Here is something that I tried - it is a lot of work but it seems to be working over here in South Africa.
I developed seperate web sites with one targeting the local market's needs and registered a .co.za, the other targeting the International market with a .com domain
smswarehouse.com is hosted on a server in North America and targets the International community
smswarehouse.co.za is hosted on a server in South Africa
The content is completely different as the local market has other needs that my international clients
It is a lot of work but it seems to be working well
There is another reason for this too - some of our local search engines just do not accept .com URL's - a bit limiting Also, in my personal experience I found our local search engines working completely different than the International search engines - I think it would be fair to say that our search technology is a bit behind in times.
I did this as an experiment to see if it is making a difference - it did as far as my local market is concerned.
Whether it will work somewhere else is hard to say. You will have to test it.
Besides the above, having a .co.za domain name registered and owned by me protects my brand locally.