When you’re part of a local community, you utilize local businesses. A hair stylist for regular haircuts. A pizza place that delivers to your home. A plumber for those occasional mishaps that always seem to come up at the worst times.
Years ago, you might have turned to a neighbor or coworker to find the right services. Now, that information is a mere click away. Google it, and you’ll discover all these businesses and more waiting for you.
But here’s the thing: you can only find the businesses that have invested in local marketing. Are you there?
What Is Local Marketing?
Where do people go to learn about local businesses? Would it surprise you to learn that 97 percent of people head online for that education? Or that 88 percent of searches for local businesses occur on mobile devices, and they turn around and visit that business within the next 24 hours?
To reap the benefits of those statistics, you have to be where people are searching. Local marketing targets consumers and potential customers within a certain radius of your physical location. It involves strategies and tactics to attract and engage these prospects and customers within specific geographical areas.
But don’t assume this is easy. Competition can be fierce, depending on your niche and specialty. You’ll need an understanding of the top digital marketing tactics to help new and repeat customers find you. It’s something you’ll work on continually.
What Businesses Benefit From Local Marketing?
Many businesses can benefit from local marketing if they have a local presence. However, specific businesses benefit more than others.
- Restaurants: Restaurants thrive on local business. They have physical locations that offer dine-in, takeout, mobile ordering, and delivery services.
- Retail operations: When your business relies on foot traffic, local marketing can benefit you. Local marketing can increase a store’s foot traffic and help build up its brand.
- Professional services: Nothing beats in-person consultations. That’s how many professional services thrive.
These businesses have the opportunity to use various online techniques to attract and engage with online clientele. Precise targeting ensures online messages only reach specific audiences who can visit their local location. So, none of its investment goes to waste.
Specific Local Marketing Strategies to Use Right Now
If you’re going to play in the local market, you’ll have to utilize tactics that can attract and engage local customers. These are the tools you should be using right now:
Mobile-Friendly Web Presence
The world searches from mobile devices more frequently than from laptops or desktops. It increases when searching for local businesses.
Studies also find that people get serious when searching from their mobile devices. Google users often refine their initial searches when the results don’t match what they seek. On mobile, they do it 29.3 percent of the time compared to 17.9 percent on desktop. Could it be that mobile searchers know what they want and keep searching until they find an answer?
Mobile-friendly sites are built for the way mobile users search. They load seamlessly as they come up. They show bigger text, menus, and buttons to make it easier to browse and get information on the go.
Before you move on to other local marketing techniques, take a hard look at your current site on a mobile device. If it isn’t mobile-friendly, that’s the first place to start.
Local SEO
Now it’s time to start tailoring your online presence to resonate with the needs of your local audience. This is what’s known as local SEO. If you’ve ever performed SEO on your site before, you understand how optimizing to increase your website’s ranking on the search engines works. Local SEO takes it to the next level and ensures you’re where local customers are looking.
How is it different? Let’s say you operate a pizza restaurant, and you’ve worked to optimize your website with keywords like “pizza restaurant” and “pizza delivery” in the past. Local SEO would help boost local online search presence with a more localized theme, like “Portland pizza” or “best Portland Oregon pizza.”
To increase visibility, local SEO helps integrate local keywords into your content. It creates a dedicated “locations” page with helpful information about your restaurant. It ensures your geographical information is accurate and clearly defined throughout your site.
Social Media Engagement
Now that your site is optimized for local, it’s time to ensure your social media profiles are optimized too. Begin by making your location information available to anyone who lands on your profile.
You can easily display it in your profile if you operate out of one location. For multiple locations, you can use bio-linking tools to ensure all your locations are represented. You can get creative with this—why not use Story Highlights called Locations? Then, when someone clicks, you can feature photos and stories from each location.
You should also use location tags and relevant hashtags every time you post new content. That way, anyone searching can find what you offer more easily.
Community Events
Local businesses should never be in it alone. You’re working hard to attract local customers and be a part of the community. Other businesses are working at it too. Why not approach local marketing together?
This can work in two ways. First, identify and approach a business that shares your values and target markets. Create a partnership in which you help each other through social media, newsletters, or in-store promotions.
Second, you can also participate in local community events that bring people together. Watch for events in your local news or approach your local Chamber of Commerce. This is a great way to get out and be a part of something local—you never know the opportunities that may come your way.
Build Your Local Marketing Strategy Now
These are just a few strategies businesses use to build up their local audience. Local marketing is a carefully crafted mix of creativity, skill, and utilizing the right tools to reach out and engage with people ready to do business with you. Have you achieved the local results you’re looking for?
If not, we can help. Getting your business in front of prospective local customers doesn’t have to be complicated. But it does take action. Have you worked on your local marketing strategy this year?
