Meeting Local Customers Where It Matters Most

At a glance

The majority of consumer purchases still occur offline, but unless your local enterprise can assist customers through all phases of the click-to-brick transition, many won’t make it across the last mile to your front doors. So, how do you evolve your concept of customer service excellence so that your brand provides a fully-assisted consumer experience online which results in trackable wins offline? This guide will show you.

Understand, capture, and perfect local consumer journeys

The marketing industry has many different working models that attempt to illustrate how online searchers become offline customers. One example is the funnel concept, with shoppers moving from top-of-funnel activities like gathering information to bottom-of-funnel actions like making a purchase. Another is the version of the customer journey in which an individual moves through phases like:

Awareness > Consideration > Decision > Conversion 

Today, however, we want to share a slightly different concept with you that incorporates the goals of your enterprise into the customer’s journey. Why does this matter? Because your business needs to both see your customers’ behaviors and then react to the data you’ve captured with the creation of a continuously-evolving consumer experience designed to maximize conversions and loyalty. This better model looks like this:

This version may look a little different than others you’ve seen because it comprises both consumer and brand goals, so let’s walk through it together.

Phase 1: Support searcher discovery of your local enterprise brand

Whether your business has dozens, hundreds, or thousands of locations, there will always be:

• Residents in the communities you serve who aren’t yet sure of what you offer
• New neighbors in these communities who aren’t yet aware of the businesses nearest them
• Travelers who have little or no idea of the resources present in a town or city they’re visiting

Nearly all of these individuals will turn to the internet to discover the information they need. They will use resources like Google local packs, Bing Places packs, mapping apps on their phones, organic search engine results, paid advertising results, social media, and AI environments like ChatGPT to gain awareness of their nearby options. 

With Lastmile, your enterprise will be highly visible during searchers’ discovery phase via:

• Fully-managed local business listings
• CMS-managed website content that is indexed by search engine bots and scraped by AI
• Professionally-managed paid advertising in both organic and social environments
• A best-in-class store locator paired with fully localized microsites for each branch of your enterprise

Phase 2: Support competitor and branch comparison

Consumers seldom make a beeline from the web to your doors. Instead, most will compare and contrast your brand to its nearby competitors. Additionally, they will seek to understand which of your own branches can best meet their needs. 

With Lastmile, your enterprise will stand out as the best local choice in consumers’ comparison phase via:

• Review management and response across major platforms; consumer review content is the most used and trusted comparison content on the web
• Real-time local inventory or “generally-carried” representative inventory for each branch of your enterprise that helps customers find what they need where they need it
• Coupons, promotions, events, and special offers that make your brand the most appealing choice

Phase 3: Support conversion

In the comparison phase, the presence of real-time or representative inventory on your website will have brought searchers very close to the point of conversion if one or more of your branches near them offers what they’re looking for. 

With Lastmile, you’ll secure maximum sales and bookings via our fully-customizable microsite landing pages for each of your locations, including:

• Functionality that alerts visitors to the next-nearest location that offers what they need when an item or service is currently absent from the branch nearest them
• Rich content that reveals all of the ways to access the business, including contact information, hours of operation, embedded maps, written driving directions, social media links, etc.
• Fulfillment options, including in-person shopping, BOPIS, curbside delivery, home delivery, e-commerce, remote shipping, etc.
• Consumer guarantees that instill trust 
• Embedded reviews that signal customer service quality at each branch
• Appointment bookings
• AI-driven chat assistance
• Get a Ride (supported by Uber/Lyft)
• Email capture and lead generation forms

Phase 4: Capture customer journeys with industry-leading attribution

All the wins across the first three phases of the consumer journey have intrinsic value, but their full power can’t be understood unless your enterprise is able to capture and measure them. Your business must access clear performance insights across every marketing campaign and customer touch point and be able to evaluate all this crucial data in a single dashboard. 

With Lastmile’s deep local analytics, your enterprise is empowered to capture and measure:

• Web traffic by source and channel
• User behavior, including calls, requests for directions, digital engagements, transactions, etc. 
• Segmented attribution via geographic dimensions, business dimensions, channels, brands, and products

Phase 5: React to what your data teaches your enterprise

The more user behavior data you capture, the better each branch of your business can understand the habits and needs of the communities they serve. Where analytics prove that a marketing campaign or offering is delivering success, you’ll know to continue with it. But perhaps more importantly, you’ll identify failures and gaps that can be improved at the branch level for better performance.

With Lastmile, you’ll be accessing a CMS that has been built from the ground-up to scale enterprise improvements via:

• Sophisticated multi-seat access permissions that enable branch managers and franchisees to directly and appropriately contribute to content and marketing improvements
• Review segmentation that captures branch-level sentiment so that customer complaints are quickly identified for resolution, defending the brand from reputation downtrends
• A/B testing functionality that makes it easy to experiment with new offerings designed to deliver the ultimate customer experience

Phase 6: Retain the customer and earn their referrals

It is almost always the case that it’s less expensive to keep an existing customer happy than to have to replace them with a new customer. The high costs of churn and new customer acquisition can seriously deplete enterprise marketing budgets over time, depriving your brand of resources that could be applied to new and exciting campaigns as technology continues to evolve. 

‍With Lastmile, you’ll be investing in the solution to this very common dilemma via:

• A managed digital footprint that minimizes consumer inconvenience because contact information is accurate and trustworthy across the web
• A website experience that is fully personalized and customized to each local consumer, offering them a level of assistance that may be unequaled in their town or city
• Enabling branch-level experts to contribute to the marketing of their locations, ensuring that messaging is in tune with local community culture and needs
• Creating a memorable online experience that, paired with offline fulfillment, deserves to be chosen again by consumers and recommended to their circle

The next logical step on your own journey

It’s an under-documented fact of local search marketing that many major brands simply haven’t yet made the necessary investments in creating a frictionless and fully-assisted digital path for their customers to journey on. 

Though modern consumers have come to demand that remote shopping experiences be as easy and convenient as what they experience with Amazon, the local business sector has yet to catch up. 

Lastmile was founded to help enterprises like yours make this essential transition because it’s the next logical step in the evolution of digital marketing. 

By combining your brand’s journey with the journeys of underserved local consumers, you are likely to gain a meaningful competitive advantage. We work solely with major enterprises like Hyatt and T-Mobile, and our unique level of expertise in large multi-location model marketing will be at your service the moment you partner with us.

Contact Lastmile today or schedule a live demo of our enterprise local search marketing solutions. We’d be honored to be part of your journey.