21 February 2024
Sauce Advertising MD, Shaun McEwan, shares his vision for 2024 and lets you in on some of his tips and tricks for LOCAL MARKETING
Last year marked a significant milestone for Sauce Advertising as we celebrated our 35th anniversary. We’re heading into 2024 ensuring we remain relevant, innovative, and futureproofed for the next 35 years.
For us the focus going forward, is to continue revolutionising the way brands connect with their local communities. Our approach of connecting people, disciplines, and technologies in innovative ways has brought us this far and has fortified us for the future. The advances we’ve made in the local marketing space are unmatched and more exciting developments are on the horizon. Our success is underpinned by one of our core values, which is creativity and in our book that has always equalled innovation.
Why locality marketing matters
But why focus on a brand’s local presence, especially if it’s a national brand? Because even national brands are ultimately local. They live in consumers’ neighbourhoods, on their commute to work, and get delivered to their doorsteps. And the need states across these communities differ, meaning one piece of marketing communication won’t fit all. For example: Hamburgers might be popular in one community and Chicken Burgers in another, and if you’re selling both it only makes sense to push the relevant product where you know it’ll resonate. This insights-driven, personalised approach impacts the bottom line and we’ve seen sales increase threefold.
Also, your approach obviously needs to be digitally focused because that’s where your audience lives. Over 80% of all purchases begin with an online search and with our focus on unbranded search, we’re finding the customers you don’t have.
Bringing it home with YEXT
But how do you apply this approach to big brands that have multiple outlets, in multiple communities across all nine regions? Through our YEXT connection, Sauce can manage thousands of digital touchpoints across multiple countries and from 1 dashboard. We are also able to monitor and manage the reviews for every outlet, which is vital, because ultimately, we all read the reviews before purchasing anything.
What really sets the Sauce approach apart is that we’re able to create and manage a digital presence for every outlet, which includes a digital web storefront and social media presence and again, they’re easily managed from the same dashboard.
Personalising locality marketing
content with AI
Creating personalised content for each community is undoubtedly the biggest challenge and requires considerable resources. But even here we’ve found an innovative solution. Through the power of YEXT we’ll soon be able to do this with a custom-made AI system that’ll be able to generate long-form content pieces in a matter of seconds.
There’s a lot of fear around the use of AI, as it might infringe on copyright laws by producing content that resembles existing work. The AI we use, however, is a closed system that is informed by its very own knowledge graph. The content we’ll be producing will be uniquely our own and completely ownable by the brand.
Curiosity is another one of our core values, which means this is only the beginning. We’re already exploring new ways to better connect brands to their local communities and always in ways that resonate. That’s how we shift brands and that’s how we’ve done it for 35 years.
