What is Local Marketing?
Local marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on consumers within a certain geographical range around your business’ physical location. Local marketing can be an extremely useful strategy for any business, small or large. For small businesses, it’s especially helpful in the business growing, increasing their brand awareness, and effectively marketing on a smaller budget.
So how do you implement local marketing strategies? Check out the guide below.
A Guide to Local Marketing for Your Business
Local SEO
Local SEO plays a huge role in your business being found online. This can affect your discoverability on Google and other search engines. As you focus on your SEO strategy, here are a few short tips to help improve your website’s discoverability online:
- Have your website’s structure set up for search engines to be able to crawl your site. This includes having good navigation, a good link structure, and utilizing title and meta tags. To improve your local SEO, use title and meta tags that are keyword-optimized throughout your site with relevant keywords such as your product or services and location.
- Make sure your website is designed to be responsive to all devices.
- Have your business’s information (name, address, phone, email) located on every page of your website. This can be easily done by placing this information in the footer of your site.
- Create a Google My Business and Bing Places for Business listings.
Once your site is designed and structured well for search engines, you can begin to focus on improving your local search rankings. You can read more in-depth on tips for how to improve your local search rankings here.
Be Involved in the Community
Being involved in local events and giving back to your community is an excellent way to increase your local brand recognition and show your local community that your business cares. Consumers today care more than ever about what businesses stand for, how they are giving back, and other social responsibilities.
Attending or sponsoring local events provides customers the opportunity to see your brand in action outside of the walls of your business and to interact with your brand in person. While at these events you can give out promotional products or information cards about your business. This is a great way to get your brand known in the local area and will allow your business to meet many locals.
Local Advertising: Online and Offline
Local advertising is one tool you can incorporate into your local marketing strategy. You can do this online through search ads and social media ads. When creating ads, you can target your specific location and set up a specific mile radius around your business. This allows you to show your ads to people in your area and can target them with specific messages tailored to your local community. The landing pages for these ads should be optimized for local as well.
With the digital prominence in today’s world, many people tend to get so focused on online strategies that they forget about the power of offline advertising. Offline advertising can be especially powerful for local marketing. You can direct-mail a promotional offer or coupon to residents in the area or buy an ad in the local newspaper, magazine, or radio station.
Register Your Business on Local Business Directories
Registering your business on local business directories will help make your business more known and discoverable in the local area. Just a quick search and you can find a variety of business listings for your city or county. When submitting your business information for these registries, make sure that you keep the information consistent. If you use abbreviations in one, use it in the other. You want your business name, address, and phone number to be formatted in the exact same way to minimize confusion and help build consistency with your brand.
Cross Promotions with Other Local Businesses
Cross promotions with other local businesses are a local marketing strategy that can help your business in many ways, such as increasing brand awareness, networking, and engaging with other local business owners. Through cross promotions, your business could connect with customers you might not have otherwise, and you can increase your business’s brand recognition in the area. Be wise in which business you choose to cross promote with and make sure the promotion combo makes sense for your business.
Local marketing is key to increasing business in your local area and the results businesses have experienced from local marketing have proven the importance of it being part of your overall marketing strategy. Local marketing is a great way for small businesses to grow their business without having to dish out a huge budget for marketing or trying to compete with the large corporations of the world. While local marketing can be extremely beneficial for small businesses, it is also beneficial for businesses of all sizes.
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