How to build a strategy for local marketing into 2025

Table of Contents

• Takeaways from the session
  • • 1. The Value of Local Marketing
    • 2. Freedom Within a Framework
    • 3. Planfulness and Alignment
    • 4. Audience-Centric Activations
    • 5. Challenges to Avoid
    • 6. Insights for Scaling
    • 7. Lessons from Successes and Failures
    • 8. Audience Engagement and Research
    • 9. Tactical Best Practices
    • 10. Community-Driven Innovations
  • Summary
• Transcript (AI generated so may contain errors)

Takeaways from the session

1. The Value of Local Marketing

• Local marketing is strategic, not just a tactical afterthought. It involves community-driven, authentic, hyper-local experiences that often require inverting the traditional top-down approach to strategy.
• A great local marketing strategy can strengthen brand resilience, foster community connections, and generate long-term loyalty.

2. Freedom Within a Framework

• Building a local marketing playbook allows for scalable yet flexible execution. This framework ensures consistency while allowing individual sites or areas the freedom to adapt to their specific audience or community needs.

3. Planfulness and Alignment

• Effective local marketing requires rigorous planning and alignment with broader national strategies. Synchronised efforts between local and national marketing prevent fragmentation and optimise resource use.

4. Audience-Centric Activations

• Understanding the unique cultural, geographical, and social nuances of a local area is essential. This includes tailoring tactics like advertising, activations, and messaging to the hyper-local context.
• Examples included the Papa John’s bike seat covers in Cambridge and Oxford, and mapping local dog-walking routes for a vet practice.

5. Challenges to Avoid

• Avoid “performative localism,” where actions are designed for social media optics rather than genuine community connection.
• Ensure materials and campaigns reflect sustainability and align with brand values to avoid alienating the audience.
• Don’t over-complicate ideation. Establish and test strategies promptly instead of endless brainstorming.

6. Insights for Scaling

• Local marketing can be the foundation for broader strategies. When scaling, maintaining the authenticity of localised elements is critical to avoid losing the community-focused essence.

7. Lessons from Successes and Failures

• Successes often stem from authentic, community-first approaches that resonate deeply with local audiences.
• Failures frequently involve poor planning, inauthentic execution, or lack of alignment between local and national campaigns.

8. Audience Engagement and Research

• Building a strategy starts with a deep understanding of local audiences through market research, observation, and engagement. Questions like “What are the key moments in the local community?” or “What unique cultural elements define this area?” are crucial.

9. Tactical Best Practices

• Use meaningful advertising channels (e.g., PPC, geotargeted social media) with hyper-localised creative elements.
• Prioritise alignment with local events, school holidays, or recurring community moments (e.g., Parkrun).
• Invest in sustainable, impactful, and measurable activation materials.

10. Community-Driven Innovations

• The rise of user-generated content platforms, like the one described by James Watt, demonstrates how empowering communities to create authentic brand content can enhance local campaigns.

Summary

Local marketing requires a strategic, planful approach that prioritises authentic, community-driven engagement. By creating frameworks that allow for scalability and tailoring strategies to hyper-local nuances, marketers can build resilient, connected brands. Success depends on alignment, consistent execution, and a genuine commitment to understanding and serving local communities.

Transcript (AI generated so may contain errors)

Speaker 1: Hello lovely humans, I hope you’re doing good. It’s so lovely to see you. As I’ve seen Lauren in the chat already saying, the weekly joe bop is back, you know, and so I had to add that little screen down the bottom just to reinstate the weekly bop. So thank you all so much for being here today. You’re all absolute heroes. It’s just, it’s just so lovely. If you haven’t already, do pop it in the chat feature where you’re watching from, just like Annette, Rose, Ted, Michael Jr. already have. And if you don’t mind, I’d love to give you the challenge of popping an emoji to symbolise your vibes today. Let’s just go for vibes and see how how you’re all doing. So hello to Glenn, Julianne, Adam, Joanne, Michael, Rose with the mind being blown. I think that’s a really, really great start. Today we have just an absolute legend joining us in Louise Cook. Now Louise, it’s such a nice story because to be honest, most of the time we spend our time sort of finding great speakers for you every week. But on this occasion, Louise got in touch and said, look, I’ve got this idea for a chat. What should we do? And it was so compelling that we didn’t break a rule because we do do it from time to time. But we did a rare thing, which we said, you know what, Louise, you seem wicked. Let’s have a chat. And so the thing that we’re going to chat about today is local marketing and how we can get strategic with it. And I just I just love it because I don’t think it’s something that we speak about enough in sort of like marketing discourse. But inevitably, it’s something that so many of us are actually doing. And so to actually focus on this, I think is really, really important. Let’s just pick up some of the emojis. We’ve got Kieran with the penguin coming in strong. We’ve got Georgia with the Christmas tree. Emma, I hope you’re feeling OK with the face mask and Caitlin with the freezing. I have been turning my temperature up today because likewise, I’m a bit ill, a little bit cold. So, you know, we’re in it together. We’re in it together today. If you have questions as we go throughout today’s session, do pop them into the Q&A feature that’s found down below. And let’s before we get started, just say a big, big thank you to our featured sponsor this week, ScoreApp. Now, ScoreApp are a quiz building platform built specifically for marketers. And what they help you do is increase your lead gen through your website by allowing you to create compelling quizzes. And to demonstrate just that right now on the QR code on your screen, you’ve got the marketing Zodiac quiz, which they’ve developed for us, which is a little bit of fun. But this little opportunity just to find out your most marketing Zodiac and see ScoreApp in action. We had Daniel Priestley, their founder, on a couple of weeks ago and the community really loved it. So hopefully you’ll really appreciate them too. We’ve got Drea saying, I’m a chameleon, which I think I got too. Also, a big thank you to Frontify, Exclaimer, Cambridge Marketing College, Plannable, Redgate and Storyblock. We’ll speak about more of those on rotation as we go throughout the rest of the weeks in our final webinar of the year next week. So introduction done. Louise, I’m just so excited to have you here because even in the 10 minutes that we were chatting before, you just lifted me. So thank you. I guess the best way to introduce you to the community is just to ask you to introduce yourself a little bit and give a bit of background to yourself and why you ended up caring about local marketing specifically.

