My answer is both everything and nothing.  The relevance of local depends on your strategy.  If you sell furniture, people in your area are likely the only sales prospects that you have.  People rarely ship furniture and to do so is quite expensive.  If you are a start-up brand with limited distribution as of yet, local may matter quite a lot.  Cooperative advertising with your distribution partners can be a cost effective means for building your brand.

For others it might mean nothing at all.  If your product can be shipped easily, and uses direct response channels like telesales and the internet, local media channels are nearly irrelevant.

The next question is what is the best way to tap into local.  Newspapers are obviously one, and even with their well chronicled decline they still reach vast numbers of people on a daily basis.  Split run advertising as with “zoned” products can bring the cost of entry to a reasonable level.  Outdoor is also a possibility, but messages need to be very simple to be effective.

The most interesting possibilities are those of event marketing on a local level.  Playing a memorable part in local events can both establish you as a member of the community and reach your target quite effectively.  Donating a prize to a Church raffle can reach quite a number of people and position your company in a positive light.  A table at a local street party can get people to sample your product and create new customers nearly instantly.  These tend to be high risk endeavors, as they either are very successful or go completely unnoticed.  The same advice applies here as with any other marketing.  Establish a concrete goal and be relentless about matching the tactic to it.  For one example, having your logo on a gift bag is superfluous if you want your product to be sampled.

The secret is: there was no prior world record for software downloads.  Firefox invented it.  The strategy was amazing.  The press and bloggers wanted to cover it, and users had an incentive to download it as quickly as possible.  They were able to multiply the visiblity of the launch many times over traditional marketing.

They also involved the existing community quite well.  As far as grassroots efforts go, they made it easy by having toolkits for the “faithful” to spread the word.

Firefox also added an element of pride.  Downloaders could print certificates for their particpation in the occasion.

From every aspect, the launch was an amazing use of publicty and community involvment.  I applaud them for setting the record they created…  and acheiving a very critical strategic goal with their innovative marketing.  They got beyond the functional improvements of the browser and made it an event to get a new piece of software.

I first learned this lesson when I was launching a local paper in Dallas.  During the launch we conducted community meetings to explain the product, which was unique in the access that consumers would have to getting articles published. We thought consumers would embrace it since they actually controlled the conversation in the newspaper, rather than the other way around.

For one of our first meetings, we went to a place that was cheap and convenient for us, on our schedule.  We sent out invitations to the busy community leaders.  When the time came for the meeting, few attended, and those that did weren’t all that excited.  They were more concerned with a perception that they would be losing professional coverage rather than gaining a paper of their own.

The next meeting was quite a bit different.  We went to them on their schedule.  We held it in their community in a place that was easy to attend.  Our message was about the additional coverage, and access to get the items they were proud of printed in the paper.  We respected the consumer and understood their concerns.  The meeting was strongly attended, and most of the people that had anything negative to say were concerned they wouldn’t be getting the product.

The first meeting was all about what we were going to do, on our terms.

The second was about listening and becoming a new voice for the community.  It was about THEM.