5 advertising solutions for national growth to help you scale
Thirty-three percent of consumers get frustrated when they’re being offered products that aren’t relevant to them, according to a Salesforce report. Yet many brands developing advertising solutions for national growth often struggle with regional relevance, failing to meaningfully engage audiences at a local level.
At the same time, hyper-local marketing alone cannot drive the widespread brand awareness and recall needed to support growth into new markets.
So how can brands balance the need for mass promotion with community-level connection?
Learn more about why strategic localization is vital for scaling nationally and explore how brands can effectively bridge the gap between national reach and local relevance.
What is national advertising?
National advertising promotes a product, service, or brand to achieve widespread recognition and to scale operations nationwide.
National advertising can include television, search, display, paid social, and sponsorships—all geared to introduce the brand and deliver consistent messaging nationwide. The goal is to drive brand awareness on a massive level that only national campaigns can achieve.
National advertising is crucial for scaling operations across the country but should also be tailored to a specific region or city to reach a particular audience. It is important to consider regional differences when crafting a national advertising strategy to ensure the message speaks to the local audience. This is where national and local advertising cross paths.
What’s the difference between national and local advertising?
National advertising targets a broad audience across the country, aiming to build brand awareness and reach a large number of potential customers. It typically involves campaigns that are consistent and uniform across various markets.
Local advertising, on the other hand, focuses on reaching a specific geographic area or community. It aims to engage with customers on a more personal level and drive foot traffic or sales to local stores or businesses.
While local advertising initiatives remain essential for customer acquisition and community engagement, national solutions allow brands to achieve broader reach, scale efficiencies, and centralized management.
Some businesses may rely on tactics like direct mail, billboards, or hyper-local social posts that target only a small geographical area near each storefront. However, to truly grow into new regions and increase overall brand awareness, a national strategy is necessary.
Advertising and marketing solutions for national growth means simultaneously delivering the brand message to massive audiences across diverse population centers. Platforms like network television, search engine ads, display ads, paid social media, and national sponsorships allow brands to tap into millions of potential new customers across various demographics.
By leveraging data-driven targeting, brands can expose the most relevant subsets of this broad audience to ads customized to their personas. Such a pinpointed exposure vastly increases the potential for new customer acquisition over what’s possible through local efforts alone.
How local advertising and national advertising complement each other
National advertising enables widespread reach and centralized operations, while local advertising includes geo-specific touches to ensure the brand message is delivered in a relevant way to audiences across diverse regions.
National advertisements often support targeting capabilities that allow segmentation of the large national audience based on location. Brands can leverage geofencing or proximity targeting to serve ads specific to nearby storefronts.
They can also use creative assets developed for national distribution and dynamically optimize them for local marketing efforts. For example, brands can create ads customized to local regions while also leveraging the national impact it creates, like in the case of Bavaria, the Dutch beer brand.
Bavaria created an online petition and a campaign, #carnavalvrij, to deliver an official Carnival holiday, which resonated well in Brabant and Limburg. This playful local initiative enhanced Bavaria’s reach across both local communities and the national market, showing how a regionally specific campaign could engage audiences more broadly when shared online.
Applying such local and national marketing strategies together can give brands insights into which localized elements resonate most within each region.
4 common expansion challenges and advertising solutions for national growth
Expanding advertising and marketing efforts nationwide can present several challenges for brands. By consolidating certain functions under a coordinated strategy and shared resources, brands can more efficiently overcome these challenges and drive better performance.
Challenge #1: inconsistent messaging
When a brand expands into new cities or states, the marketers in each area often create their own marketing materials and ad campaigns. They tailor the messaging to connect with the target audience in their specific area.
The problem is when different cities have different ads and promotions that need to be aligned, it makes the overall brand messaging inconsistent. This can cause confusion and frustration for customers, disrupt the overall customer experience, and make it more difficult to build brand loyalty.
The solution for inconsistent messaging
The best way to combat this is to create messaging and positioning that falls within an overarching framework: a high-level messaging system that can be used across all locations to maintain consistency.
The local area teams can still create ads tailored to their locations but within the overall positioning framework. This keeps the general messaging aligned across locations, even if the specific ad details vary.
For example, Lay’s potato chips, as an international brand, created localized ads that resonated with specific regions — like leveraging the UEFA Champions League Final in Europe and the Super Bowl in the United States. This approach allowed the brand to connect with its target audience by tailoring content to their specific interests, effectively engaging global consumers on a personal level through familiar events and themes.