Speaker 2: Brilliant. Thanks, Jo. It’s such a pleasure to be here and thanks everyone who’s dialed in. Everyone’s got sunny weather. I’m very jealous. It’s very grey and overcast here, so very chilly as well. But yeah, to kick off, so yes, I’m Louise Cook. I’m a director at Louise Cook Consultancy, which I recently set up. So I’ve spent 13 years in consumer marketing, so working with some really, really brilliant brands. And as Jo said, through that time, it’s absolutely brought my passion for local marketing to the forefront. So I worked with Papa John’s for a number of years, who, of course, are a franchise. And then I also spent time working with Vets for Pets, who are a joint venture business, so a slightly different business model, but again, really focused on the individual business owner. And then lastly, I spent working into Pets Home, which is obviously a really large business, it’s a FTSE 250. And that role was a much broader, integrated role, looking after all their in-store marketing, plus all the services they offered, and really finding that way to make that omnichannel and holistic experience the best it could be for the customer and the client. So that was a real challenge, which we will come on to later, about how you deliver something really meaningful when you’re part of such a large juggernaut business. But reversing back to that time I spent with franchisees and joint venture partners, it was such a privilege working with hundreds and hundreds of different business owners. And they’d all have invested different amounts of money, and they’d want different things from the businesses, and the business would be performing in different ways. And it was just a real privilege to be part of their business journey and really understand that every pound they spent meant something to them, it meant a difference on whether their kids could go to university or not. And I think through that journey, I saw the real power of amazing local marketing. And it’s so exciting to be able to talk about it today, because it is a strategic decision, how you do your local marketing. So yeah, I’m really excited to discuss that with Joe and have some great questions from you guys. And yeah, leave you with some great ideas.

Speaker 1: That’s wicked. I love it. I mean, there is already so much to dive into, because like when you’re speaking to hundreds of people and to understand hundreds of businesses at once, that is wild as a challenge. But maybe we start off by defining local marketing. So everyone’s sort of on the on the same page. So when you start speaking about this, what do you mean?

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Yes, it’s a really interesting distinction. So the way that I consider local marketing is, it can be really defined also by community and hyper local authentic experience. And I think the role and narrative of what local marketing has massively changed. And I think that’s interesting in itself. 10 years ago, local marketing was probably just demographic based or geolocation targeting. And you could argue as a business, oh, we have a local marketing strategy because we target our advertising in a hyper local manner. And that’s really kind of the crux, I guess, of the conversation about how local marketing can be strategic, not to necessarily jump to the point. I think there’s two schools of thought. And for me, it’s the discussion that local marketing can be your whole strategy. So if you think about the pyramid, if you like, really simple marketing, you can have your big national reach at the top. And then you could decide to take your strategy, your national strategy and plug it in locally. You could argue that is local marketing. It’s very tactical. We can definitely discuss that later. And there are real benefits for some businesses doing that. My real passion and what I believe is so important for F125 and moving forward, especially in this world where community is everything, is really challenging yourself to build your strategy bottom up. So let’s use one example. You could be a multi site retail. You could be a startup. You could be a service level business. And you don’t need a national strategy by building those hyper local pods and hubs, both in your communication content, targeting your knowledge as some of its parts becomes the strategy. So you really invert the pyramid. And I think I’ve seen what I have seen some real successes from businesses just being really bold, structuring themselves differently and inverting the pyramid. So, yeah, that’s that’s yeah, that’s my position on local marketing absolutely is a strategic decision. It doesn’t just have to be a tactical activation.

Speaker 1: Nice. I love that. And so I guess the obvious following question to that, then, is how do you start making the choice to go local versus national? Because if it is a strategic decision,

Speaker 2: then there’s a there’s a choice to be made. Yeah, yeah, 100 percent. And I think I think something that’s got to come from within your business or you as a marketeer and likely to be the consumer lead in the room, if you’re if you’re in that style of business, I think you’ve got to champion it and really think about it from the end, because truly, it’s probably going to need your whole business to billboard if you want to have a real local marketing led strategy. You know, it might define what agencies you work with. Agencies are brilliant, but their model, you cannot deliver hyperlocal pay digital through an agency. So you might have to have an in-house person. So I think number one is considering what’s your role within the business? What’s your position of influence? Where’s your business at in terms of change? If you’re a startup and you’re growing, you know, have those strategic conversations now, you have embedded everything in, you’re a super established FTSE 250. We need to think about that. And then, yeah, on the and then on the other side, on different schools of thought, the way you can do it can be can be completely different. You can have an existing broad national strategy that’s super embedded. And there might be people on this call thinking, well, you know, how am I going to make a difference? And it’s really thinking about your sphere of influence. You can position local marketing within whatever part of that marketing team you’re you’re in. And maybe we get onto looking at what that looks like further down the line. But you can look at it either way. And it shouldn’t just be reason to say, well, I’ve got less money, so therefore we have to be localized. I think businesses with millions of pounds of investment, you can invest it really effectively in a hyperlocal, targeted, targeted manner. It’s the best way to spend your money and it’s the best the best way to deliver great communications as well.

Speaker 1: Love that. You know, I mean, we can see it day to day, right? You know, and it’s stuff that doesn’t necessarily always feel particularly fancy. And I’m speaking about the tactical implementation here rather than necessarily strategic decision. But we see the output of it sometimes through stuff like, I don’t know, flyering or, you know, you know, small signs on roundabouts or whatever it may be, you know, this kind of stuff. But it’s, you know, until until you’ve made a decision to focus on these things, then they can feel trivial or tactical or whatever it may be. So it’s well, exactly. And I think I don’t

Speaker 2: know if there’s any girls on the call, but there was a, again, probably sitting in the kind of tactical space, but you can reverse engineer it back to go, well, actually, that could be a strategic decision. So they, I don’t know if it was recently, they opened a store, they were refitting store and press switch and they missed the T at the word press switch. And I think it’s a massive face palm moment. I know it was an incredibly strategic moment, but I think it was a face palm moment. We go, oh, my goodness, like that is Joe, you and I were joking previously, where one more person comes to me with a tagline says we’re in the heart of the community. You have to show people you’re at the heart of the community. You can’t just say that. And this example of Gail’s where they spelt the name of the town wrong. You know, there’s nothing localized or personalized about that marketing approach. It was literally a plug and play rollout final. And the irony is that actually the response came through from someone on LinkedIn to say you’ve missed out the T as in letter T. You should give everyone a press switch a free T as in cup of tea. And Gail’s responded to that and turned that into an activation and that’s become a local execution. And I think what’s interesting is if you reverse engineer that backwards, the engagement they’ve now got from the local space, the way they’re able to target their messaging. Imagine if that had been the strategy not to make the mistake in the first place. You know, think of the cut through, the impact, whereas actually potentially someone in head office has gone let’s roll out this creative design and let’s plonk in the name of the location. That could be our local approach. But actually, yeah, exactly. Just having that. Really, what does it mean in a local space? Maybe the press switch was the wrong word. Maybe they’re in an area that’s known locally as something else. And there’s nothing less engaging to the local people to go, well, we don’t call ourselves press switch here. You know, you immediately stick out. So, yeah, you’ve got to be a bit brave, haven’t you? A bit gorilla.

