This is the third post in my series called Local Marketing Mondays. The first post covered Education and the second focused on Great Creative. This post will cover the topic of providing guidance to local marketers.

Guidance is a tricky subject because knowing what to do and when to do it is a tremendously difficult task when it comes to local marketing. However, with the correct approach this becomes a much less daunting task, and can deliver amazing value to your local affiliates.

Guidance can be best described as providing signposts that help your affiliates to navigate through difficult situations. This is different from providing education which I covered in an earlier post.

Think of it this way; if you were to spend a bunch of time training a new accountant, they should come out of that educational process knowing the basic rules, and technically how to enter the appropriate credits and debits into the accounting system. Now, imagine a difficult situation arises which falls into one of the many gray areas in accounting principles, say revenue recognition. This newly minted accountant could really use some guidance on how to best handle the situation. Typically guidance will come in the form of a mentor who has been through this type of situation in the past. The guidance should not provide the new accountant with the exact answer, but it should give them a direction to head with an increased sense of confidence.

That is the critical take away from this post - guidance should provide a direction and confidence, not the answer.

If you focus on implementing a guidance system that answers local marketing problems, you will fail. There are too many intricacies and circumstances that influence the right answer, and often there is more than one correct answer.

There are a couple of different approaches to providing this level of guidance:

1. A services-based approach which leverages a team of knowledgeable and experienced marketers who are available for consultation. This type of service can be difficult and expensive to maintain, but will most likely provide the best experience for your affiliates.
2. An automated system which allows the affiliate to enter the circumstances they are dealing with, and then responds with the appropriate guidance. These automated solutions are also expensive to invest in initially, but have a lower cost of ongoing maintenance over time. The downside to an automated system is that the information tends to be more generic in nature, and not quite as helpful.

Both approaches can be implemented either internally or through a third party vendor or system. The important thing to do is to ensure that you are very thoughtful about the level of guidance you are looking to implement, and the type of user experience you would like your affiliates to have. Just remember, in the end, you are looking to provide guidance, not the answer.