Marketing ABC’s Localish: Modernizing Strategy for 2020 Growth
November 6, 2019
The Overview
As an overall concept and brand, Localish is very strong with huge amounts of upside. The execution on your marquee series—from More in Common to Bite Size to Secretly Awesome—deliver on what I would call an “aspirational yet attainable” promise. In other words, this isn’t a brand filled with over-the-top, far-flung locales, featuring over-produced Instagram-influencer-feigned authenticity. Localish is a value-packed, entertaining mirror of my life featuring neighborhoods like mine. This is a very good thing at the right time. By all accounts, over-produced, unrealistic influencer-style lifestyle content and marketing is on the decline in favor of real value and engagement.
Fake is out. Authentic is in.
But for Localish, the challenges to meaningful growth are still very real. You already know this. To be a digital-only brand with revenue from integrations is one thing. To be a thriving multi-platform brand that serves the audience where they are and keeps them coming back for more, while becoming a profitable content powerhouse, takes a coordinated strategy that requires content, marketing and sales to be on the same page at all times. You can’t Frankenstein this kind of thing together—you have to start with a holistic overall vision of the brand, its mission and its goals.
What follows are the topline initial seeds of my vision for growing Localish in 2020 and beyond. I’ve taken your answers to my questions and integrated them into the start of an overall strategy that’s broken down into three key areas of focus:
Branding and awareness of the over-the-air product: high-quality and high-concept image spots, local market newscast plugs and full segment broadcasts, contesting, local event sponsorship, “as seen on Localish” tags, and cohesive pushes to digital/social.
Realignment and optimization of social media: redevelop and redeploy a platform-specific social strategy with focuses on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, complete with a fine-tuned content calendar and livelier, CTA-driven copy across the board.
Total overhaul of the website for SEO/voice SEO/SERP optimization: full redevelopment of the website, optimized for search and voice search, with long-tail keyword-rich articles accompanying every video, and a daily curated playlist that compliments both the OTA and social media products.
Some of these are no-brainers—like local market broadcast integration or developing killer image creative for OTA promos—so I won’t dive into those here. Instead, I’ve broken out a handful of specific thoughts into short term (30-60 days), middle term (60-180 days) and long term (180-365 days) timelines. I’ve been involved with enough rebrands and brand launches to know it would be incredibly foolish of me (or anyone) to think large-scale brand marketing efforts like this could be done quickly. So let’s be realistic, while still thinking big, shall we?
The Specifics
Clearly define the voice and POV of Localish (short term)
From my vantage point, this is day-one critical to the success of Localish. I get the brand, you get the brand, but the causal viewer is going to stumble upon the Facebook page or website and get hit with a vast array of content that doesn’t clearly tie together. Some of it is highly-produced and thought-provoking (More in Common), other pieces clearly feel like local-market lifestyle pieces (much of the recent FB and Insta content). This is great from a “we need to fill the wheel of content” standpoint, but a detriment from a “this needs to feel like one brand with a singular mission” standpoint. The best and easiest way to bridge this gap is to have a clear voice and POV on all copy, tags, headlines, text on screen in videos, etc—something that’s currently lacking in most copy across all platforms. In the absence of an on-screen personality, Localish the brand need to be that personality (e.g. Wendy’s). The fastest way to get there is to ask, “If Localish was a human, what would they sound like? Funny? Quirky? Lovable nerd-ish? Slightly self-deprecating?” Define these parameters and you have the start of a relatable voice for everything from OTA image promos to copy for instagram posts that viewers will recognize and say “that’s Localish!"
If you’re going to do verticals, treat them like TV shows
I love the idea of More in Common, Bite Size, Secretly Awesome, Glam Lab, etc being their own vertical. It’s a great way to make the Localish brand feel huge—like it has something for everyone. This is also a great way for you to be able to hit and monetize niche markets. BUT…if you’re going to go this route, the branding, promo, and overall treatment of these series/verticals needs to feel more like episodic TV—complete with trailers, highlights, and micro-content (BTS or “from the cutting room floor” type stuff) delivered throughout each “season.” If you tell me this is a big deal, I’ll likely think it’s a big deal and give you my time. This is a smart way to get far more milage out of what would otherwise just be another piece of short-form content in my feed.