Speaker 1: No, 100%. I think that was Claire Heverside who spoke recently at TMN Manchester, who did the post on LinkedIn about it. And they followed up with her. And it was, you know, as you say, whether or not it was strategic and they were just waiting for someone to notice, probably not. I’m sure, I mean, like in the chat, I mean, I’m sure everyone can relate to that feeling of getting a printed material made and then seeing a spelling mistake or something like that is just like the worst thing in the world. But like…

Speaker 2: But good on her for calling it out, you know, finding your way around it. And it’s that energy you need kind of back to that decision around having a local marketing strategy. Like that’s the energy you need in your business, really. And the mad thing with digital and Instagram and everything, you can have like a really smart exec just half a day, go research these areas, go and find out, come back with a really visual deck, tell us about what’s meaningful about this area before we go and open our location. That’s a really exciting piece of work to do. And you can see it all, you don’t have to drive around it necessarily.

Speaker 1: I love that point there. I mean, it starts with the questions, doesn’t it? And I guess there is a point or there’s a question to ask here, which is like, does a local marketing strategy look any different to you to say, for example, a national strategy, a generic marketing strategy? So I know you’ve done the mini MBA, but we’ll take anyone who hasn’t done the mini MBA on the journey with us as well, you know. And so Mark Ritson will speak about diagnosis, strategy and tactics. Diagnosis is understanding the local area. Strategy is saying who you’re targeting, the goals you want to achieve and the position you want to build. And then the tactics is saying this is how we’re going to reach them. So is there any nuance within a local marketing strategy when you are building them, which didn’t exist within that structure when it comes to sort of focusing specifically down?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Really good question. Yeah. And if anyone hasn’t done it, the mini marketing MBA is really good. It’s very, very good. So if anyone hasn’t done it, you should absolutely do it. Yeah. Look, strategy is strategy is strategy. And I think as a purist, you would argue that’s a challenge that you should be challenging to yourself, especially if you’re not necessarily super comfortable in local marketing or it’s something you perceive you’ve always previously understood. I think you have to challenge yourself to say, am I building a local strategy or am I building local tactical activations? Both are brilliant, but I think you just have to keep going round and round that circle because a strategy is a strategy exactly to your point. You know, thinking about how we’re going to segment your data and there are different things that are going to influence that. And I think it’s about just reverse engineering where you want to end up. And I think, you know, everyone will have a vision for that. If you co-found or own a business, you have a vision of what you want it to look like or if you own or look after a certain part of your marketing budget or area, you’ll have a vision of how you want your work to look like. And I think it’s reverse engineering that back. And I think that, look, on a really bad day, local marketing strategy, I’m going to say local marketing on a really bad day is someone who just doesn’t give up, I won’t swear, but someone who just doesn’t care. They go, wait, there’s great national strategy, but where’s the money? Higher up? Oh, yeah, we need to do some local stuff. We’ll just geotarget. We’ll pull down the same message or we’ll do X, Y, Z. Or then this next stage up, I’d argue, where you go, OK, we’ll just put the name with the location in there. And actually, if you’re putting all your thought and budget into this, how do I do broad reach? Kind of back to what is strategy? At the point you’re doing your segmentation, that’s, I think, where you have that challenging moment in your head where you’re like, who are we? And I think that comes back to what sort of business you are. I would argue, you know, I have a lot of background spent in service industry. Like I said, a lot of background looking for franchisees and doing venture partners, whether you’re dental, optics, cosmetics, veterinary, that service space, it lends itself to a hyper local strategy. I think the challenge is when you come to build the strategy, it can look a little bit different. And that’s by getting your businesses on board. But know that the back to your point, to kind of circle back to a strategy, a strategy, a strategy. I think not many people are bold enough to start with hyper local from day one. And I think when you get to that kind of segmentation point, it will take you on your journey. And, you know, like keep going round it when you get to the end of your national strategy, you go, oh my God, we’ve only got £3.50 left to activate anything. Maybe you need to really look at it as a hyper local approach and build it as a sum of its parts. But my, again, my challenge and my warning on that would be, if you build it as individual pods, you must love those individual pods. Don’t get lazy or get sold apart by, I love agencies for certain things, but don’t get sold apart by an agency and you’ve got five now, well, it would be quicker if we did this or we optimised if we did this, like really hold your ground. And there’s lots of different ways you can look at the benefit of doing that, whether it’s through demographics or targeting or just digital advertising, you know, that is really where the value is coming from. And I think this is about innovating and being at the front and leading, being the disruptor, not being the disrupted. And therefore not many people are going to think about it these ways. But yeah, that would be, it’s strategy is strategy, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to keep moving around.

Speaker 1: I love it. Well, it’s so useful. And like, I guess speaking about strategy is strategy, then at least part of it is the market research phase, the diagnosis stuff. Do you, you know, looking back on your experience working with all these hundreds of businesses and stuff like that and trying to understand the locales and the cultures that exist in each of these hyper local areas, do you have any moments where you’ve been like, ah, that was a great question to ask, which has really helped me understand this local area a little bit more. Are there any sort of like tips that folks can look out for when starting to understand that specific location?

