Depending on what you are selling, marketing your business to local suburbs often leads to better sales conversion because people prefer to buy from local businesses. If you’re looking to attract more customers locally, there’s no better place than to invest your money in local marketing strategies. If done correctly, you can almost become a local celebrity: wherever you go, people will look at you as if they had seen you somewhere before. I’m sure you’ve seen the following signs in your local shops, stores, and businesses websites.
The problem is that your competitors are doing the same thing – marketing to the locals. And depending on which industry and niche, it can be crowded and competitive. However, if you find that it is not always the case in your target suburbs, count your blessing that your targeted suburbs are still a blue ocean. If you pump money into marketing your business locally, you can easily outwit your competitors and safely expect a happy ROI – before your competitors start swamping in.
Local marketing is simple, but it isn’t always easy. The beauty is that it allows you to target a specific demographic in your local area with minimal costs, which can help grow your business faster by reaching out to potential customers who live within your locality.
This article will explore three (3) local marketing strategies to get more customers and loyalty.
But first.
What Is Local Marketing?
Local marketing is a strategy where you invest resources to market your goods or services to targeted localities. It can be your suburb, city, region, or district area. The focus is on selling to people who are nearby. The mission is to reach out to local prospects and get them to buy from you rather than from companies further away.
Local marketing or “local commerce” are often synonymous. The term “local” here refers to a geographic area smaller than a country or state.
Benefits Of Local Marketing.
Business owners often aspire to reach out to the national or international platform when trying to grow their business, which can be tempting. However, it is still crucial that you take one step at a time, focusing on local marketing for your business as your initial marketing strategy.
It’s a rule of thumb, but you don’t have to follow it. The ideal scenario is to max out your customer base locally, state-wide, nationally, and internationally.
Here are some of the advantages of targeting your local market:
- Sense of certainty: – customers prefer to buy local as it gives them a sense of security and assurance that they can complain to the local authorities, ombudsman, or consumer affairs if anything goes wrong. The consumer’s law will protect them.
- It is easier to convert: When compared to purchasing goods and services overseas, there’s a perceived inconvenience when things go wrong. Even though you can submit a refund but not without jumping through hoops: time zone differences, email delayed correspondence/ responses, lack of support, off-shore support, and postage costs paid by you.
Localising your marketing strategy helps you reach local audiences faster, boost your search rankings and online traffic, and build trust easily with potential customers. Local marketing is the way to go if you’re looking to expand your business to new markets or attract people who haven’t heard of you yet.
Here are three (3) local marketing strategies if you want to dominate your market, locally.
1. Google My Business (GMB)
Google My Business (GMB) is the epitome of local marketing.
50+ years ago, the Yellow Pages, local newspapers, and other classified prints dominated the local marketing media. There were not many choices but to advertise on these media. Remember paying $30 for a 15 words Ad column to fit into a small section in the classified section? That’s savage!
Fast track to the present, they are almost forgotten except by the baby boomers.
Google My Business (GMB) is FREE and easy to use and comes with a dashboard to manage your listing anytime to ensure all the information stays up to date. Google even reward you with extra exposure if you actively use their platform (GMB).
It’s easy to set up, and here’s how. Type the word “Google my business” and click on the first link.
Log in to GMB using your Gmail account.
Once you are in, the rest of it just follows the prompt, which is self-explanatory.
The primary benefit of GMB is that it will boost your search rankings and online traffic, provided you optimise it.
Google My Business prioritise local businesses when someone type high-intent keywords on the search engines, for example, “dentist near me”, “Macdonald”, “pregnancy chiropractor (insert location)”, or other (professional/ Service provider) “near me” or “in my city”.
Google My Business will display businesses based on their registered IP address (local). Instead of displaying businesses farther away, GMB showcases your business which potentially helps you generate new inquiries, traffic, and sales if you know how to close it.
If you own multiple locations or branch offices, you should also register those businesses based on locality and add the addresses on the GMB platform. Doing so will allow customers searching for your business on desktop or mobile devices to easily find your business(es) through a map view on their search results page.
