tools do you currently use for brand building? I'm interested.

Local Marketers in search of fresh ideas would be well served to review a few of the 150 Best Marketing Blogs according to Ad Age.

This is an impressive list of more than 150 blogs—1141, as of this post. At quick glance, the list includes many names I need to explore and some of my favorite marketing thinkers including:

• #5 Seth Godin, a best-selling author, world famous blogger and the father of the permission-based marketing movement.
• #23 Marketing Profs, a resource I count on at least weekly to give me great email subject lines, and one line zingers.
• #25 Duct Tape Marketing, renowned small business marketing guru
• #29 Avinash Kaushik, leader in web analytics and Analytics Evangelist for Google

Give the list a read. You'll find some great new ideas, and if you are like me, your next problem will be executing on all the great practices.

Today, I attended my first virtual tradeshow, The Art & Science of B2B Marketing and Sales. It was a fascinating experience and has me buzzing.  I came away with a new respect for the method of virtual marketing to large groups of clients, prospects and vendors, and some lingering questions about the future of this technology for local marketers.

Perhaps most awe inspiring was the event organizer's ability to make the virtual space feel so similar to a physical show, and the ability to provide tools for attendees to talk to other attendees and vendors, and to attend presentations with such ease.

From the outset, the turnout amazed me. I was shocked to see more than 150 other people milling around in the atrium 30 minutes before the keynote. While I waited, I browsed 50 or so attendee profiles, passed through each booth, and had a handful of targeted chats.

Compare that experience to your last physical tradeshow. If it is anything like my experience, you ended up with no effective way to sift through the thousands of attendees, and instead by chance, sit next to a stranger for your morning donut. While cordial, most exchanges (outside of a vendor booth) are not fruitful, leading to any business outcome for you.

Back to my show experience. At the top of the hour, I attended a presentation, and again was delighted to see the profiles of attendees in the room who were interested in the same topic. Again, I scanned the profiles of attendees, listened to the speaker, and had a handful of additional chats.

At the end of a productive day, I learned about four vendors, listened to 10 presentations, downloaded seven white papers, and engaged with at least 15 attendees without incurring conference costs or leaving my desk. It was incredible.

Franchise marketing, and local store marketing practitioners, keep an eye on this technology. Its adoption may propel broader acceptance of virtual worlds like SecondLife. In a not-so-far-off future, you may find yourself marketing locally to global clients through a virtual brick and mortar store.

Here are three reasons why Balihoo's ad builder will turn you into a brand super hero. As defined by Wikipedia, a super hero possesses "extraordinary or superhuman powers."

1. Brand Control—Brands demand control over the minutiae that collectively embodies the brand, and rightly so, considering that the tiny details separate good brands from great brands and contribute to the incredible brand value as represented by the $432 billion of brand value held by the top 10 in InterBrand's Best Global Brands of 2010 report.
   
   While channel partners, remote sales teams, or distributed marketing organizations may regularly disregard branding guidelines out of ignorance or lack of attention, onus is on national brands to control every detail of their brands. That is where a robust ad builder becomes a killer app, or otherwise stated, the first building block essential for local marketing to happen. Balihoo's ad builder, for one, enables a brand to designate locked-down elements including logos, certain copy, layout, and customer and product imagery, among other attributes.
   
   Also important, brands can control the life of branded assets when using a SaaS system with a central repository of "approved" advertising. When the brand introduces, or retires a new branded asset, all of its downstream users have immediate access to the updated files. That is powerful version control.


2. Localization—In contrast to the brand's control requirement, local marketers (remote sales teams, distributed marketing teams, and downstream reseller partners) want the capability to localize a national asset into an effective marketing piece for "their" customers. Such localization may be as simple as adding local contact information, or in collaboration with the brand, may include a product shot in front of a local landmark, a shot specific to a unique use of the product locally, or may include mention of a reseller's local community involvement.


3. Reusability—Perhaps most exciting about Balihoo's ad builder is the capability to reuse national assets with its hundreds or thousands of local marketers who then localize elements of those national assets and execute advertising across 15 available mediums in an integrated campaign. Perhaps a local marketer creates touch points using TV, Radio, a printed coupon, email, twitter, and local microsites to capture leads. While it is common to create advertising for a given medium, a coordinated campaign reusing material and executing against a specific calendar is very difficult. Therein is the secret sauce that separates the average local marketer from the extraordinary.

As George Mulhern so eloquently stated in the October 14th webinar, Practical Practices for Increasing Channel Revenue Through marketing, smart marketers control each "moment of truth" or touch point with a customer or prospect. Done manually, control is almost impossible. Done using Balihoo's ad builder, marketers become Brand Super Heroes with extraordinary control of execution of their branded advertising through downstream partners.