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Honestly, I think just, yeah, taking that time to, yeah, taking that time to care and it can be half a day. So there are certain things that I’ve done when I’ve been building those kind of hyper local strategies. And some of it’s when you’re looking at your annual calendar. So whether it’s what your, the KPI metrics are going to look like, whether it’s your sales curve, really understanding the shape of that and marketing, I’m sure we will agree needs to be part of that conversation, you know, really pushing into having those metrics. And I think from the local point of view, it’s about understanding the nuances and there are certain things I’d always look for. So service industries, again, dentist optics, et cetera, they’re normally fairly responsive to school holidays. So, for example, that’s a consumer mindset behavior. So specifically veterinary, you get to the beginning of the summer holidays, someone might get a dog. They’re thinking about, I don’t know, all my kids have just finished from school. There’s a little bit of an admin moment, but then basically everyone goes away during August. And unless you’re on holiday and you need an emergency dog, no one’s swapping vets, no one’s getting a dog. And then you get into that September phase and the end of holidays, everyone has that right, better get my haircut, better get the kids to the doctor’s, admin, admin, admin. And that’s really similar for like opticians or vets or dentists. And I think it’s understanding that localized consumer mindset. So one thing would be, you know, in your annual strategy, when you’ve got your big consumer moments that are happening in the space and how it’s affecting your media spend, and you’ve got your annualized priorities, when you’re starting to think about those localized moments, build in the school holidays, understand when the school holidays are in those areas, because especially, you know, and even if you’re running like a retail business, you’re working with pets at home, those summer holidays really affect the consumer mindset and they affect the mind of what the shopper’s looking for. And they, it affects probably who’s coming to the shop with them. So pets at home during the holidays, you see lots of people coming in with their kids and that’s a real opportunity to surprise diet, increase dwell time. That’s the opportunity to have your front row bays with your local products to really show your engagement with the community to authentically be pulling it through with your partners. So yeah, school holiday is absolutely something that I’d be pulling through. And I think there’s another piece when you’re looking at your kind of annual strategy, and you’re looking at those hyper local moments, you can’t, you cannot do everything and you have to have a formula like a hyper local strategy isn’t being obsessive about every single part, you’ll never scale it. So you have to find those few things that work for your business. So one might be holidays, one might be sport, local sporting moments, like Parkrun is brilliant. Like Parkrun works with so many businesses, you know, every Saturday, there are going to be a hub of local active influential people in one area who are all then going to come together and disperse. Oh my goodness, don’t create a moment, go to the moment in community, do some flowering, do some activations, create that as your rhythm within your, your plan. So you might have Parkrun, go to your holiday moments. And then there might be, you know, there are other things that you need to be aware of within certain environments that are really appropriate, and that are appropriate to this certain areas, different diversity, different holidays, different religions. But when you’re stepping into that space, you really have got to do it with a good origin story. Like I think I would put that as a word of caution, caution, thinking about something, if it’s not a true origin story to your business. But yeah, but back to what I was saying, you can’t do everything, you can’t have these absolutely hyper local, that’s like really the absolute cherry on the top of your strategy. But yeah, you can have two or three things that you’re going to roll out across your 50 sites that are your local strategy.

Speaker 1: Nice, I love that. Well, you know, it’s really, really interesting just to do that. And I guess you get that local sense from these moments, such as Parkrun. I mean, Parkrun, as you say, is such a brilliant organisation in that way. And but you can see how that does feel like local community in action. And so involving yourself, but I really appreciate you making the point about you have to understand the origin story at the end there, because we’re speaking about if we’re speaking about community, and hopefully, we know some things about community, then it has to come from that authentic place, you know, and it has to come from that place of like, you know, caring and being there and stuff like that. You can’t just show up and say, hey, we’re here because it didn’t mean anything, you know, but you know, and we care and it means an awful lot. And so do you have any, like, favourite examples from your career where you’ve done like a local marketing activation for one of them, a better phrase where you sort of showed up and you’re like, you know what, we really nailed that on a really local level. What would be your favourite thing?

Speaker 2: So, so I’ve got three, three thoughts. And do you know what, I actually don’t think we’ve nailed any of them. And I think that’s probably just my personality. But I just don’t think any of them I’m like, oh, I’ve really nailed it. And that’s, you know, marketers, we’re realists, right? You just don’t have the budget all the time or the passion to do everything you want to do. But there are there are three things that have kind of stood out. And then there’s one thing that I’m really chomping at the bit to try and I wonder if anyone’s tried. So we’ll throw that in at the end. So one of them was less hyperlocal and more building the brand into the space. So this was something we did with Papa John’s when we were thinking about opening a franchise. It’s not really that much of an emotional connection opening a Papa John’s. By God, I tried, but it’s not really, is it? So we were working at how could we really warm the audience up before we opened the outlet? We just, you know, rather than putting signs up, whatever. So we did something in Cambridge and Oxford, which are towns very close to our heart today, right? Which we optimised the all the bike parking outside of the train stations. We know they’re bike first cities. And we did some really lovely seat covers and something nice that went under the seat cover. And it was ideal. It was the day it was due to rain. We got the team out. They bike covered the whole park. So it was in this really strong Papa John’s red. There was some really pithy copy on it. And underneath it, I can’t remember, there was something like a discount code and some nice messaging around having a warm bun. And it visually looks really great. It was useful. And we chose a bike cover that was reusable and was easy to put back around again. So, yeah, that was a really strong activation. It felt really relevant to the local area. And then you could see that it lived on. You could see those seat covers in use. So that was really gorgeous. One of the examples is one that I didn’t do, but I really, I really, really wish I had done. It was for a company called Pizza Pilgrims. You have loads in London, but they were also opening one in Oxford. And I remember being really surprised that, again, their pre-launch approach, they were opening a store and their teams went out and honestly, they immersed themselves in the community. I didn’t even know there was a Pizza Pilgrims opening, but they were running the Oxford half and they were giving out pizza and they were sampling. And it was like 14 weeks out, 12 weeks out from the opening. So it felt so distanced from a sale that it felt really authentic. And the fact that they weren’t just sampling at the London half, they were running it. That’s really committed to the community, to run it and to sample the event. And that it was so far away that they were really, you call it dating the customer, right? You’ve got to date the customer before you get married to them. And they were clearly on that 14-week journey and they had these activations played out. And there are key moments that, you know, in towns are really meaningful to the community and sports moments are great for that. They like really bring the community, bring the community together. The third one quickly was something we did with Papa John’s in a collaboration with the vets where when we were launching one of the practices, instead of just kind of giving directions, it was in London, we’d found the best places for dogs to walk in the area. And we’d found like the ideal route if your dog was anxious and the best sniffing tree. And this is a great tree to go and have a wee on. It was this really lovely visual representation. I mean, on one hand, you could have gone, here’s our template for our local flyer. This is our location. Here’s our details. And on the other hand, we’re like, I don’t know, half a day’s work with a really exciting young exec, just getting on the internet, have a look, speak to their friends. And we created this really lovely, meaningful activation, which really showed we understood the area. And that lends itself to plus one social content and et cetera, et cetera. So that was a lovely one. And that leads me on to my final one. I really want to try it. I’m going to get the name of the business wrong, but James Watts just launched. Is it Social Tip? I think that’s it. His approach is that he just wants to change the face of user generated content and influences. So it’s about community led content. So as a brand, you can give whatever it’s like five thousand pounds, you would be giving to influencers on this platform and that will be dispersed to true. You know, it could be me, not me because my Instagram is terrible. It could be me on my account with my dog Petra or whatever. And I create an ad and I hashtag the brand in it. And they through that AI tech approve it and I get 50 quid from it. But, yeah, so I’m really I’m super interested to say it’s quite early stages, but I’m super interested to know if anyone’s tried that because it feels a really can be, again, community led way. Let let the community decide what content they make, who they respond to, you know, rather than you working out who’s best influencers are. So that’s quite a long answer.

