Strategies to stay top of mind in local markets

Justin Ulrich
Was all that stuff that I said true?

Erin Levzow
Yes, everything was true. Fact checked.

Justin Ulrich
All right. Even that you’re an incredible marketer. I know that to be a fact. But the competitive dancer. Did you just have a recent competition?

Erin Levzow
Yes, I was just in Chicago for Fred Astaire’s dance sport competition. And yes, I am a competitive ballroom dancer.

Justin Ulrich
Nice, nice. And you did well.

Erin Levzow
I did very well. I won for showcase, which is like a theater theatrical piece. And then in both of my championship rounds for rhythm, came in second against some pretty incredible dancers. So I felt really good. And you never know how you’re going to do, and it’s supposed to be about how you dance, but sometimes I black out when I’m out there. So when I watched the video. Oh, that was all right.

Justin Ulrich
You’re like, where am I? When you’re done. Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, hey, why don’t we just get started with you telling us a little bit about your journey, maybe your background and what you’re working on today.

Erin Levzow
Yeah, absolutely. Well, my background. I grew up in Illinois and have a degree in theater. And after college, headed out to Vegas and found an apartment. Slept on the floor of this apartment until I could find a job and started in theater. Fell into HR talent development from theatre, but working in the casino space. So for Caesars corporate. 

And when the recession hit, my career really started in marketing because I was let go as a trainer, because they don’t need trainers when everyone was losing their job and they weren’t hiring people. They said, what do you want to do? And I said, I do anything. They said, what do you know about Internet marketing? And I said, I have the Facebook. And I got Facebook. 

Justin Ulrich
The Facebook.

Erin Levzow
Yeah. I started at the bottom. I was like the coffee go getter, the PowerPoint clicker. Like, there was no one below me. I would…I took on everything and anything someone threw at me. And I worked my way up, and I went from Caesars to MGM, where I moved into a manager role. I’m doing all media buying and planning for all, many of the properties, then went to Palms. 

And then we just decided to, not that there’s anything wrong with raising children in Las Vegas, but we decided we wanted a little bit different vibe and so moved. Went to work for Wingstop in Dallas. That led me to Freebirds after that, as the CMO, and then left there, went to Hathaway, now Bounteous, the martech agency, leading the vertical for CRM and strategic services, and then was recruited up to Wisconsin to be the CMO of Marcus Hotels and Resorts. 

21 hotel property throughout the US, and 50 independent restaurants. And then left there to go work and lead marketing technology for Del Taco. And I was there when we were acquired by Jack in the Box. So I got to work a little bit on both. And then the Museum of Ice Cream. And now most recently have been consulting on restaurant retail, even memory care, as well as software and tech services for restaurants, which has been really fun.

Justin Ulrich
Very cool. Yeah, restaurants, it’s a fun space to be in, for sure. Especially on the tech side, it’s pretty cool. So I guess let’s maybe you can tell us a little bit about, like, what you think is the most important aspect of local marketing and what you think moves the needle the most.

Erin Levzow
Well, with local marketing, what’s great about it is you have to understand the market in which you’re in. Right. It’s in the title local marketing, but so many companies don’t. They look at it and they go, it’s cookie cutter. If I do this in this city, I should do it in this city. And what connects with your community can be different, right? Right. 

It’s still a connection, but it can be vastly different on where you want to pop up, what you want to show. And so for me, local marketing could be just. It starts with knowing your audience. Right. Who are you talking to? Why are you talking to them? And what makes up that audience? Who’s coming in in your trade area? 

And then whether it’s grassroots, which is still boots on the ground, or digital, those are the best ways to get to that customer as quickly as possible. But you have to be able to speak the language, and the language is the community of which you’re in.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure. On the digital side, we get, a lot of our guests do talk to the community involvement aspect, like engaging with folks, like kind of being the mayor of your community and trying to get in front of many people as possible, doing co-marketing and stuff like that. But on the digital side, we don’t really get too many folks sharing their views of that side of the local marketing. 

I don’t know, maybe you could dive in a little bit deeper into, like, digital. Like, what do you think works? Like, how do you engage your different audiences? How do you create messaging that resonates with different segments? I don’t know.