Such a cohesive brand message ensures that the core values and propositions are the same no matter where a customer encounters a brand. This consistency helps build customer trust and customer loyalty.
Challenge #2: fragmented communication
As each local team works independently, it becomes difficult to share insights on what marketing strategies are working the best. As a result, the local teams often operate in a vacuum, unable to learn from each other’s successes. This can lead to wasted time and resources and decreased overall efficiency.
For example, one location may find that radio ads drive strong results there. But if the ad’s performance isn’t shared with marketers at nearby locations, they won’t know they can optimize and replicate that approach—instead of spending time and money on less-impactful approaches.
Such fragmented efforts lead to an ineffective use of resources and a lack of customer reach. With a unified strategy, it can be easier to identify the best channels for reaching potential customers.
The solution for fragmented communication
Brands can easily optimize spending across markets by consolidating all the data, reporting, and marketing expenses into a centralized system. Most enterprises do this by using marketing automation tools like HubSpot or Adobe Marketo to pull together data such as lead information, campaign results, and budgets into a single interface. This way, teams can share performance benchmarks across regions to identify high-potential areas and gaps quickly and scale winning marketing strategies much faster.
This is particularly valuable at times of unprecedented situations when the economy slows down, like in a pandemic. With nationwide data integrated, brands can nimbly adjust their approach to capitalize on shifting market conditions.
As Paul Baumgarthuber, chief marketing officer at LaserAway, discussed in Yelp’s “Growing From Business to Enterprise” webinar, “It really comes down to having the data available to you and understanding what metrics are important, whether it’s ROAS or cost per lead.” He mentioned LaserAway’s strategy of constantly monitoring the metrics, comparing back to the previous period to gauge if the business is improving or not and which channels work the best and which don’t.
“Shifting and allocating spend based on the available information is crucial,” he said. “Unlike the times of economic growth when the competition peaks, in the case of an unfavorable economic situation, it creates additional opportunities. For example, some advertisers may leave the market while certain channels can get cheaper and potentially become more profitable.”
Challenge #3: misallocated funds
When local teams control their advertising expenditures, the money often doesn’t get allocated in a way that best serves the brand’s overall expansion goals. One market might spend too much on print ads, while some pay-per-click ads can go underfunded even though they drive more growth.
Also, without coordination, budgets can’t be rebalanced effectively across markets either. One area might go over the allocated advertising spend while another may underspend. But since there’s no centralized view of the marketing plan to shift dollars strategically, it’s exponentially harder to ensure you’re maximizing your budget across locations.
The solution for misallocated funds
With centralized oversight of all advertising expenditures, brands can distribute spending more strategically aligned with growth priorities.
Here are a few things that you can do to make sure that budgets are distributed smartly within locations:
- Utilize an advertising platform—like Hootsuite Ads, Semrush, or Zoho Social—to aggregate campaign performance data from all channels into a centralized dashboard
- Implement budget tracking tools—like Dreamdata, HubSpot, or MARMIND—with automatic categorization to monitor spending against objectives and prevent overspending
- Conduct attribution analysis to determine the most effective marketing activities and allocate budgets accordingly across regions
- Empower regional teams to work within set parameters while maintaining oversight through regular ROI metric reviews to optimize future allocations
For example, if a few newer markets have more potential for expansion, budget from mature markets can be redirected accordingly.
As you track your campaign metrics across markets, you can continue to redistribute ad spending to support the markets and tactics that are delivering the best incremental gains.
Challenge #4: disparate workflows
Running integrated national campaigns with hundreds of local markets is extremely complex without centralized workflows. Producing new creatives and assets is slow when each market has to coordinate individually.
This decentralized process leads to inefficiencies in creative production, delays in campaign launches, and difficulties in data consolidation and reporting. Consequently, it hampers the ability to accurately measure campaign performance and optimize for overall business growth.
The solution for operational complexities
To tackle the operational complexities associated with campaign development, optimization, outreach, and distribution, brands must adopt advanced, streamlined workflow automation and collaboration tools. This solution involves integrating cutting-edge technologies and platforms to streamline processes, foster collaboration, and drive efficiency across the entire campaign lifecycle:
- Integrated project management systems: Implement robust project management systems, such as Asana, Trello, or Monday.com, to centralize campaign workflows and tasks. These systems allow teams to collaboratively plan, execute, and track campaign activities in a structured and organized manner.
