USA Today, which is part of the Gannett Company, has launched LOCALiQ, a digital marketing and advertising platform, to improve the digital reputation of its clients and to provide them with data-driven marketing strategies. The platform features data intelligence tools and enables clients to track their online presence. In addition, the platform delivers recommended ad marketing approaches and offers real-time feedback so that clients can change strategies depending on how successful they are. Recently, Loyalty360 sat down with Paras Maniar, President, Local at Gannett, USA Today Network, to discuss the platform.
“We as a company have had a long history of being in media,” says Maniar. “The reality is businesses have an objective or goal that they are trying to drive. For example, I need more patients in my Urgent Care center. I need more folks on my auto lot considering us for the purchase of a car. I need more people to walk into my restaurant. But the tactics that you can use have become so complicated and diverse. We said, Let’s make sure we use a lot of these tactics so we create more opportunity. But about a year ago, we started really looking at the customer and the client, and we said, We are driving some of this confusion, but we need to know what the customer wants. LOCALiQ allows us to answer that.”
He continues, “It includes all kinds of tactics. Some are print. Some are things like SEM. Others are website and SEO. But the focus is committing to invest in the goal that you want. Instead of pitching products or tactics, let’s talk about the right set of solutions that meet your objectives. For one, it’s going to simplify for the clients that we work with how we work with them and why we work with them. It also finally empowers our sales force and our product people and our client success teams to not get obsessed with the products, but to get obsessed with the client and their objectives and go to market like that. For us it really is a fundamental change in the way we talk about what we do.”
One thing that Maniar really likes about the LOCALiQ platform is that it is useful for a range of clients, from small to large. “Our clients are broad,” he says. “They’re across the country, and they are of all sizes. They’re as small as small shops spending less than $12,000 a year with us in what has been historically a transactional nature. Putting in a print ad. Putting in obits, if you’re a funeral home. We also work with large agencies that represent major brands across USA Today or multi-hundred-thousand dollar search campaigns. So, our clients are very different. LOCALiQ is really for all of them. Everyone we work with has some confusion about what they should do, and people come up to them to have conservations about tactics and what it is they’re trying to drive. The platform helps simplify the series of products that we offer.”
Still, this platform doesn’t replace a process of identification and measurement. “When we sit down with clients, we first try to understand their objective,” Maniar says. “The client comes in. They say, At the end of the day what we’re trying to do is increase our reputation. So we pick a series of scores that we can measure, whether it’s an MPF test or something else. We say, The right solution set for you is some branded content plus reputation enhancement. Then we deploy it and we report on it through a log in, or some clients want to sit down with us once or twice a month to go over where the progress is.”
He continues, “Other clients say, We’re really large, we’re spending a lot with you, we actually built our own data visualization platform, and we give them a pure API pipe into the data and we send it to them so they can correlate it to whatever they want and look at it in terms of attribution. But the key is, we agree on what success is before we start the campaign. Now, for others, it’s more classic. Success is this many impressions. Success is getting a qualified lead for $200. We start by making sure what the client’s goal is, what’s the right success metric for it, and then we deliver against that and hold ourselves accountable to it.”
When asked about challenges in the attribution process, Maniar says that having fewer tactics makes things easier. “Those who are tied to one tactic, they’re usually not the ones having a problem. They know exactly what they’re optimizing. They know exactly what they’ve spent and they compare it to what they think competitors are spending by keyword.”
He adds, “The bigger driver, however, is the fact that single tactics aren’t enough. You have to be pretty small for a single tactic to be effective for you, or you have to be in a pretty small market. Typically, you need multi-tactics, but when it comes to multi-tactics, you have to figure out how to measure. How do you know if you’re spending the right amount in social versus PPP versus branded content? That’s what we really spend time solving for.
“Our goal is to create a collection of the right tactics that move the needle. But you can’t measure them individually. You have to map out the consumer journey for a client. If it’s an auto dealership, the consumer is someone who has purchase intent to buy the Corvette, and if you’re using a combination of branded content as well social as well as display, you have to figure out how to attribute the entire customer journey and report that back. Basically, we track the customer back from the sale across all these touchpoints to make attributions.”
Clearly, even if with an excellent marketing platform, there’s no substitution for good, old-fashioned data measurement processes.