Try this local marketing automation test:  

Pick your favorite search engine, and search for the name of your national brand.  

Assuming you've done a good job at your national marketing efforts, when you look at the real estate on this page, the "good" content about your brand should represent greater than 50% of the links (both paid and natural) on this page.  A job well done!  

Now the fun part - search again for your national brand, but add-in any geographic modifier.   For example, "brand" Los Angeles or "brand" Chicago.  In most cases, you will see your ownership of the real estate on this page drop dramatically.  Additionally, clicking-through to any of the search results will typically give you either: 

1. Online, discount resellers who represent a small portion of your sales and/or profit.  Or
2. Local resellers with websites that are very poor and/or promote your competitors products 

It gets worse when you go beyond your brand and into a general category search.  If you are a major manufacturer of Kitchen Cabinets, it's likely that you own that search term at the national level.  However, again, if you add a geographic modifier to the search, odds are that you and your key resellers/distributors are nowhere to be found.  

Interestingly, when you consider the "intent" of the imaginary potential customer executing these searches, you can assume that the searcher that added the geographical modifier was further down the purchase cycle.  They are giving off significant buying signals, but the lack of a local internet marketing strategy is not allowing them to fulfill that demand (that you likely drove with your national marketing efforts).  

My point is this:  Without an effective local marketing strategy, you are driving significant demand at the local level but you don't have the tools in place to capitalize on that demand.  Your national budget that is used to drive demand is incredibly inefficient if you're not covering the local base - the "last-mile" of marketing.  

Local Marketing Automation can help - let us give you a demo of our local marketing automation software to show you how.   Regardless of whether you use Balihoo to fulfill this need or not - it's critical that you first acknowledge the need and then put the tools in place to effectively address it.