I hosted a great panel discussion Thursday, the 14th with three talented marketers representing an interesting variety of channel marketing experience. If you missed the live webinar, you are in luck. You can still watch the on-demand presentation, Practical Practices for Increasing Channel Revenue Through marketing.

Here is a synposis of what was covered.

George Mulhern discussed HP's dominance over Dell in the printer business, attributing much of that success to HP's incredible ability to market and sell through its robust network of international channel partners.

George also drove home the point that for brands to successfully sell through the channel, they must control each "moment of truth," or touch point a partner has with a customer on the brand's behalf. In his material, he also discussed the five channel strengths and three proven practices to increase the effectiveness of channel partners.


Shane Vaughan discussed ten challenges common to most brand channel marketers as well as five fixes (four easy and one not-so-easy) that brands can employ to empower their channels to be more effective. His tactical suggestions included:

1. Providing strategic local marketing planning for your local resellers.
2. Employing microsites, a co-branded web-presence for each reseller.
3. Making available a robust ad-builder in addition to effective local demand-generation creative.
4. Enabling channel partners to execute and track their local marketing.
5. Using a co-op administration tool to increase usage and effectiveness of co-op advertising.

Steve Rogal extracted lessons learned and models used from more than 20 years of channel marketing experience.

Included in his material, Steve shared his "Critical Success Factors," a partner model that he developed to evaluate and improve a partners' marketing and selling. Such analysis will allow brands to refocus their resources on the right partners.

Steve rounded out his comments by discussing six specific criteria for identifying a "good" dealer.

We are gearing up to host another marketing webinar the first part of December. Stay tuned.

Things are shaping up very nicely for our Thursday webinar, Practical Practices for Increasing  Channel Revenue Through Marketing. After a dry run of the presentation today, I was impressed with a few items that came out of the discussion:

1. Channel Marketing is hard—and in spite of the webinar title—requires much more than marketing alone.
2. Brands that are effective channel marketers are able to position partners as an extension of their sales/marketing organizations. This seems obvious at first glance, but corporate policies and procedures often create ‘them vs. us’ tension.
3. The challenging economy has had a big impact on the small business resellers who make up most brand’s channels.

Join us for the discussion and drop me a line if you want the panel to address your questions.

How valuable are channel partners in your business?

The question came out of a great conversation with Steve Rogal, a panelist in Balihoo's upcoming October 14th webinar, Practical Practices for Increasing Channel Revenue Through Marketing.

Steve Rogal, Senior Manager in charge of Channel Marketing and Lead Management for Masco Cabinetry shared insight into his company's channel partner relationships.

Masco is a B2B2C manufacturer, and for them, channel marketing is about a lot more than marketing.

In his specific example, Masco may sell $5,000 of cabinets to a customer, but as Steve put it, no consumer goes out to buy just cabinets. Instead, they buy a $50,000 kitchen remodel and they get that from a kitchen contractor that provides the customer with cabinet, counter top, fixture, lighting, paint, flooring, appliance, and hardware options.

Steve continued to relate the challenges working with partners. While their partners are typically great craftsmen and women, they are often unsophisticated in other parts of their businesses including marketing, finance, hiring, and sales.

The picture Steve painted made me realize just how dependent his piece of that $50,000 sale was to the partner who must successfully:

1. Drive demand to the show room
2. Design the perfect kitchen
3. Close the sale
4. Manage the installation and
5. Provide customer service

Steve made the point that Masco's brand reputation is linked to that customer's experience with that partner. Steve, and his channel marketing peers at Masco are not only marketers, they are small business coaches providing strategic, and tactical guidance to their partners for the collective good of both parties.

Exciting for you and me, we'll be able to hear more from Steve and a panel of other experts at Balihoo's October 14th Webinar, Practical Practices for Increasing Channel Revenue Through Marketing. You'll want to join. They will share insightful tips about the solutions that you can employ to help your channel partners be successful.

Wednesday morning’s WSJ article, Fed Hints at Move to Boost Recovery is welcome news for many franchise owners and franchise marketing professionals. The news comes on the heels of IFA’s September 16th press release announcing that, "After nearly two years of intensive lobbying by members of the International Franchise Association, franchise businesses are closer to improved credit availability with the passage of a provision by the Senate that increases the Small Business Administration’s loan limits from $2 million to $5 million."

The press release links to a compelling story of Pat Luers of Centerville, Ohio, who opened his first BrightStar a year ago. After creating 40 new jobs, he hopes to expand, but not without a line of credit from the SBA.