Erin Levzow
So it can be as simple as creating different, again, understand your audience, but creating different segments to speak to. So if I see an ad on social media and the ad says, hey, come into our restaurant and try this. Okay. But now if the ad says, hey, I live in Heartland, hey, Heartland. Game this Friday, pre-game, come into the restaurant and try this, it’s gonna catch my attention. Right? Cause they’re speaking to me. 

They’re speaking to me as the local market. They’re speaking to me as the local restaurant in the local market, which is different than a vast, hey, you’re a worldwide chain that’s trying to connect with me one-on-one in the community. And digital is a very easy place to set that up and do that and be able to connect with an audience based on what you know about them. 

Hey, I have kids. Guess what I’m doing? I’m not sure this weekend, but I’m sure I’m gonna be with my children. How do you speak in the community and what’s going on that’s going to give this ability to stand out in what is a very cluttered ecosystem in digital.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, you know, if you’re listening and you’ve listened to other episodes, you know, we’ve talked about, like, now is the best time. Like, there’s never been a time when folks have access to digital marketing channels like they do today, and especially on the free side of things, because on the organic side, you can create tons, endless amounts of content. 

The more content you create, the faster you create it, the more you learn. You know, you accelerate your learnings, figure out what resonates with your audience, and push different content pieces across different channels. And, you know, there’s really, it’s really, the possibilities are endless in terms of being able to develop content, to be able to connect with your local audience.

Erin Levzow
100%. And I agree that a lot of that local content and creating continuous content is that need to remind people you exist. We are also, and the people that we care about are like, everybody has their own story that they’re going through every single day. And so the idea that, like, a restaurant or a company thinks they’re going to remember me very, very slim, is that going to happen? 

Like, I literally will tell my husband, let’s go to dinner and then he goes, where do you want to go? I can’t think of one restaurant around us all of a sudden. And I’m like, I don’t know. So you end up going to the same place every time because you can’t remember that there are 3000 restaurants because no one reminded me they existed. Right? 

I was just most recently at a medical spa talking to the Medspa company. I was there to get like an IV drip. Big fan of like, getting healthy vitamins in your body. Turns out they help. But as I’m talking to them, they’re telling me, oh, this offer we did, it really worked. And I said, well, what did you do? They said, oh, we did an offer. It’s not even that great of an offer. 

I said, I don’t know that the offer itself worked. I think what worked is you went out and emailed your list. You went and texted people. You sent all your current clients that. I said, what you just did was you went out with a mass, hey, remember we exist campaign to your local audience, and you told them why the benefits of this was really good. 

And then you did give them an offer, but the offer wasn’t the driver. It might have created some urgency. You just use the right channels to talk to your local audience. And they were like, oh, that’s interesting. And they’re like, so we don’t need an offer. I was like, I’m not saying that. That’s not what actually moved the needle for you. It was reminding people that you exist.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. Staying top of mind, because it’s not every day, every, for the most part. Most folks aren’t like, every single day, I’m gonna go eat out. You know, what’s a restaurant near me? It’s like, for me, for my family, it’s like, maybe once, maybe twice. I’m sorry, once a week, maybe once every other week, depending on if we’re doing something special for the kiddos or want to take the whole family out, whatever it might be.

Erin Levzow
It gets really like, I have three kids and they started eating a lot more as they grew up and also normal, but gets way more expensive when all of a sudden they’re like, no, I don’t want the kids meal. I want the adult. And I was like, but you still qualify. Get the kids meal. Get the kids meal. One fourth of what the adult price is.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, it’s so true. Yeah, we, we run into that all the time. My son, he’s just like, dad, I just wanted. He gets the adult meal. Ever since he was ten, he just and he houses it because he’s just a growing kid, you know.

Erin Levzow
And eat off other people’s plates, too. Like my, even my daughters grow. They’re just like, hey, are you going to eat that? I was like, guess not. You already took it. So.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, yeah. It’s something that’s important is like you said, it’s important to stay top of mind because if that every other week you’re going out, it’s like when you have to make that choice, you want to make sure that you’ve been served up some form of communication and it could be creating compelling enough content that’s fun. 

It’s engaging enough, maybe organic on social to get people to want to subscribe so they’re seeing your stuff more often, or maybe you’re just creating more engaging content. The algorithms are going to want to serve up because they know it’s really good. And that type of stuff keeps you top of mind. 

When it comes time to make the choice, whether you’re a med spa or a restaurant, whatever it might be, they’re going to think of you.

