Content Writer
Have you just opened a new business in town and are looking to learn how to better promote your business through local marketing?
Nowadays, marketing a business can bring you customers from all over the world, both online and offline. But before expanding on a national or international level, you need to first focus your marketing efforts on your local community. VoIP phone systems can be used by companies of various kinds, including small, medium, and big businesses.
Local marketing is an important puzzle piece of a wider marketing plan. It can help bring success and attract an audience from within reach. Word of mouth travels fast, and for that to happen, you might be in need of need a few online local marketing aces up your sleeve.
Let’s dive in and see what effective local marketing tactics you should include in your strategy.
Get the guide for creating a social media marketing plan for your business.
What Is Local Marketing?
Shortly, local marketing is all about marketing a brick-and-mortar business to an audience that lives in close proximity to the area where a business operates.
We can often talk about a 50-mile radius of the spot where you can find the physical location of a business. In some cases, local marketing is also known as “local store marketing” or “neighborhood marketing”.
Local marketing is often used by businesses such as cafes, bars, restaurants, stores, agencies, or brick-and-mortar businesses.
Both physical and online local marketing has the following benefits:
- Increased visibility on local Google searches
- Local brand awareness
- More in-store visits
- Better targeting of local consumers
Local Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
So, you are probably wondering how can you market your business successfully in your local area? Well, there are a few marketing strategies that can easily be adapted to any local business, and they won’t require you to invest too much money.
Here are five effective local marketing strategies for small businesses:
- Increase visibility with Google Business Profile
- Have a mobile-friendly website
- Build a strong social media presence
- Leverage user reviews
- Use local SEO
Let’s learn more about these tactics and find out how do successful local business owners use them to promote their brands!
1. Increase Visibility with Google Business Profile
One of the most important local marketing strategies we’re going to discuss is having a Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) account.
Google Business Profile is a free tool that is great for online local marketing. That is because it allows businesses to manage their online presence on Google. This is effective especially if you own a small business, like restaurant management.
Not only will you be able to create an account for your business and all the information your customers need to know about your business, but you will appear at the top of local listings (both on Google searches and Google Maps).
Having a well-optimized Google Business Profile Account can help you differentiate yourself from other local businesses, and attract more customers as a result.
Marketing locally means your audience and local community can find your business when searching for “Stores near me”, for example. However, just creating your Google Business Profile profile won’t ensure that your business will be visible when a user performs a Google Search.
Here are the details you need to add to your Google Business Profile listing:
- Business description
- Contact, location, and availability data (phone number, business name, working hours, and address)
- Business categories (e.g. vegan restaurant)
- Frequently asked questions (FAQ) with helpful answers
- Link to your website
Create and Share Content on Google Business Profile
Besides having a detailed Google Business Profile, you also have to share content regularly to reach your audience and enhance your local marketing results.
Google posts appear under your business listing and expire after seven days.
Maintaining a consistent posting schedule is effective for your local marketing campaigns. And the best part is that it’s very low maintenance—all you have to do is make one post a week.
Google Business Profile should be mostly promotional so that you can encourage your potential customers to go to your website or make an in-store visit to take advantage of your latest offers.
Make sure you keep your message clear and straight to the point and your visuals as engaging as possible. After all, you want your posts to immediately catch your audience’s attention.
To make sure you always have content planned out for all your upcoming campaigns and promotions, create and schedule your posts ahead of time with SocialBee.
SocialBee is a social media management platform that allows you to share all your social media content from one place. Forget about the hassle of manually going to each social media platform to create and share content. Now you can open SocialBee and carry out the entire process from one single tab.
Adjust your content specifically for Google Business Profile. Change your word count, adjust image sizes and add CTAs to abide by Google’s requirements.
Start your 14-day SocialBee trial today for free!
In SocialBee’s content editor you will find all the tools you need to create you Google posts, from standard CTA types to a Canva shortcut that allows you to create your visuals directly from SocialBee, and much more.
2. Have a Mobile-Friendly Website
It’s no secret that marketing local businesses or any other small businesses nowadays takes place mostly online. Also, most people use mobile devices for online navigation. In fact, 62% of the traffic websites got in 2022 came from mobile devices.
So, there is no denying that mobile optimization is an important item on our list of local marketing strategies you should invest in.
Optimizing your website for mobile devices concentrates on aspects such as:
- Loading time – Your website should load in around three seconds.
- Text size – Mobile screens require bigger fonts, so make sure that your text is comprehensive.
- Buttons – Mobile screens will require bigger buttons as well, that don’t overlap other buttons.
- Menu – An easy and intuitive interface will provide a better user experience. The categories visible on the desktop should be properly configured on a mobile device too.
