How to market locally for a national brand?

[Masbro]

I just got a new client that offers travel information for cities throughout the US and Canada. They have a specific page set up for most locations. I want to promote each page for that community, but the task is very daunting, as you could imagine. It's almost like having a separate client in each city.

I've optimized the title tags, meta descriptions, content and so forth, but that's not enough. Engaging in a backlinking and social media strategy for each location is insane - I wouldn't have enough time in the day. Looking for off page promotional ideas that can be scaled nationally.

Does anyone have a similar situation with a national brand, or any ideas you'd like to share?

[simplycary]

Create a fantastic piece of evergreen content for the major areas surrounding cities you target. The content for each smaller city will be used to build out large context for the major pieces of evergreen content.

so you end up with:

MAJOR ARTICLE ABOUT EVERYTHING IN NEW ENGLAND

^stuff to do in [enter city]

^best parks in [enter city]

^top 10 restaurants in [enter city]

Over time you end up with rich major pages that target large areas - with smaller niche content that is linking to and drawing deeper context to ALL things about an area. With smart URL's and initiatives such as targeted local facebook ads propagating content - and getting local bloggers involved - it'll all be downhill from there.

[sachin-sv]

Hi Masbro,

Here are some suggestions:

• You can participate in national travel communities/ forums like TripAdvisor. They usually have city-wise segregation for city specific discussions.

• You can be a part of various local travel groups on Facebook. Here, you can find national as well as city specific groups. For example: Explore Canada (https://www.facebook.com/ExploreCanada) for Canada as a whole and Visit Toronto (https://www.facebook.com/visittoronto) for Toronto as specific location. It’s not just Facebook but other platforms like Twitter engagement, blogging, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, all are important.

• Engagement with local travel bloggers can be good idea.

• Image platforms like Instagram is again a worth try. When you are planning to market a destination where your travel agency offers a trip, pictures could be the thing you would like to show to your potential customers. Most of the people decide the spot where they want to go for a vacation after seeing the images, mostly on the internet. So, the images are probably the best tools for travel marketing, especially when it is performed online.

Hope this will help.

[DennisSeymour]

First of all, youll need a lot of help.

A go to strategy for scaling this for me is using an infographic.

Find a common topic of interest that can be changed per city. So you have this interesting, informational infographic that you can scale per city and promote in different channels there.

Sachin mentioned travel bloggers, and he is right on that one. I would take it a step further and "pay" (sensitive area here on moz but these guys are like mom bloggers and will want compensation) these guys to write consistently about your brand, linking to cities that they cover. So that scales on it's own, just keep track of publish dates and try to have a read of their content before it gets published to make the most of each one.

[Masbro]

Thanks for the responses! I'm not afraid of the work, but to tackle each market is going to take a lot of resources to do effectively, which I don't have. I think I'm going to have to choose the top markets, work on as many of them as I can and work my way down to the smaller ones.

I like the infographic idea. I think that can work well for what I'm trying to do. Reaching out to travel bloggers in each market is another good one, if my budget allows for it.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.