Speaker 1: I love that. I think it’s, you know, I mean, we had a session a couple of weeks ago around influencer, influencer marketing in general, and, you know, sort of speaking to that trend of influencer marketing, where the conversation gravitated to like authenticity, people actually caring about it, all these these themes that are coming out in this conversation as well. When we’re sort of speaking about sort of reaching those people, what we’re speaking about is pillars of the community, right, people who come together and sort of show that they care about something and have a voice. And so I think this is really, really fabulous. And we are Vicky in the chat. He’s saying really great examples and insight and a big thank you. And we’ve got Alan also saying, I love pizza pilgrims that home cook, frying pan, home cook, frying pan. Pizza recipe is brilliant, especially when your nearest branch is 200 miles away. And I don’t think you get people using the word like love as Alan did in the comment here without sort of an understanding. Yes, A, the product is great, but also B, you know, that they’ve shown up in a specific way to recognise the brand and not just sort of say, oh, I really like this frying pan pizza.

Speaker 2: Yeah, becoming a true fan. Honestly, Alan, you would have made someone’s day at Pizza Pilgrims, build fans of customers, right? I think that was the founder of Metro Bank. But yeah, that’s it, isn’t it? And it makes you so resilient to PR, it means then you’re not competing against racing to the bottom of prices. Invest in community and that local strategy. It’s going to make you resilient in six months time when a competitor appears at the door.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Can I put a question to you from Cicely? He’s come through the chat feature, which I think might be a lovely way to sort of just ground this sort of first part of the conversation and what we reflected on and sort of work through it through your brain with the example that Cicely has given there. So the example is the insurance broker I work for wants to create a local strategy to increase our awareness and client base in the town we’re based in. So they’re asking for any advice on what you could do here. So what’s the starting point? So insurance broker, so possibly a bit B2B, want to do something more local. What’s your starting point when you start thinking about going local? And it will probably, I appreciate it will repeat some of the stuff that you’ve already spoken through, but it might just bring it together really nicely.

Speaker 2: Honestly, it’s so exciting. That is music. You can tell I’m passionate about it. It’s music to my ears. Like what a gift that an insurance broker wants to do that. Like A, how exciting and B, buying their hand off. That is brilliant. It is really relevant for B2B. A lot of my clients and customers are also B2B and I find them fascinating. They come on board and think, how is that going to be an exciting project? But it absolutely is. So if I was you, was it Cicely?

Speaker 1: I think so. I might have butchered the pronunciation, so I’m really sorry.

Speaker 2: Sorry if I’ve said that wrong. Sorry. But yeah, so if I was you, I would just do a really basic piece of work. I mean, you can sweat this through as long as you like, but the basic piece of work, I’d be really clear on your insurance brand’s mission statement and be really clear on those pillars that ladder up to it. What are those four or five things that lead up to your North Star? And you’re probably really clear on those from a national point of view. But then it helps you step underneath and go, what are the two or three things that give me the right to talk in that space? And the reason that’s quite important for the local marketing is exactly in this B2B space, you might have something on value and price and family run and whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah. And actually, when you do the next step, you go, well, have I got the right to talk about these elements? One, two, three. It will help you work out where your gaps are and it will help you challenge your insurance brand to go, guys, you are corporate and inaccessible and you make all these claims. You need to be X, Y and Z. So that’s a really good starting place because exactly the conversation we’ve been having, you can’t really be what you’re not. And you need to find out truly what you are, your origin story, your, all go on a journey to change those things. If you want to be able to say those things locally, to know who you are. And then the fast follower I do is do your annual plan, get to know that local area. What are the things that happen in the local area? What are the holidays? What are the events? What are the key media moments? Go and look at some brands that have done it really well, even if they’re not in your sector, right? Competitors are not competitors within the, within your, just your category. It’s what consumers spend their time consuming outside of the category, right? Amazon is everyone’s competitor, unfortunately. Everyone wants everything tomorrow. So do your annual plan, just a big old spreadsheet and then take that reflection back and go, can I even put anything together organically? You know, you’re a marketer, you’ll get excited about something, you’ll start seeing things be put together. And then from that, come up with like two or three things you’re going to stand beside. And then do that strategic piece, go back around in a circle and truly build a strategy and really challenge yourself not to get into tactical activation. The flip side of it is if they’re not going to give you the space to do it, just go back and make sure that your targeting is really great. That your messaging is really on brand, that you’re speaking locally. It’s not really to the heart of local strategy, but it will start you on that journey. So there you go, there’s three bullets.

Speaker 1: Nice. Thank you. And, you know, again, you know, maybe it’s the person I am, but I just really picked up on that first point. Again, you know, that sort of idea of being able to stand by the claims that you make and like the stuff around like, because a lot of more local businesses, whether or not they ladder up to the sort of national campaigns, but particularly if they’re just operating on that local area, you know, probably do have some really great claims to make, you know, for that local area. And so, you know, to back those up and sort of speak about them and then show up in that way as well.