These two points of news give me plenty of hope for a continued recovery from The Great Recession, albeit a recovery unlike the pre-2007 consumption economy. ConAgra’s CEO, Gary Rodkin, said it best in a conference call to investors rationalizing a 12% fiscal first-quarter earnings fall by describing the new consumer landscape saying that, "The strong, deal-seeking mindset consumers developed earlier in the recession has become the new normal. As consumers continue to tighten their purse strings and whittle down their pantries, retailers and manufacturers have discounted more heavily to re-energize sales." So, with all this uncertainty, what is your perspective on the market for Franchises? I'd like to hear what you have to say. Drop me a note.

WEBINAR—On October 14th, at 2 pm EDT, Balihoo will be hosting a webinar discussing, Practical Practices for Increasing Channel Revenue Through Marketing.

In the wake of the economic downturn and slow, prolonged recovery, brand marketers are returning to the drawing board to figure out how to generate demand, and increased revenue. Long minimized as primarily order takers, a brand’s channel can be a powerful partner to generate demand.

Join George Mulhern, Principal at Highway 12 Ventures, and former Senior VP of Hewlett-Packard, Shane Vaughan, VP of Marketing at Balihoo, and Steve Rogal, Director of Dealer Development at Masco Retail Cabinet Group in a lively discussion of practical practices to increase channel revenue through tangible, easy-to-implement marketing tacts that will empower your channel.

If national brands had a local website, they would 'be available' in search results when their prospective customers searched locally. Instead—except for a few exceptions including auto retailers—I do not see reseller results associated with the national brands they sell.

My son likes DC Shoes and is in need of some new shoes, so I did a quick search on Google Maps for DC Shoes. Yes. I could buy these online, but I'm not sure of my kid's shoe size or ultimate size, so I want to  This was my result:


First of all, it is interesting to note that Zumiez—listed on the DC Shoes national site as there retailer in my local area—doesn’t even show up in my results.

Second, the DC Shoes national site doesn’t show up as a local organic result, and likely won’t based on Google’s introduction of Google Places, a strategy to make local search results more relevant surely based on sites listing local addresses.

Immediately I notice "DC" is listed in the Journey description, so I click on that store. In this instance, I see a rotating DC Shoes ad on their home page. Good for DC Shoes. If I am determined to buy DC Shoes. I’ll go to their store and pick up some shoes.

However, if I am on the fence, Journeys gives me a variety of other shoe options to consider, and I might be persuaded, which would be a shame for DC Shoes who had my attention.

Now consider this. If DC Shoes employed Balihoo Microsites, they could have a 4-5 page web site for every one of their thousands of resellers. This sounds like a great undertaking, but in reality, it would be straight forward. Using Balihoo, they set up the master site template, decide what content is locked down and what is editable by their resellers and then push the template out to resellers with step-by-step instructions.

Next, they would inform their local resellers how to add their store location and web site to Google Places. Alternatively, if they were corporate owned stores, they would use Google Places Bulk Upload to load up to 10,000 locations at once.

In summary, a microsite strategy does several things for the DC Shoes brand:

1. Gives brands a local presence that will show up in local searches.
2. Allows brands to continue their influence further into the buyer consideration stages.
3. Through powerful web analytics, brands would have insight insight into consumer search behavior for individual stores, regions and in a variety of aggregates regionally, nationally and internationally.
4. Becomes a platform for a variety of interesting things (local consumer loyalty efforts, local promotions, lead generation).

Brands that adopt this strategy have a first mover’s advantage against competitors. As an example, consider Old Navy’s advantage jumping on with Groupon. Similarly, a brand that jumps on board with Balihoo Microsites, could roll out this strategy to all their reseller sites and be at the leading edge of increased consumer trends to search locally.

You’ve heard it a thousand times: Empower Your Channel to Grow Sales.

Sounds good, right?

Problem is that empowering your channel has always meant hiring more sales people who struggle to control the loose ends. It turns out that implementing channel marketing automation technology is a cost effective approach that will provide a tangible return on investment.

Reality

A recent call with a prospect illustrates the situation. Half of this prospect’s sales come from Group A, a handful of large, national B2C buyers with thousands of local stores. The other half of sales come from Group B, consisting of thousands of local and regional distributors with 1-5 locations. Logically, this marketer focuses the majority of his resources on the handful of big buyers who drive sales quotas.

The irony, while Group A does drive tremendous volume, and total sales, their fixation on price drives profit out of each transaction, resulting in commoditized products. In stark contrast, Group B tends to be very loyal, strong brand advocates, and more profitable (considering the very small amount spent on them currently). So the prospect neglects Group B.

Sadly, this is an all too common problem. Gerald Murray, Research Manager with IDC, recently released a study of channel marketing for large IT companies stating that, on average the IT company participants in his study have 19,000 inactive partners. Beyond IT, the problem pervades other industry sectors.