If you’re not sure whether your web page is mobile-friendly or not, Google’s Mobile-Friendly test can give you the answer.
3. Build a Strong Social Media Presence
Having a strong social media presence is another great strategy in our list of local marketing ideas. And it’s also one of the most popular marketing strategies for local businesses.
In fact, a social media profile can expose your local business to more people and keep you closer to those already following your business, as you can share local events, news, images, or videos, among other pieces of information.
Make sure you post on your profile regularly, to build your presence and create a strong community around your brand.
For local businesses, location tags are essential if you want to target leads from your area. Social media platforms offer localization options, and these are great for connecting with a local audience.
Here is how to use locations effectively on social media:
- Create a check-in from time to time
- Include your business location in your account’s bio
- Add location tags to your posts
- Photograph your products around town and share the results on social media
As an example, if your local business uses Instagram as the main social media platform, adding a location to your posts will boost its visibility in local searches.
You can easily add a location tag to your Instagram posts from SocialBee’s content editor. Not only this, but you can also customize your posts to fit the requirements of each social media platform you included in your content marketing strategy.
With tools like SocialBee, running successful local marketing campaigns on social media is a piece of cake. You have all the tools you need to create your posts from scratch along with advanced scheduling options that post your content on the right platform at the right time.
SocialBee: Your AI-powered social media management tool
4. Leverage User Reviews
We can’t talk about local marketing ideas, without mentioning user-generated content. After all, many local marketing strategies revolve around targeting specific groups of people and giving them the social proof they need to gain their trust.
Reviews are an important part of any business and act as an informal customer referral. They are also a good starting point for local customers, as well as target customers. Especially when they have to choose between your business and a competitor’s business.
A review or recommendation is valuable, as it shows potential customers that your local business is trustworthy and authentic. You can get more personalized reviews with account-based marketing, so it will be best to explore ABM campaign examples. Also, good reviews bring you higher rankings, and this digital word-of-mouth system can work wonders for your business.
Getting reviews might not be as easy as one might think, but you can:
- Add a “Review” or “Rate” button to your website or app (if that’s the case).
- Send an e-mail to your customers after they’ve received their order.
- Make use of social media platforms to ask your customers to review a product – this can lead to a social media engagement boost as well.
- Take time to reply to all of your customer reviews.
- Provide your customers with a great customer experience.
Of course, reviews aren’t always 100% positive, but even so, discarding negative feedback is not recommended. That is because negative can help you improve your local business or provide solutions to a problem you didn’t foresee.
Negative reviews can also help you break down any problems with your products, customer service, delivery, or business. Thus, you can find a solution to these problems and keep both your external and local customers happy.
5. Use Local SEO
There’s one more aspect that needs to be tackled when promoting your business on the local market, and that’s local SEO.
Local search engine optimization is a strategy that can give local business owners more visibility on search engines such as Google. Shortly, the rules of SEO don’t change that much when we’re talking about local SEO. It’s more of a geographical addition to the SEO you’d already go for.
Thus, the focus isn’t only on keywords that represent different products or topics related to your business. Local SEO will also require relevant terms for the city where your business is located.
Here are a few ways you can boost your local search:
- Update your Google Business Profile account.
- Update your NAP (name, address, phone number) – make sure it’s text, though, not just an image.
- Add locations to your website – you can add a Google Map, or use location pages in case you have more than one location. Make sure all the information is accurate.
- Share local content – you can promote local events or news to gain authority locally and boost local searches.
- Use location-based keywords, to match your local area and attract customers. You can use these keywords in your content, meta-content, as well as your URL or page names.
- Redirect your in-store customers to your website and social media pages through a dynamic QR code generator.
You can use tools such as Moz Local for local business listing verification and Ahrefs for keyword research or backlinks.
Build Your Successful Local Marketing Strategy
Are you ready to implement local marketing strategies into your action plan?
As a small business, a strong digital marketing strategy can bring you exposure and success. After doing the hard work of registering your LLC, you will need to prioritize focusing on your local marketing efforts to attract new customers and build your way up from there.
Local marketing can help you achieve much more than you think without spending large sums of money right at the beginning.
Elements such as local SEO, a Google Business Profile account, reviews, and social media can also help you make the best out of your online advertising strategy.
And it doesn’t have to be difficult to tackle any of these aspects. SocialBee is just one example of how you can minimize effort and maximize results when it comes to social media marketing.
Start your 14-day free trial today and begin your local marketing strategy on the right foot. We’ve got the social media side of things covered so you can focus your attention on the other pressing things from your to-do list.