Erin Levzow
And you have to target, you have to…and using paid social and organic social are different reasons to use both, right? Organic, you’re going after someone who likely already knows you exist, right? They’re going to see your post, they already follow you or their friend engaged in your post and it’s getting served up to you, but they probably know that you exist so you can start talk to them like you have a little bit of a friendship. 

You’re paid social, you want to go after that new customer, but you also still need to have some paid social, whether it’s boosting a post or promoting organic posts so that you, because again, organic algorithm, your whole audience is not seeing that post. We all like to think that every piece of content we put out is gold, but it’s not. 

And so not everybody gets to see it. And so you can boost that to get those really important organic pieces in front of people. But then you’re paid social. Go after the new customers, go introduce yourself, tell them why you exist and what makes you different as quickly as you can in, you know, 3 seconds or less, and then eventually they’ll move over. 

But when’s the last time you’ve gone to a restaurant, sat down and picked up your phone, went, you know what? I think I’m going to follow these guys on Instagram or Facebook. You just don’t. So likely a lot of your customers are not walking in and go and are already on your social media so you do need to promote and pay for some of that.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. What are some tactics that you’ve tried that have worked really well? Whether it’s a campaign on social or anything, really.

Erin Levzow
When it’s all connected, when the same story you’re telling is connected, it works really, really well. Partnerships also work really well because local community partnerships, when you’re talking about marketing, whether you bring that partnership to life digitally or in real life, even better if you do it across all verticals, but you’re getting to their audience. 

So, for instance, like Museum Ice Cream, we partnered with Kendra Scott. It made all the sense in the world. They happen to be very close to one of our locations, and that way, we were getting to the very Kendra Scott avid followers and reaching them. But they were also excited about the partnership because they were getting to the Museum of Ice Cream fans and followers. 

Whether it was like Wingstop, we would partner with local community sports teams or national sports team in that local community. And again, same thing. We’re getting our message about wings, which it turns out, sports fan enjoys wings, typically. So their customer, and they’re getting their message about following that sport and the engagement with us to each other. So it really benefits both parties. 

In fact, we even worked with, like, WWE, the same idea, like, let’s go after. Where’s our customer? What do they look like and where are they sitting and what are they doing? And then finding those right partnerships. And when you do that, whether it’s with the local, you know, soccer team, that’s like all six. Whatever it might be, getting your message out there in the community really helps. 

The other thing I find, I was part of the Book It. Remember the Book It program at Pizza Hut when it was called that as kids? And, like, you actually had to go to Pizza Hut and you take your certificate for a personal pan pizza for reading, like, $6, which. And then here. Here’s my certificate. 

But your parents would buy pizza, right? They weren’t going to eat your tiny little, what it probably cost them two cent, super smart local marketing. And restaurants don’t do that anymore. And so getting your local or field marketer to connect with the schools and saying, hey, we want to give every kid here who does jump rope for hard or something, hey, a gift certificate for this. And the only way they can redeem it for their…Culver’s does it. Like a free custard for kids.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah.

Erin Levzow
Well, I’m not going to Culver’s and not getting food for myself.

Justin Ulrich
Right.

Erin Levzow
Which, if you’ve ever had their chicken fingers, they are the best chicken fingers, I think I’ve ever had in my life.

Justin Ulrich
And the cheese curds too. Yeah.

Erin Levzow
Oh, they’re cheese curds. Yes. I mean, I live in Wisconsin, so I’m a cheese curd connoisseur. But they are so good. So good. I’m like shouting out all the restaurants one by one, like it’s kind of like going to Raisins and getting like Texas toast, right? It’s so good. I’m hungry.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, what if you had to make a suggestion for somebody who’s really struggling to drive growth at the local level? What would you suggest they do maybe today or sometime this week to help turn that around for them?

Erin Levzow
So I think sitting down and taking 20 minutes and just going: Who? What does my guests look like? What? Who? Who are they? Right? Whether it’s psychographic, demographic, what is it? What exists around my market, right? Don’t fool yourself and think, oh, I want to go promote 20 miles out. They’re probably not going to drive 20 miles. 

So if you through a net way out there, you’re only going to get one or two people, right? But if you throw a net right in your backyard, lot more likely that people come in. 

