The Glasgow Effect - is keeping it local a good marketing strategy?

The internet could not disguise it’s outrage after artist Ellie Harrison set up the Facebook page describing her latest project “The Glasgow Effect”. This project involves Ellie not leaving the greater Glasgow area for an entire year, in order to “test the limits of a ‘sustainable practice’ and to challenge the demand-to-travel placed upon the ‘successful’ artist / academic.”

The controversial part of this project for many, is that Ellie received a grant of £15,000 to undertake the experiment from Creative Scotland through the Open Project Funding Programme. The mob could not contain themselves, highlighting that many people in Glasgow never leave the area, and don't even come close to earning £15,000 per year, accusing Ellie of attempting to create “poverty porn”.

The premise of Ellie’s project is that many artists and academics feel the need to move away to become successful. However in the world of content marketing, we like to think the opposite may be true. This post looks at how marketing locally and focussing content on a local audience allows for greater engagement, and

Local Content Marketing

One of the most important questions content marketers ask themselves is : who are my audience? Answering this question is difficult to master, but ever so important.For example, a property law firm based in Glasgow may produce insightful and engaging content about UK affairs, which is excellent. However, they are far more likely to generate business by producing content that relates more directly to their target audience - those looking to sell or purchase property in Glasgow. Rather than discuss property prices throughout the UK, the firm is much more likely to be found in search and be contacted by visitors to their site, if they choose to produce content that is Glasgow specific.

For small to medium sized businesses local content marketing is much easier as these types of business have the flexibility and local knowledge to engage with their local community. However, the benefits of local marketing can be applied to larger companies too. Large businesses serving multiple locations across the UK can create a solid local presence in each of the locations where the desire to win business. This can be done through creating local pages and creating locality specific content.

How do Curated Media do Local Content marketing?

Creating content with a specified locality in mind can be challenging - especially since we cant live in all of our clients operating areas at once. However, there are a number of tools and tactics we use to ensure we are delivering what our clients customers want.

We work with SEO experts who let us know what areas we should be targeting to win business for our clients. It’s not just about targeting big cities, going hyper local can be useful for building business too. Many people search for law firms in their local town or area of the city, and when they do, we want them to find our content.

We also like to work closely with our clients to find out what is going on in their local area, and to discover what issues they feel are of interest to their clients. Even if our clients can’t help us out with this information, there are other ways we can gather the information we need to create targeted content. Using tools such as Google Alerts and Twitter, we can keep up with local news and conversation so that we can react to current issues quickly.

This month we are also looking forward to keeping it local at The Glasgow Digital Meetup to hear all about Scoop - a new social media monitoring tool that will allow us to find out news before it breaks in mainstream media. The meet up is taking place on 28th January (details here) and we’d love to chat if you're going along too.

Content Marketing for Law Firms

If you would like some help to nurture your own content, Curated Media can help. We work with lawyers and law firms to help fulfill their online content needs. Our team of experienced writers, lawyers, online marketers and web developers have the practical knowledge to curate, as well as create.

Contact Us.
 0808 301 5192 or fill out our online enquiry form