Does it Matter if My Marketing Agency is Local to My Business?

During the holiday season, shopping local is the big topic. Social media posts, email marketing campaigns, radio ads, and all other types of marketing content will be relentless in reminding everyone to support their local small businesses for both retail and service needs.

If you’re one of those small businesses sending out this type of messaging, are you working with a marketing agency who is also local? If not, your marketing strategy could be missing important nuances that are particular to your local culture.

From a strictly technical perspective, any competent marketing firm can deliver a range of services to any business in the country. A significant aspect of modern marketing strategy is digital, and the internet pretty much works the same no matter where someone is. Even print, visual, and audio marketing tactics can be executed over the phone and email.

So why does it truly matter whether you work with a marketing agency in the same physical region as your business or with an agency that’s located anywhere else?

It matters because marketing is always about communicating with people. And people all live in a specific place with a specific culture and specific knowledge. If you engage a marketing agency to help your small business effectively market to your local audience, the team at that agency needs to be in tune with the same place, culture, and knowledge as your audience.

Local Marketing Requires Local Knowledge

Marketing to Mission was founded in Southeastern Pennsylvania, so that is the area we serve. All of our team members live in the Philadelphia suburbs, which means we drive the same roads, attend the same schools, shop in the same stores, and navigate the same terrain as our clients and their clients.

Shops in Doylestown, PA

This is an intentional choice in our business. Since we meet with our local clients over video most of the time, it would be just as easy to meet with clients who are based outside of this region. But having the theoretical ability to serve clients based in any location does not necessarily make it a good practice in reality.

We choose to keep our business local for a few foundational reasons:

1. “Work for the well-being of the city where I have sent you to.” ~ Jeremiah 29:7

We are all placed right where we are for a purpose. No matter how accessible the world gets because of technology, we all live our lives in a relatively small area. Marketing to Mission wants to work for the well-being of our “city” by supporting the businesses and people who also live here. We believe in caring for our local economy, families, services, nonprofit organizations, and government. A focus on local clients allows us to keep our attention and efforts directed exactly where we will have the most impact.

2. Local insight can’t be outsourced - it’s lived.

A foundational principle of Marketing to Mission’s service model is that our clients need to know exactly who their ideal client is. We help clients get to the granular level of this knowledge using the persona profile. The only way we can truly partner with our clients in this effort is if we know what they know. It’s not enough to have an education in marketing.

We should be as familiar with the demographics, nuance, household brand names, and landscape as our clients are. By virtue of the shared experience of living in Southeastern PA, we more intuitively understand who our clients are trying to reach with their marketing.

Looking down Main Street in Ambler, PA

If a client comes to us after working with an agency in another state, they may feel a huge sense of relief. They don’t have to explain the differences between Ambler, Lansdale, Quakertown, Newtown, and New Hope. When they begin describing their ideal client, we can picture real people we know. We get the implications behind the local brand names that come up, the schools kids attend, the routes people drive, and the places people work. We can better select a stock photo because we know what house in Blue Bell would look like versus one in Pennsburg.

There is a high level of unspoken mutual understanding when businesses and clients occupy the same local space. If you have ever had to try to explain our Bucks and Montgomery County region to someone who isn’t from around here, you probably understand why this is so important in planning a marketing strategy!

3. Nothing beats being in-person

Right now, the Christmas season is upon us. Christians are celebrating the birth of Jesus and the miracle of the incarnation - God taking on flesh and living among His people. Regardless of your religious beliefs, this idea resonates because we all understand that humans are physical beings. We may have a spiritual side, but we also have physical bodies and live in a physical world. There’s something about sharing the same physical space with another person that strengthens a relationship in ways virtual interactions simply can’t match.

One of the benefits of partnering with local clients is the opportunity to meet in person when it matters. Most of our work happens virtually for efficiency and convenience, but even a single face-to-face meeting can strengthen trust, clarity, and collaboration. The better our relationship with a client, the better our strategic work becomes. By serving local businesses, we preserve the ability to occasionally sit across the table from each other - something that ultimately elevates the quality of the marketing we deliver.

Local Marketing Strategies Based on Real World Data

Even though Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work lives on the internet, real world locations still matter. All marketing strategies are built with end users in mind, which means we are working hard to target people who live and work in real places.

A local marketing agency can interpret the demographic data more efficiently than an agency that simply doesn’t know the region. We can review the metrics and see how visibility is doing in one small town versus the one nearby (Perkasie vs. Chalfont, for example), we filter it through our existing demographic understanding. This allows a local agency to develop more finely tuned strategies in SEO, location landing pages, Meta pay per click ads, email marketing, social media content, and blogs. 

Offline, local agencies, alongside with their local clients, have their finger on the pulse of local marketing opportunities. We have relevant information about local media, print advertising, signage, etc. that can enhance the visibility of any particular activity. For example, it’s one thing to review estimated impressions and suggest a billboard is good for business. It’s a quite different thing to know which exact billboard location it is and whether people will actually see it while driving.

Our Mission is to Serve Local Businesses

It is not always easy for a business to narrow its service area. The prospect of turning down a client because they are too far away, especially when the service seems like a good fit, is nerve-wracking! But the reality is that we simply cannot serve everyone. And that being true (we promise it’s true), we need to decide who we serve best.

At Marketing to Mission, we stand by our commitment to serve our local clients best. Local is the heart of our business, just like it is the heart of many of our client businesses. When we meet a prospective client outside our service area of the Philadelphia suburbs, we will provide a referral to another agency rather than a quote for services. This allows us to focus on our most ideal clients and how we support them in their mission.

If it feels like your marketing agency doesn’t really know you or the clients you want to reach, have you considered their location as a factor? There are some things that simply can’t be explained in words, and the unique culture of your local region is one of them.

No matter where you are located, we urge you to reach out to a marketing agency that is close to you. If your business is in Montgomery or Bucks County, Pennsylvania, we hope you’ll reach out to us! We will dig deeper into finding out if we’re a good fit for each other during a discovery call.