Working with partnerships. So where am I located? How many businesses are around me? Let me go talk to those businesses and let’s swap information. Right? Doing drops, those are all grassroots things. Walk to the door and say, hey, because a lot of restaurants will say, once you try our food, you’ll love it. And it’s usually the case, like, I haven’t met a lot of food I don’t like. 

But you drop the food and you say, hey, we want you to try these cookie bites. Come on in. And they do. They try it. And there’s something about this free sample and the same reason Costco still gives free samples. Like, that’s my lunch on Saturday is walking around Costco, I think. 

But you try all these little samples and then you’re like, oh, I do. It’s worth buying a whole thing of it. And so doing that as a restaurant, setting up your paid social so that you’re really targeting and speaking to the local community with it and not going like, I have seen somebody like a one restaurant location do a campaign and they’ll be like, I’ll be like, I saw this in another state. And they’re like, we targeted friends of friends. 

No, you need to keep it in your local community. Like, that was the wrong targeting, buddy. You don’t know what you don’t know, right? Do you have an email list? Do you have an SMS list. And is your data all talking about? 

I consulted on a restaurant solution that brings PoS data and all this data together. And they have an enormous amount of their customer data now because it’s actually integrated, it’s actually built in a way that you can speak to the customer right after they walk in through the door and again, that’s restaurant space. 

Who can do that? There’s not like, most loyalty programs have 10% loyalty, right. Or 20% loyalty. But if you could actually talk to 90% of your customers, then you know exactly what you need to do. So making sure your house is sound. Right. Your business is sound, and how your technology and everything’s set up and then using the tools, whether it’s SMS, email. 

So I know I just started and your question was like, what’s like one thing? Mine is your one thing is to sit down for 20 minutes and figure out what you actually need to do and what’s a nice have. And that will help you a lot. A lot of times I see people, they’ll come to me and they’ll go, we’re having such a hard time hiring, which it’s hard. And. 

But they, I go, where is your now hiring sign? Or you’re hiring now, or jobs open on your location? Well, I don’t know. We’ve never hung up a sign. I said, your customers can be your employees. Someone who already loves your restaurant, likely, if they need a part time job, would be like, yeah, I could work here. That’s cool. 

And you might actually, because they already have money to come into your restaurant, so. And they’re passionate about your food and they already know your brand. Hang up a sign. All right, I could start there. And it’s surprising what little things we overlook because we get too close to it.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, you’re too far in the weeds. Those are all great examples. Have you noticed anyone? It could be folks you’ve worked with, maybe in consulting or just a brand that you’ve engaged with who’s, like, doing local marketing really, really well.

Erin Levzow
There’s a lot of brands. There’s a lot that aren’t. But I have thought Raising Canes has a really great field team and local marketing team, and you see them pop up in different ways. And I think for a while they tried to go cookie cutter and do the same thing in every market. And they got smart to that and went, no, no, no. 

We need people who understand the market. And then you started to see these field teams hire people in the markets instead of being like, we’re gonna all sit in headquarters. No, I want someone that understands the San Antonio market, that sits in San Antonio, that has those personal relationships, because what we find is some markets need that. They need the personal connection. They don’t. 

And you don’t want corporate coming in, going, no, no, no, everyone do this. That doesn’t always work. But there’s truly a lot of them. And it can be as simple as, like, your mom and pop restaurant that does it. We have a restaurant here. There’s two of them, and they’re maxims, and you see their name everywhere. And it’s almost like they took up every ad to sponsor a team or something. 

And you want to go in there, you want to support them because they’re supporting the community. And I think that’s always really nice. When you see that dichotomy play off really, really well. There’s so many that do such a nice job. There’s also restaurants that you see everywhere for a while, and then you see them disappear, and you can almost tell, like, oh, they had a manager change. Like, what happened? Where did you go? 

So it’s really not anything specific other than local marketing. You need someone to do it. And a lot of restaurants just don’t invest or they go, we’re just going to have the GM do it. Well, that’s really difficult because they have to run a restaurant, so it’s hard for them to do marketing too because one’s outside of the four walls and one’s inside of the four walls. And so if you spend your whole day inside the four walls, you really need to hire someone that can focus outside the walls.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure. For sure. All right, well, I think those are all really good insights. Switching gears a little bit. So you talked a little bit earlier about how you’re a competitive dancer.

Erin Levzow
Yeah.