- Creative asset management platforms: Utilize Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms like Bynder, Brandfolder, or Adobe Experience Manager to centralize and streamline the storage, retrieval, and distribution of creative assets. These platforms facilitate efficient asset sharing, version control, and collaboration among internal teams and external stakeholders.
- Automated approval workflows: Implement automated approval workflows using tools like ProofHub or Workfront to expedite the review and approval process for campaign assets. By automating repetitive tasks and notifications, these workflows ensure timely feedback and minimize bottlenecks in the approval chain.
5 advertising strategies to maximize visibility on a national level
Reaching customers across the country requires strategic planning and execution. While advertising on a national scale provides enormous opportunities for growth, it also presents challenges of scale—like targeting diverse audiences efficiently and optimizing campaigns over a wide geographic area. The following five advertising strategies have proven effective for brands seeking to maximize their national visibility.
When implemented together, these advertising solutions for national growth leverage the strengths of different media channels, target messaging to key demographics, personalize the customer experience, and focus spending where it drives the most impact.
1. Maximize broader reach with digital marketing
Elevating your digital marketing strategy for nationwide reach demands precision. While online channels give you a mega-sized reach across the country, you still need to laser-focus your message to reach your audiences.
Between social media outreach and search engine marketing to various forms of advertising, there’s no shortage of places to establish your presence. Plus, many of these platforms make it easy to hyper-target certain subsets of audiences across varying demographics and interests at scale to help improve your online presence.
But the key here is to have your own independent research guide your digital marketing strategy through any of these platforms.
To start with, you can A/B test creative assets, landing pages, and calls-to-action to determine what resonates most strongly. By analyzing valuable metrics like click-through rates, website traffic, and conversions, brands can refine and optimize campaigns over time.
Such an iterative approach through digital marketing helps brands advertise on a national scale while still tailoring it quickly to the preferences of local audiences. And Yelp specializes in this.
You can use digital tools from Yelp for Brands that offer innovative advertising solutions for national growth to implement and track your ads across massive user bases. For example, you can use Yelp for Brands to:
- Promote discounts or new features with your consistent brand messaging to stand out in the competitive market.
- Increase awareness in new locations by leveraging Yelp’s targeted advertising capabilities to reach local audiences to drive foot traffic.
- Track in-person traffic, providing insights into foot traffic patterns and customer behavior at physical locations.
- Measure digital visits and transactions via pixel tracking, allowing you to attribute online interactions directly to Yelp advertising efforts and assess the impact on digital conversions and revenue generation.
- Gather metrics from third-party partnerships, accessing additional data sources to provide a holistic view of campaign performance across multiple channels and platforms.
This level of granularity—from awareness to offline actions—allows you to optimize and refine national campaigns and localization efforts to bring a high return on investment.
2. Incorporate traditional media
While digital media continues to grow fast, traditional media still packs a big punch. Especially when it comes to reaching older crowds, things like TV are hard to beat for building trust and credibility.
A PwC report shows TV advertising rakes in over $150 billion yearly and is expected to remain steady over the next three years. Even as online advertising booms past $500 billion, TV isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
When brands need broad exposure, traditional TV remains a formidable choice, offering unparalleled linear reach for high-profile campaigns. However, with the rise of connected TV (CTV), there’s a compelling alternative that combines the power of television with the precision of digital targeting.
CTV allows advertisers to target highly engaged audiences across streaming platforms with customized ads based specifically on their personas. Furthermore, advertisers can monitor performance metrics to continually optimize their campaigns—both of which are absent in traditional TV ads.
Apart from these, print and radio still play valuable roles in reaching local audiences on a regional level. For new markets, out-of-home (OOH) advertising, including billboards, remains an effective way to build brand awareness. However, it’s essential to note that traditional advertising channels may lack the granular targeting capabilities of digital channels, such as CTV.
So a well-rounded approach consists of both traditional and digital advertising methods, so an omnichannel media buying mix is the way to fly. Using multiple platforms—both digital and traditional—ensures you’re covering all your bases. You hit people wherever they frequent with the right message via the best vehicle.
3. Employ targeted messaging through market segmentation
To connect with a diverse national audience, brands must understand regional differences in demographics, lifestyles, and preferences. That’s where market segmentation comes in—it helps split people up into meaningful subgroups using their unique pain points and values.