Speaker 2: Well, they forget to say, and you’re absolutely right. Some of the guys in this call probably work for much smaller businesses. And oh, my goodness, so many of my clients, they talk to you and they just spend 10 minutes. They tell me about yourself and my jaw is just like, oh, my God, this is absolute gold dust. But they just think like it happens a lot in veterinary, like everyday excellence. They’re like, well, of course, I just did that. Of course, I worked out. I’ve also done this. You think, oh, my God, like it’s my job to tell your story. And I mean, then you understand what your your job is as a marketer right locally. But if you don’t have the stories, it’s some. Yeah. But, you know, you can do it. We tried it at Puppet Johns. It’s certainly easy when you’re working with puppies.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think. Yeah, I’m just going to agree with that. I have nothing to add. Let’s let’s sort of branch into the tactical stuff. So we’ve sort of spoken quite a lot strategically here. But I’d love to pick up on maybe even just debunking some of the stereotypes that exist around local marketing tactics. So we’ve already mentioned, you know, stuff like flyering. You’ve given some great examples with stuff like understanding Oxford and Cambridge. So you’ve got some covers made for bikes in areas where there’s lots of bikes. Do you have any fallbacks on tactical implementations when it comes to local marketing where you’re like, these are the tactics that I actually think are really effective when I have this local marketing mindset? And feel free to push back and go, hell no. You know, it’s got to be unique because that’s kind of the point. And so like, is there is there stuff that you found particularly effective that is worth checking out?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And I don’t think it should be unique. You know, my experience is is is scaling and rolling out brands and doing hyper local or local on scale and making it net international. So absolutely. I think if you get to a point where something is so niche and cottage industry and hyper local, that’s not strategic. That’s, you know, really take a step back and go, what am I doing? But you need to build something which is templated in it. And, you know, I call it the local playbook. What’s your local playbook? What’s your five pages? You’re going to roll it out. It’s got set areas. We’re going to be nuanced. So, yeah, 100 percent. There are channels, you know, it absolutely depends on the industry. But I think it comes back to like I was thinking about layers of layers of cake. Lovely thing to think about. So your bottom layer might be your PPC. So really making sure that those are appropriate for your local strategy. And it depends on your business. You know, a service business, you can really dial down on dentists near me X, Y and Z. But really understand what search volume is happening in that local area. And then as you build up, I think you then get to meaningful decisions around. OK, so I’m going to do some meta advertising. I’m going to geotarget in this way. But I’m really going to think about the coffee and the content. So this is where it comes back to. It’s a local strategy. If it’s a local strategy, you’re probably going to take your best form of organic content, which is probably created by one of your amazing fanatics, your customers, your clients. And you’re going to serve that as your your your meta top of funnel advertising. That’s probably what you’re going to do. And then you’re going to take your next level up. You get a bit more money and you go, OK, we’ll do a bit of out of home. OK, rather than picking a billboard, pick the most important bus stops in those areas and either put directional comms on it or really meaningful local communication on those areas. And then you kind of build up from there as you get a bit more money and a bit more money. And I think it’s only when you get to the real top area that you get those really hard to attributes. I’m not going to call it traditional because I think actually a lot of digital marketing is traditional now. But exactly what you’re talking about is kind of like flyering and ad hoc bits and pieces like that’s your real like very top bit. But you’ve got to have a really sensible, layered plan that you can run for an econometrics model. You’re being held to account like local marketing is not an excuse to kind of be lazy and go, well, when we just handed suppliers out, you still have to be able to measure it and it should be impactful. So, yeah, I think it’s similar channels that you use at a national scale. Thinking about how you do it hyper locally. And I think, again, anyone that works in cities or has got a national brand, they’re thinking about doing it. It’s fascinating. You know, the search volumes in Penrith, they used to joke like the only thing you have to do is spray paint a sheet. There’s nothing up there. There is no search volume. And then you get to London and you think, oh, my God, it is just absolutely stealing the share. You end up with a sort of donut around London. And, you know, that comes back again, full circle. You can’t have a hopper at the top of national budget if you’ve got 500 stores, because it’s just all going to go on Clapham and Reading. So, yeah, but to your point, absolutely. I think you have preferred channels. I think local marketing is still the super smart channels, but it’s challenging yourself not to just pick something because it’s a geotargeting approach. It’s got to all stack together and then do those lovely bits on the top, the bits on the top that feel really human, that you can touch and feel and are lovely, great. You’ve got to have your stack of accountability underneath. Absolutely.

Speaker 1: I love that. And, you know, I think it’s such a good call to action, really, in general, because I think I think sometimes there is that temptation to think we are a colloquial local business or, you know, we’re a small team or whatever it may be. And what I appreciate about your answer there is there is a core of, you know, just like solid marketing-ness. You know, it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing that campaign as one pod to use your language, you know, in one area only or 100 areas, you know. Yes, the flyering exists, but then, you know, there is a core of great marketing, which has to exist, even if it’s not rolled out nationally, even if it’s rolled out locally, which I think is so important. So I appreciate it because it’s easy to get lost sometimes because you’re probably going to be drawing on smaller numbers as well, presumably, where, you know, instead of a million people you’re reaching, you’re going to be reaching a thousand, but those thousand really matter in each area.

Speaker 2: Which exactly, honestly, like I, I didn’t experience this maybe 10, 12 years ago, whatever my role was, local marketing, X, Y, Z, whatever. And I remember the national marketer at the time saying to me in like a, I don’t know, maybe a bit of a condescending way, like, oh, yeah, I started in national marketing, but now I do TV. I remember thinking at the time, like, okay, well, maybe I’m never going to do TV. And I think actually when you kind of run up and down the ladder and you’ve sort of kind of done it all in your true marketing generalist, I think the world has turned. Like, we are not where we were 12 years ago, and exactly to your point, Sher, like, if you have local marketing in your title or you’re putting a local marketing strategy forward, it is not lesser, it is not secondary, like, you are as skilled and as accountable as any other marketer. If anything, you’re a better marketer because you can’t hide from anything. You’re creating a super exposed strategy, you know, and I think that’s, yeah, that will be my, I guess, gift of confidence to anyone that’s kind of in this local space. Like, you’re a brilliant marketer, like, it is not a lesser strategy, it’s more important. And brands, businesses that do this are going to survive the next five years. You know, post-COVID, it changed everything for brands. So, yeah, totally agree, Joe.

Speaker 1: Love it. We’ve got a question from Adam in the chat who asks, do you have any other examples of brands that you really, that you feel are really nailing things in their local community? And while I do that, because it’s always hard to give examples straight off the top of your head, so I’ll just read out a chat comment here that’s come from George. Because George says, Green King opened a new pub concept in a village in Buckinghamshire a couple of weeks ago. Had a lot of national interest and senior interest as it was an important new concept for the business. But they also took the time to do a soft launch evening for local people only. It was a huge success with the locals loving the event and loving the new concept. So, again, you know, just speaking to what you’ve been speaking to, Louise, here. A large organisation, but they’ve really taken the time to value and understand the locals, make it about the locals, and therefore it’s been a success. Do you have any other examples? Because they’re always hard in these situations where it’s like, do you have any examples? Yeah, do you have any examples?

Speaker 2: Do you know what’s really funny about the Green King comment? The marketing director and quite a lot of the team are ex-Papa John’s, and I think that says a lot. I’m so glad it’s a positive launch, but it kind of goes in your blood. I think you’ll find that people who work in franchise and multi-site, multi-site retail, multi-site pub, you have the same mindset. So, yeah, I’m so pleased that’s rolled out and it’s landed well. Great. I will drop them a note and let them know. Fabulous. Yeah, thank you for the time. I appreciate that. Do you know what? I’ve actually got probably a flip of the answer, which is quite unhelpful. Some examples of maybe brands that aren’t doing it very well. And I’m not going to call out the names, because this is about naming and shaming. I think, really think about your, there are some brands on social media, they’re doing quite a lot of guerrilla stunts where they kind of go around sticking up QR codes and driving people to the websites. And I think you need to think about that, that it’s maybe going to drive interest. Really check whether it’s in line with your brand recommendation. But it’s probably not going to convert anyone. And is it meaningful? So I think that kind of like I would challenge is that community or is that just generating content? So I think really, really think about that. I think there’s some really interesting content generating brands on social media where they’re creating content. And it’s not so close cut that you can’t see the context of where it’s filmed. But people want to see and feel themselves in the content. So my tip or advice would be going out and doing these Vox Pops or anything like that. They’re really popular. It’s great content at the moment on organic or paid channels. Do it in a space that the local people see and understand. Do it near a landmark or do it in a park that everyone understands. Don’t cut it in such a way that people can’t see the background environment to it. So no, that’s not a plethora of brilliant examples, but there are some great brands out there that are doing it. I think just really, again, back to that, is it strategy or is it tactical? There are some other brands that won’t be named in a retail space that are quite aggressive. They’re kind of chasers in the retail space and they’ve been quite aggressive against the leaders. And it’s kind of I just feel like these two brands are having like a bit of a fight and sending digital vans to each other’s retail parks. And I feel like consumers are just sitting back going, yeah, we don’t really care. Like that’s not really meaningful to us that you’ve parked a van in the local area. Yeah, you do. You guys just finish your argument and we’ll go and work out whether that’s consumer services. So I think, again, it’s like taking that step back and it’s almost local strategy, local tactical activation. And then you’ve got your local kind of guerrilla exciting. What’s our response going to be? And do you know what the answer of all of this is? The answer for all marketing, like be planful, like be planful, be mindful, get your strategy planned in advance. Like really think about is that actually what we want to do? Because everyone’s super busy and their clients care. But it was Alan or whoever was like absolute fan of Pizza Pilgrim. So they’re going to think, oh, my gosh, what an amazing brand that they sent a digital script. They’re just not going to care, are they? So, yeah, it’s interesting. And, you know, like I think I spend some time like scrolling through Instagram and looking at these brands and having a critical eye, because sometimes knowing what you don’t want to do helps you work out what you do want to do.

Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. No, I appreciate that. So there’s so much validity in calling those things out, as well as you also, you know, get a very positive answer there as well about cropping out. But it struck me that you can be performatively local, you know, and this is a point that’s already been made in this chat. So I’m not adding particularly, but, you know, if you’re being performatively local or doing the things such as parking up in Salisbury Car Park, it’s for the socials. It’s not for the people, you know, and there’s something. Yes, exactly. I want to just highlight in the chat here, because I don’t think we’ll answer this question specifically, but maybe the community can help Bex in the chat here. So Bex has asked, do you have any examples of charities that do local marketing well? So if anyone in the chat can help Bex out with some examples, because I think charities is something that is so locally important. So if anyone’s got any examples of where you live or nearby, then please do contribute, because I think that would be really helpful for Bex, a member of our community. So we’ll get there. Can we just speak about the laddering? Because I think a lot of my sort of questioning has sort of been like, you know, again, to use your language like pod specific, so location specific, you know, we’re doing this in one place. But one of the things that we wanted to cover in today’s session was that inversion of the pyramid where we’re starting from one, and then we’re sort of spreading out to 100 or 200 or whatever. So how do we, how do we begin to start to think like that? I mean, we’ve covered a lot here, but what does that start to look like as a strategic choice to ladder up from that one to 100?

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. So I think, I guess there’s, so I guess the laddering up is one question, like how do you grow a business and how do you scale it out? And I guess the how do you align your local and your national, and I do feel strongly that you need to have your overall strategy, but if you’re going to do both, even if it’s a local first strategy that then grows arms and legs, think for me that the key thing on that is to think like an aligned plan. So make sure that when you’re landing your activity, that’s, that’s the whole point of hyperlocal or local strategic marketing. If you have 40 stores or whatever it might be, and they all take similar actions at similar times or similar responses, but with the local nuance, plus they have the 10% of time to do whatever is relevant for their community, it builds up to the sum of its parts. You can then decide to put like a mothership or a halo over the top if you want to like really scoop up the, scoop up the branding. And I think again, when it comes to doing your annual planning, it’s really about just looking at what you’re aligning and what you’re syncing together. I mean, it would be brilliant if you could build a brand on just the 40, 50, 150 sites. It’s very difficult because actually agencies, just their models don’t work and you have to really commit to having an in-house team to do that. So you do end up with needing to maybe have a balance. The reality is having this very curious local marketing strategy kind of works to a certain scale and then maybe you sell or whatever, and it’s just not scalable anymore. But I think, yeah, really for me, that top tip is having a sync plan where it’s super aligned. And if you’re having that national strategy running at the top, you know, you might have your always on brand activation, absolutely fine. Like that’s, that’s great. It’s building awareness. Then you might have all maybe key brand moments through your year. You’re only having a few moments that people really stand and look at your brand. So make sure that’s drawing down to local strategy. I think where you’re going to lose impact and waste time and lose your business, they’ll start disengaging with locals when they start with two separate strategies. So when you go, well, we start with our local and then now we’ve got 20, now we have this big national strategy and we have sort of completely separate stuff or it’s completely disconnected and it’s a, it’s a whole different discussion in a different debate. But you come on to like, should franchisees run their own local marketing accounts and should they, should all sites have their own social media? I mean, yeah, let’s have another hour, Joe.

Speaker 1: I mean, like maybe not an hour, but could I, could I jump in on that? Because it strikes me that once you get to that place where you are trying to run, I mean, our community watching in today will know how hard it is to run marketing from one place. And sort of have one team trying to convince the board, the CEO, the CFO, you know, even if it’s not a CFO, you know, the accountant to invest in marketing, nevermind a hundred different businesses, as you would have had in Papa John’s or similar, to try and coordinate that activity and keep up standards. Make sure everyone is doing what they’re supposed to be doing, you know, producing materials, et cetera, et cetera. Like, I appreciate part of the answer here is going to be have a team who can, you know, sort of have oversight and just sort of watch these things. But is there, how do you even begin to approach it from like a practical perspective of making sure everyone is doing what they’re supposed to be doing, bought into what they’re supposed to be doing, et cetera? Because that seems like a phenomenal challenge to try and get.

Speaker 2: Chaos, Joe. Chaos. Very good. No, no, no. I would say two or three things on that. So first, I’m really mindful of the first freedom in a framework. So I think kind of back to this whole conversation around strategy and strategy kind of is a big word for having a plan, right? You know, it means different things depending on your type of business, but freedom in a framework. So especially if you’re, let’s talk about franchisees, they need to be really clear on understanding the brand guidelines or the structure of the year ahead. You know, you’ve got to be planful so you can take people on the journey and give them freedom within the framework. I think then the other bit is you say, talk about kind of brand guidelines, usage, et cetera. Some of it’s understanding when you’ve got 100 or 250 franchisees, there are going to be some economies of scales in there. You’re going to have the majority are going to be fine. And I think it’s about having those really good plans, quarterly check-ins, great spreadsheets. The middle should run itself. If the middle isn’t running itself, go back to your strategy. If you haven’t got a, exactly what we were saying earlier on the call, you’re either too pipe local or you’re not frameworked enough. And then you end up with your laggers and your leaders and your new growth opportunities, right? So really you spend most of your time going, here’s our annual local strategy. Here’s our framework. Right, let’s concentrate on you guys because you’re new or you’re struggling. They have got to jigsaw in. And if they don’t jigsaw in, you shouldn’t be able to read where they are out to each other. And then you guys, you’re really big, how we make bigger. And then we’ve got these exciting openers. And then it’s a bit of a hive mindset. That’s where here, some of it is about recruiting more people. But, you know, at Papa John’s, I am definitely not a superhero, but I did 250 by myself. And then we brought an exec on board. So in a way, it’s a really good challenge. Like startups do it, like just be smart. And the more people you bring in, the more nuances you’re going to get. So honestly, you can get a really long way with spreadsheets and organization and being structured. Nice. Freedom in a framework.

