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 BRANDS 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 CONCLUSION4 EXERCISE: DETERMINING BRAND PERFORMANCE AT THE LOCAL LEVEL 5 WORKSHEET: DETERMINE YOUR BRANDS 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 arent 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 brands 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, its 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, its 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 brands 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 brands 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, theyre 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 Webs 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 brands corporate website, carrying through the brands 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, its 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 brands 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 brands 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 Balihoos whitepaperThe LocalWeb:The Linchpin to Successful Local Marketingexplains 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 resellers 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 manufacturers 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 competitors 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 its 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 regions local presence. Then, using automation, its possible to launch hundreds or even thousands of sites simultaneously. When its 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 brands 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 brands 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 onPage Oneof 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, well use a Converse brand,Chuck Taylors,as the brand, andbasketball shoesas the product category were 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 BrandOwns or Influences Your BrandResults 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 BrandOwns or Influences Your BrandResults 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. Its 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 BrandOwns or Influences Your BrandResults 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 BRANDS 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 forChuck Taylor,Converse Chuck Taylor, Converse,Jack PurcellandConverse 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 brands 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 brands 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 BrandOwns or Influences Your BrandResults 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 BrandOwns or Influence Your BrandResults 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 BrandOwns or Influence Your BrandResults 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 BrandOwns or Influence Your BrandResults 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 BRANDS 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. 2014 Balihoo, Inc. All rights reserved. @balihoo balihoo.com sales@balihoo.com 866-446-9914