Solution

How then can the prospect cost effectively drive sales through the more profitable Group B? It turns out that hiring more people is not the solution. The increased human capital costs would outweigh the subsequent sales increase. The opportunity then must lie in the use of technology.

Murray from IDC tends to agree, though his solution is to implement partner relationship management (PRM) tools, though I don’t think that fundamentally tackles the channel marketing problems. Instead, I think a local marketing automation (LMA) platform includes the full suite of tools to solve channel problems. Also based on technology, it focuses on empowering the local channel reseller, a distinct difference from PRM tools that focus on tools for a brand’s channel marketing/sales organizations.

The LMA solution is scalable, cost effective, and ultimately places emphasis on local store marketing execution, a movement that is much more than a trend. To understand this as a solution, one must consider the MARKETING problems a channel faces: 

1. Marketing Materials - Access and ability to customize proven, professionally designed, and nationally branded creative assets.
2. Advertising Funds - Traditionally administered as a co-op marketing solution, national advertising dollars are a lifeline to the small marketing budgets of local channel resellers.
3. Strategy - Local channel resellers typically don’t have the training, experience, or attention to develop, implement and execute effective cross-medium local marketing.
4. Execution - Local marketing requires knowledge of effective branding across multiple mediums.

What do you think? Are these the problems your channel faces?

Balihoo was recognized this morning as the #401 fastest growing company in the Inc. 500 list. It is an incredible accomplishment and as Pete, our CEO, stated in the company's official press release, this "validates both our vision, and effort to deliver superior solutions and customer service" for a growing list of national brand clients.

Congratulations to all Balihooers who have been a part of the effort since 2006.

In the last few years, Balihoo has served a growing list of national brand clients. The attention that has been given to our ‘local marketing automation’ platform has caused me to reflect on five signs that ‘Local Marketing’ is much more than a trend:

1. ‘Local Marketing’ Search Volume is Dramatically Growing—As a search term, ‘Local Marketing’ started growing in 2008 and has exploded in the last year, according to Google trends. Variations of this term have seen a similar explosion in growth. Balihoo coined the term ‘local marketing automation’ and owns that space as evidenced by it owning the top three Google search results.
2. Analysts' Increased Attention—Analysts like Forrester and BIA/Kelsey are giving increased attention to local marketing, local search and now ‘hyperlocal’ media trends.
   
   1. A recent Forrester “Distributed Marketing” report illustrates the ‘local marketing’ challenges. It was music to my ears and I was glad to see Balihoo was included as a vendor solution, although sad that Forrester didn’t give more attention to define the integrated approach Balihoo employs to combine ad building, co-op management and execution across all mediums. That approach is how we are changing the rules of the game. Seriously, a 30-minute demonstration will prove my point.
   2. A review of BIA/Kelsey blog posts illustrates the growing interest in local, hyperlocal and geo-targeting topics.
3. Steady Saturation of Mobile—the ubiquitous adoption of mobile phones has changed how brands can “connect” with consumers.
   
   1. Texting was slow to take off, but according to CTIA, the Wireless Industry Association, in ’09, 152B SMS text messages were sent monthly, up from 9.8B in 2005.
   2. According to the Pew Research, adult cell phone ownership has gone from 65% to 83% between ’04 and ’09 and 93% of 18-29 year-old adults and 75% of 12-17 year-old teens have cell phones.
   3. Smartphones and mobile devices--with the launch and adoption of the iPad and Kindle platforms-- are fueling a revolution in mobile computing.
4. Meteoric Adoption of social platforms and geo-location tools—Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter’s meteoric rise along with other evolving geo-location based tools like Yelp, Foursquare, and Groupon are changing the way consumers consume and share information. It presents huge opportunities and challenges for marketers.
5. Increased Acquisition/IPO Activity—The last few months have resulted in some interesting acquisition/IPO activity that affects local marketers including IBM’s announcement to acquire Unica, and ReachLocal’s $54 Million IPO. Other activity includes Yelp’s Rejection of Google’s $500 Million offer, Google’s subsequent launch of Google Places, and Facebook's announcement today of its geo-location solution, Facebook's Places.

So what does this all mean for national brands?

First, it means every national brand needs to have a local marketing strategy. What is yours?

Second, as stated in the Forrester research, local marketing is very difficult. That is where Balihoo comes in--pardon the quick plug. We have the best tools available for ad-creation, asset management, co-op advertising administration, media planning, microsite creation, and execution across all mediums including social. In addition, Balihoo has an incredible CEO, management team, and board of directors that understand Balihoo's opportunity to revolutionize local marketing.

Pete Gombert said it almost as good as Bob Dylan sang it, that Times They Are a Changin' and all signs indicate that 'Local Marketing' is much more than a trend. It may be a revolution.