Does blogging make sense for local SEO?

I usually do SEO on a national scale, and blogging/building links to those blogs is the meat and potatoes of all of my SEO strategies.

For national strategies, not only is it effective at link building, but it also can refer purchase-intent traffic that generates leads/sales. (i.e. a blog on "what is [money-keyword] price")

For a local company that only has 2 locations in neighboring regions, this doesn't seem to make as much sense. The national traffic in and of itself means virtually nothing, and the links built/earned would not be localized.

I know citations & local links are more important, but there is only so much of that I can do.

Does it make sense to keep blogging and ranking nationally for a local brick and mortar company? In general, what is the best ongoing local SEO strategy? More PR type stuff for local backlinks maybe? Maybe write blog topics that are related to that location?