Justin Ulrich
And we hang out a lot at different events, especially lately, have been running into each other at different shows. And that’s all I hear about is dance, dance, dance. Like you. Just teasing. 

Erin Levzow
I sound so cool. 

Justin Ulrich
But I did think it would be funny. I did think it would be funny to drop your image into AI and see if it could crank out you as a contestant on Dancing with the Stars.

Erin Levzow
Oh, my goodness.

Justin Ulrich
Which, ironically enough, I could not get a picture of you and, like, what’s his name? Huff.

Erin Levzow
Derek Huff.

Justin Ulrich
I kept, I kept swapping the face, and it was like, making Derek’s face, your face.

Erin Levzow
Oh, my God.

Justin Ulrich
It was the funniest because you both had, like, blonde features and stuff. It was it was like pulling that in. I was dying laughing. I was like, ah, I can’t really show that one.

Erin Levzow
That’s hysterical. There’s a gentleman who dance runs part of Fred Astaire, Tony Devilani, and he’s from 13 seasons of Dancing with the Stars, one of the pros.

Justin Ulrich
Oh, yeah.

Erin Levzow
He’s wonderful. Like, I just saw him this last weekend in Chicago.

Justin Ulrich
So that’s hilarious.

Erin Levzow
Yeah, it’s really cool. So there is overlap, although Anna Delvey is going to be on Dancing with the Stars this season and she. Do you know who Anna Dudley is?

Justin Ulrich
I don’t. I don’t. I’m going to google it.

Erin Levzow
The woman who, there’s like a whole drama series on her that, like, out of all this money, went to prison for three years. She’s still under house arrest or like, she’s allowed to go around New York, but, like, I still has to wear an ankle monitor and she’s going to wear it on Dancing with the Stars. And it’s very controversial on whether or not they should have let her on. But it’s very interesting. I’m kind of like, it’s all the TikTok content I’ve seen recently.

Justin Ulrich
I’m definitely going to check it out for sure. Well, cool. Before we, before we let you go, why don’t you tell everyone how they could follow you? Social, LinkedIn, Facebook.

Erin Levzow
All the channels. Yeah, LinkedIn, all under Erin Levzow. LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, whatever. If you want to follow on TikTok, you can. It’s just dances with me and my daughters learning silly Barbie dances. So feel free. And. But yes, I’m on all those channels.

Justin Ulrich
Perfect. And if you happen to be in the restaurant industry and you go to different events, Erin seems to be at a lot of different events and she speaks on different panels and actually has some of the most insightful commentary, I think, of most of the folks that I’ve seen. So hats off to you, Erin. 

Everything, when I go to your sessions, it’s always very actionable in terms of the insights you give. You and Rev, I think, are two of my faves for sure.

Erin Levzow
Rev definitely does an amazing job. And he started that because we kept going to these places and people would talk and it was like they were pontificating on marketing and you would walk away and you’re like, well, that sounded cool, but what am I supposed to do?

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, where’s the meat?

Erin Levzow
Yeah. And so he would go, I’m not going to get up there if I’m going to speak I’m going to say things that you can actually go action on very quickly, which is similar. Like the same, same as you. You were like, what is one or two things people can actually. Oh, do.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah.

Erin Levzow
And it’s so much more helpful to, like, someone who’s sitting in the audience. Like, I had two CEO’s come up to me after the last one and say, that was so helpful. Can we talk more? Because they’re sitting in the audience going, they need to boost their sales tomorrow. They don’t want a long tail. I mean, we all need a plan, but they want sales now. 

And so it’s really impressive. I’ve been very impressed with Rev, with listening to you talk. And there’s so many smart people in this space when given the opportunity and get to share that you can learn something.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. Well, for what it’s worth, you and Rev give so much meat, I end up walking away from those sessions with the meat sweats. 

Well, awesome, Erin, it was a ton of fun having you in the lab. Thanks again for joining us, and thanks for everyone for listening.

Erin Levzow
Thank you.

Justin Ulrich
As always, thanks for joining us in the Local Marketing Lab. This podcast was sponsored by Evocalize. To learn more about how Evocalize can help you grow your business, visit evocalize.com. 

If you learned something from today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook @Evocalize. That’s Evocalize and on X at Evocalize. 

And remember, keep innovating and testing new things. You’ll never know what connects with your customers best unless you try. Until next time. Thanks for listening.