Building a local brand can be much easier than trying to reach global consumers, primarily because such businesses typically target a highly segmented market. Nevertheless, even a local business needs a carefully planned branding strategy that should start with choosing a suitable brand name, which would later also provide a stable ground for developing a digital presence.
As opposed to offline promotion and marketing strategies that take place within a particular region, the digital expansion of a local brand highly depends on associating it with a particular physical address or area, in order to distinguish it from global competitors. Additionally, locality is important for the choice of a domain name, because it is one of the first indications to both users and search engines on where your business operates.
Therefore, local businesses can significantly improve their online growth opportunities simply by deciding to add a location-related reference to their names. Let’s see how this can be done.
Local branding online
When it comes to small businesses, emphasis on location is essential for digital expansion because it greatly influences a website’s visibility in search. Google themselves have a special treatment for local businesses – provided that, of course, their websites contain all the necessary pieces of meta-data. This helps the engines better identify the queries in which a brand should be shown, which is particularly important in relation to local searches that keep growing at a rapid pace.
Namely, a local search study by comScore, Neustar, and 15miles reveals that 78% of smartphone owners and 81% of tablet owners use these devices for local searches and that nearly 80% of their searches result in either online or offline conversions. Of course, to be included in this digit, you first need to ensure high search positions, which is partly influenced by your domain name.
As one of the strategies for improving the possibility to be found in search, implementing location information in the very name may be a great strategy wherever this makes sense, of course. This can be done in several ways and one of them is using a geographical imaging strategy that will be discussed below. Of course, to build an actual brand, local businesses must go beyond search, but geographical imaging in its proper form can certainly help in different aspects of expansion.
Geographical imaging
Even though primarily related to local businesses, geographical imaging is also used by some of the world’s greatest brands. Ovidiu Moisescu’s study on brand name strategies , for example, gives some interesting examples on this, defining the geographic image as one “related to the stereotypical images that consumers often have of a city, region or country,” which “can provide a positive addition to the host brand.” He also notes that it can be linked to a brand in one of the following ways:
- Directly: through the insertion of a geographical image directly into the brand name (British Airways);
- Indirectly: through the brand slogan or a label such as “made in” (Lambhorgini).
As further noted in the paper, such images can be added to company logos in the form of the country flag, which can also be used as a dominant color combination for other brand elements, including the website. Moreover, location can be added through country codes in the URL, which again offers the relevant information to both users and search engines. The purpose of this is, of course, to relate the brand with a specific audience and specific queries online. However, as we have seen in the examples above, this by no means limits the expansion of a brand that wants to go global and, in these cases, serves as some form of personalization.
It should be noted, nonetheless, that not all countries accept this or it may require additional documents and authorization from national institutions. Trademarking is also a big question mark when using direct geographical mentions (country name) or imagery (flags).
Choosing a brand name: techniques and factors to consider
Clearly, a brand name has multiple roles, most important of which are neatly outlined in this study on factors affecting a firm’s global brand name strategy:
- The identification of the product, which allows consumers to choose;
- Communication of messages to the consumer through the descriptive qualities of the name or through associations built up over time;
- The legal property, to protect by law from trespass.
When digital strategies come into play, there is the added importance mentioned above – i.e., enabling visibility across search engines for relevant queries. In the case of local brands, geographical imaging helps in all these aspects, which is why it is important to choose it strategically. To do this, you need to consider different factors:
- It is available (i.e., no part of it is already trademarked by another company);
- It has a nice ring to it and it’s clear (no frequent mispronunciation or misspellings are related to it);
- It conveys the right message;
- A related URL is available.
Conclusions
Geographical imaging is, of course, only one of the strategies businesses can use when in doubt about what would help them build their brand more easily. As pointed out above, any type of location referencing may help in targeting a geographically segmented audience, which is why it is always a great option for those with such tendencies. Additionally, this definitely opens different opportunities for local SEO strategies, which may be particularly appealing to small businesses considering their cost-efficiency and potential reach.