2. Optimise Your Website with An SEO Strategy.
How?
- Embed 15-45 buyers’ Keywords across your web pages.
- Perform On-Page SEO.
- Perform Off-Page SEO.
- Perform Local SEO.
Your website is your marketing real estate when it comes to branding and executing your marketing strategy for attracting new customers and improving conversion. You need a presentable and impressionable site to retain your visitors. To do this, try these tips:
- Ensure your colour palette and theme complies to your brand bible.
- Ensure your website is SEO friendly so that Google AI can crawl your website with ease. If it was built with unfriendly elements and programming codes, the Google AI crawler can’t get to every page.
- Make sure your website is optimised for mobile devices: if users can’t view your page on their phones, they might leave before deciding whether they want to stay in touch with you!
- Proper font size on all pages is large enough for easy reading without zooming in on each page; this includes mobile view.
- Ensure your site is easy to find: Have you installed the latest sitemap.xml on your Google Search Console? And test your robots.txt?
- Get quality backlinks to point to your website to tell Google AI that your site is credible and legitimate and that you mean business. There are many fakes, spammy, AI-generated websites that Google tried to ban on their search engine.
- Breadcrumbs: keep the navigation straightforward throughout the site.
- And finally, keep content clear and concise at the beginning of every page so visitors won’t have trouble figuring out what you do or what your business offers on your website –this will improve readability, and Google AI recognises good copywriting.
- Embed 15-45 high-intent keywords on your entire web pages. Make sure it is on every webpage, landing page, and meta tag description.
The most significant benefit of embedding 15-45 high-intent keywords on various web pages is to help Google Crawler Bots identify the nature of your business so that the AI can better present your business to the users. It is all about user experience.
You do not have to add the word “near me” to your webpage content because you have already registered on Google My Business. Google will recognise your address and display your website accordingly.
3. Create Google & Facebook Ads
You will find Facebook Ads easier if you work out how to use Google Ads.
In this section, we’ll focus on Google Ads as the No#1 search engine to date is Google.
Why pay for Ads?
Your potential local customers will not typically type your business name.
You need to determine what type of “Buyers’ or “high-intent” keywords your prospects are typing on the search engines.
High-intent keywords are results/outcome-oriented keywords that your prospects use and type on the search engine to help them solve a particular challenge, pain, and problem. And almost, if not always, there are highly competitive. Every business are competing for those keywords to rank on 1st page on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
Examples of “Buyers” or “High-Intent” Keywords + location are as follows, depending on your industry (sample only): –
We hope you get the picture.
The locality is what local marketing is all about, and we recommend including your location as an essential keyword on your Ads placement to improve its visibility. But there is no guarantee as Google Ads has its algorithm.
Other than location as keywords, you can use the geographical filtering feature.
If you want to target a suburb within a radius, you need to insert the name of the city/ suburb and adjust the radius.
Google and Facebook media platforms are advertising platforms. The objective is to give business owners quick and instant exposure to their target market who live within the targeted local zones.
The challenge is that depending on the demand for those high-intent keywords, there is a bidding price. If those keywords are highly popular, the advertising platform will charge a premium for those keywords per click.
Alternatively, you can create articles with at least 20-30 location keywords embedded on the keystone pages and build links to them so that Google will display your business on the first page of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). But if you find this process tedious and arduous, placing Ads on Google and Facebook marketing platforms might be best.
Google and Facebook media platforms have made it so easy that anyone can jump in and create Ads. They want you to create ads! That’s how they make the most money. Google and Facebook will make it so easy that even a high school kid and a retiree can do it – if they have the patience and ability to apply basic logic.
FINAL THOUGHTS.
Google My Business, Search Engine Optimisation and Placing Google/ Facebook Ads (campaigns and promotions) are today’s top 3 online local marketing strategies. If you set up your targeted geographic zone, it will boost your business credibility and profile. We see this as affordable compared to targeting an audience globally.
If you want to find more about local marketing strategies, click this article to discover 3 ideas that build instant rapport with your local community. Local Marketing Ideas that Build Instant Rapport