Create a Master Content Marketing & Editorial Calendar (short term)
Another day/week-one critical piece is to get the 35K foot view of what you’re working with in the library, what’s being published or aired when/where, what you have too much/little of, and get a sense of your production limitations and liabilities. Then you plan a large-scale content and marketing calendar against it. This is super basic and you hopefully already have it, but it’s also a thing that can be ignored because of other priorities and then the team is far less responsive than it should be throughout the year. This also leads into our next short term point.
Consistency, consistency, consistency. (short term)
What days do new episodes of, say, Bite Size get posted? Like programmatic TV, social media is all about building habits through frequency, repetition and consistency. You need to burn it into my brain that new episodes of Localish’s Bite Size come out every Tuesday at noon and I can even sign up for an alert when it hits (or get it before everyone else because I’m a loyal viewer). A great example here is this: successful YouTubers stick to a posting schedule and never deviate from it. Like OTA TV programs, they’ve conditioned their viewers to know that a new vlog hits every week at a certain time without fail. That way, you can market and sell against it, and if the content is really good, you can transition some viewers from digital to OTA with this strategy. This video about Casey Neistat’s incredible YouTube growth is a fantastic case study of this very important digital marketing strategy. Speaking of YouTube…
Relaunch YouTube with a “how-to, food first” strategy (short to mid term)
As far as discovery is concerned, YouTube is an incredible platform for both paid and organic brand introduction and habit building. Running pre-roll TrueView video ads with Localish image spots and CTA-enabled action buttons feels like a a tactical no-brainer for growth (more on paid in a bit), but the biggest opportunity I see here is for Localish to turn on the YouTube content faucet with a “how-to, food first” approach. Here’s how I see it working:
All Localish content continues to be uploaded and SEO optimized on YouTube. Playlists are curated, descriptions are fleshed out, better thumbnail templates are developed.
The stuff that’s highlighted and promoted on YT is food related, as that’s what globally performs well on this platform.
Since food tutorials are some of the most searched content on Google/YouTube, a new Localish “how-to” series is developed with local chefs from each market showing how they make basic dishes with delicious twists. Think “how to make the best PBJ (with a twist)” kind of thing (for reference: Gordon Ramsay’s YouTube).
What’s critical to success on this platform is consistency and personality. This is not the passive watch experience of Facebook or Instagram. I need an engaging on-cam personality to be truly successful here.
Similar to all other verticals, this series is treated as a seasonal programmatic run, with its own promos and micro content.
Done well, this type of YouTube content could lead to explosive audience growth, conversions to the website and TV show, and an added line of revenue. Speaking of the website…
Blow up the website and rebuild with a modernized, curated Localish content hub (mid-longish term)
As we discussed, I totally get the idea of “launching with what you have.” In this instance, launching with a pre-built website template to get it up and running made total sense and I know that. But it doesn’t make sense to keep it as-is moving forward. To modernize your marketing in this crowded content landscape means you’re doing everything you can to safeguard against an algorithm change in Menlo Park taking away 40% of your hard-earned audience. I’ve personally lived this and now you’ve never heard of an otherwise fantastic media company. My goal with all social/digital marketing is threefold: 1) get you to watch the content wherever you are, 2) entice you to spend time on my website and subscribe, and 3) actually show up in your social feed and your Google search. Rebuilding your website as a curated and programmed content hub hits all three and opens you up to additional opportunities for NTR on things like data-driven features, long-reads and podcasts.
Develop a paid digital strategy that focuses on conversions via custom audience interests and social listening
The discussion of paid requires a far deeper dive into current metrics on each social platform, but in general, my preference is to forgo reach in favor of uber-targeted conversion tactics. These niche markets lead to your most vocal and engaged fans, which elevates each post organically as a result. Earlier this year, I wrote about how organic growth happens fastest when niche, engaged audiences respond to your content. Keyword hacking and social listening will also be critical with a library as large as Localish owns. Google, YouTube, Facebook/Insta all have solid tools for niche targeting and Google’s TrueView video is a fantastic CTA tool.
Optimize for SEO/SERP/Voice SEO (short to long term, with efforts happing short term, results happening long term)
This is the really big one for me. Localish content is ready-made for high-end local SERP and position-zero results (e.g. “Best BBQ near me” = Localish recommendation), but that work needs to start immediately. The relaunch of a long-tail keyword-filled website will be critical to these efforts, as will having the site crawled by Google A.I. Additionally, developing a plan for voice SEO tactics is HUGE—voice SEO + local search are massive opportunities for not only Localish, but ABC O&O stations as well. Here’s a good starting point for that conversation, since SEO gets deep into the weeds…quick.