Speaker 1: I think you’re describing why I would be terrible at your job, Louise. But I don’t do it anymore. And by the way, I just wanted to note in the chat, because we asked for some recommendations for charities specifically to help Bex out. We’ve had some, and that’s so fabulous. So I just wanted to say thank you to the community for helping out as you have. And Naomi, I have noticed another vote for a charity webinar. We’ll see what we can do on that as well. So thank you. You know, this is how these things work, right? You’ve got to listen. And so thank you. Let’s wrap up. I’m just taking a quick look through the Q&A here, because I want to make sure that we’ve covered most of the bases. And I think a lot of the bases probably have been covered with the questions that remain. So hopefully those folks in the Q&A agree. If you don’t, feel free to shout at me in the chat. We’ll go from there. But just as we start to draw this to a close, I guess it would be great just to get your sort of, again, it’s a little bit like the examples question. Your sort of top three tips and top three mistakes to avoid, if you could, when it comes to local marketing. And let me just do some fill, create some space to give you a little bit of time and just acknowledge that Sarah in the chat has also sent another vote for me for the charities webinar. So Louise, top three tips or top three things to avoid when it comes to local marketing?

Speaker 2: So, yeah, so I think I would say three tips. So the first one would be really challenging yourself on whether you’re creating a tactical plan. So we said at the beginning, strategy is strategy. Really challenge yourself to do that ground up strategy and not to get into the activation. And I think you will find you’ll be pushed by your business to say, oh, yeah, local activation. Why don’t we serve the ads locally, like reverse out of that and try and build the strategy. That was my first tip. The second would be around having two completely separate teams. And that’s how businesses run that I’ve been in. You know that you have a local team and you have a national team and you have a brand team. And actually, that takes a really strong leader to create that sync plan and the alignment. And I think if you’re in the local team or if you’ve got a local first strategy, it’s about not being separate to it. And also doing that for the benefit of the client or the business that you’re working for. You are better in local when you’re standing on the shoulders of the giants, whether it’s that standing with your national brand or standing as some of its parts, because you’re all moving in sync. So really think about local has got to be part of your existing plan, not separate. My final one is just about being really planful and building that framework, that freedom in a framework like local marketing. It’s absolutely you can do on scale. You can do a huge impact. But you cannot do it if you’re just planning a week ahead that you’ve got to have your annual plan. And then you’ve got to plan the quarter ahead and the quarter that you’re in. And then you absolutely can absolutely can do it. And you don’t need those headcounts at all or those budget.

Speaker 1: I love that. And I love that point because it strikes me that some of the folks watching in today may not be in a position where they have several pods, as we’ve said. They may just have the one right now. But what you’re creating is your playbook to be able to do it. Absolutely. And so you have the opportunity to create that framework and then implement it out again and again in a real way, which, you know, to the point of this webinar, I think would probably challenge a default position for a lot of folks. Which is like, you know, OK, we’ve got a second location now. We’ve got a second business, whatever it may be. OK, let’s just do the same thing. Let’s let’s just tag it onto our national campaign rather than sort of really caring about the rest of it, which is really smart. Those were some fabulous tips. Thank you. On the challenges or things to avoid just as we come to the end. Are there any sort of regrets, common challenges, whatever it may be that you’d just like to folks to to to not do if they could?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Do you know, I think it comes back to great marketing kind of skills generally, whether it’s local or not. I really want to kind of reinforce that the local marketing is the same as being a great marketer. I think really exactly to your point, Joe, you’ve got your playbook. It can show what you’ve tested, what you’ve learned, your ROI. Marketers, we’ve got to be best friends holding hands with the accountant. Right. We’ve got to make them see it as an investment, not an expense. So I think that’s really important. And I think the second one is I can’t remember what the what the model is. But if you’re in that hyperlocal ideation phase, it’s got to stop. You can’t ideate for nine weeks. You’ve got to get to the point where you do your strategy. You’re ideating. You’re sending an exec to go and do an afternoon and then go, that’s it. We’re done now. But you can’t just keep going and going and going. So that comes back to kind of having a plan. And I think the final one would be actually really relevant to this charity conversation. I really think about what you’re printing your materials on and what does it look like to the consumer that’s there? You might be wanting to come across as a truly authentic business in the local area, but you turn up with a load of great kit or you’ve printed really thick flyers or, you know, just it’s that nuanced thought around what is the stuff that we’re printing on. So those would be my watch outs. Love it. Thank you so much, Louise.

Speaker 1: It’s really, really appreciated. And, you know, it’s been such a lovely session for so many reasons. I mean, first, you are you, which is a lifting person, you know, so you feel better for having a chat with you. Secondly, I just want to note how incredible the community are. I mean, for the chat to go on like it is and sort of have that as a as a thing that it goes on on the side is so special. And I just want to say thank you to everyone watching him for that, because I don’t think we should just say that that is and not acknowledge that. So thank you very, very much. And yeah, that’s really, really special. So thank you very much, Louise. Endlessly appreciate it. And thank you to the community, too. With all this said, we’ve got our last session, our last webinar of the year next week. And so it’s not part of a big season, as we’ve been doing recently. It’s just a standalone session where we’ve got Helen Tupper from Squiggly Careers coming to speak about marketing careers and recruitment. And really, this is a Q&A like as in a Q&A from the community. I’ve got some questions about like retraining and even aging in the marketing industry, which I think is something that not enough people speak about. But I’d really love the questions from the community as well to help us guide, you know, how we speak about marketing careers. So if you’d like to come, then the session is right there up on your screen. If you haven’t already, do take the time to connect with Louise. The QR code is up right there. And that will be right there. And also in the follow up email. And also a big thank you to this week’s featured sponsor, who are Score App. I promise there’s more answers than just the chameleon. So if you hit into the QR code right there and take your Marketing Zodiac quiz, then you can find out your Marketing Zodiac sign. A final, final thank you to Frontify, Exclaim, Cambridge Master College, Planable, Redgate, Storyblock and Score App. They mean that we can keep on bringing these sessions to you. Claudia will make sure that we send out Louise’s information after this session. So with all that said, thank you all so, so much. And we’ll see you very soon. Take care, everyone.