Several approaches to market segmentation can help national brands target messaging appropriately:
- Demographic segmentation: You can divide the target audience based on age, gender, income, occupation, and other similar variables to understand how preferences vary between groups.
- Behavioral segmentation: You can examine differences in customer behavior patterns, usage rates, benefits sought, loyalty status, and purchasing process.
- Psychographic segmentation: You can analyze personality traits, social class, values, and attitudes influencing purchasing decisions.
- Geographic segmentation: You can gather crucial context about regions across a large country, such as the influences due to divergent climates, industries, cultures, and priorities.
With these segment lenses, brands see who they’re talking to more clearly. Then they can tailor messaging just for them.
Advertising solutions from sites like Yelp make it easy to target ads this way. For example, a chimney cleaning business operating across various regions could use Yelp Showcase Ads to target homeowners in colder climates, featuring chimney inspection and cleaning services to ensure safety and efficiency during the winter months.
On the other hand, they can use Yelp Showcase Ads to emphasize fireplace repair and restoration services in historic neighborhoods known for their traditional fireplace features. Customizing ads based on the customer segmentation can maximize its impact and drive better engagement and conversions.
User-generated content is also incredibly valuable. Sharing real customer photos and reviews from your Yelp Business Page helps brands feel authentic to the local scene. Promoting locally on search engines, social media, and local directories drives folks to engage within their communities.
The end goal is for every location to feel like its own valued community hub, not another franchise outpost. Segmentation is vital to getting there.
4. Engage through personalized, multi-location campaigns
With first-party customer info, brands have a secret weapon to step up national campaigns. Data on purchases, website activity, and demos lets you segregate your target audience into meaningful segments.
This allows personalized touches—like one-to-one dynamic email marketing, interest-based social ads, and tailored e-commerce shopping—to make people feel seen and heard.
By analyzing purchase histories, website behaviors, and demographic profiles, brands can segment lists and send customized ads speaking directly to each recipient. For example, a sporting goods retailer could push new running shoes to physically active customers while hyping jerseys for sports fans. Data makes these micro-segments possible.
Tools like Yelp Ads are perfect for highlighting seasonal deals, new launches, or local events. Showcase Ads stand out visually on Yelp Pages and in search highlighting specific promotions, products or offers. And you can take that messaging to the Yelp app homepage with Spotlight Ads as well to get in front of even more prospective customers.
These Yelp products are also highly customizable. Brands can tweak ads regionally so promotions feel extra local. This can help amplify reach across diverse markets when paired with broader campaigns.
Plus, you can associate each Yelp ad with the nearest location information to help potential customers sign up. Furthermore, store visit tracking metrics can be integrated to gather performance insights and optimize advertising spend.
The key is balancing the overall brand marketing solutions for national growth with local-level personalization.
5. Streamline local efforts using centralized tools
Running marketing campaigns across lots of scattered locations is no easy feat. Coordinating efforts between regional and local teams can be time-consuming and lead to inconsistencies in messaging.
But a centralized approach simplifies everything. From the overarching campaign strategy to the creative assets, local teams across locations can just pick from the central system to maintain consistent brand messaging and avoid redundant work.
On centralized platforms like Yelp, profiles, creative content, and ad campaigns can be set once and rolled out everywhere from one account. This allows small marketing teams to act big by treating all locations as extensions of the national brand while still accommodating local nuances.
Rather than wasting time duplicating the same set of tasks for each location, marketers can focus on developing top-quality content and campaigns. For example, a fitness equipment company could create a series of Spotlight Ads to display on Yelp’s homepage, centrally promoting its brand story, then deploy strategic variations locally according to segmentation profiles, automatically rotating ads targeted to nearby customers based on location.
Robust reporting dashboards also roll performance metrics from the store level to regional, district, and national views. With at-a-glance insights, marketers can identify top- and under-performing creatives, locations, times of day, and audience segments. They may then reallocate budgets or retest messages accordingly without manual data consolidation.
Go big nationally while thinking locally
Rolling out ads nationwide takes smart planning. You should solidify your core brand message and identify the different types of customers you want to reach. Once you know your segments, target them with customized messaging across digital and traditional channels.
While going broad is great for brand awareness, don’t neglect local touches that make your message relevant on a neighborhood level. Hyper-targeted local promotions can turbocharge your national growth.
Want a more hands-on guide to take you through the process of marketing locally as a national brand?