Does your online business serve a specific geographic area? If you’re looking for readership or customers specifically in the area of Charlotte, NC, then you would be well served to look for a Charlotte marketing agency. A local firm should be able to help you develop an online marketing strategy that is focused on the local area, complete with search engine optimization terms and web design content that reflects local knowledge and sensibilities.

If your website is entirely general, and readership could come from any corner of the country or globe without having an impact on your business, then you probably don’t have to worry about localized marketing. In that case you could hire a marketing agency from Charlotte or from Los Angeles, or from Timbuktu. It doesn’t matter, per se, although we’d encourage you to note that North Carolina has become a tremendous hub for the information technology industry in recent years, so a web-focused Charlotte marketing agency is probably as safe a bet for generalized marketing as for localized.

Furthermore, having a generalized focus in your personal marketing strategy doesn’t necessarily mean that that strategy will stand up to scrutiny over the long term. The familiar goal for 21st century marketers and their clients is to “go viral,” but in the excitement to do so we often forget that popularity and brand loyalty are still largely products of word-of-mouth. Viral successes generally start by spreading among close-knit groups of people who have both online and offline relationships with one another.

This is to say that if your nationally-focused website develops early popularity in one region, you should do the best you can to exploit it. If your earliest analyses of traffic patterns show recurring visits from North Carolina, you might want to consider retaining the services of a Charlotte marketing agency to help build upon that initial success. If you choose wisely from among the experienced firms in the area, you’ll probably find that such an agency will be able to help you improve your original, nationwide campaign right alongside the new, localized one.

The question then arises as to what happens when your Charlotte marketing agency’s traffic analytics start to demonstrate that you’re acquiring localized popularity in other areas as well. One option is to simply take that as a sign of success and keep going with the strategy that you and your agency developed together. But another option is to recognize the opportunity to target some or all of those markets, as well.

At this point, hiring separate marketing agencies in each area would be cumbersome, but if your Charlotte marketing agency was successful in building website content and managing social media with its own locality in mind, it may be able to design additional websites and identify additional search terms and content keywords that exploit the wants and needs of your new markets, right alongside Charlotte.

The short version of all this is that web marketing is not an all-or-nothing proposition, with no geographic specificity, as some might suppose. It affords the site owner with interesting opportunities to build brand awareness in an organic way, going from place to place after starting in one’s own local area, as with a Charlotte, NC marketing agency.