Many businesses need their marketing to reach people in their area. Here are some ways for small businesses to sell locally.
Local marketing means using tactics to reach people in the area around your business.
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Local marketing works well for companies that have a physical location, like restaurants, small shops, and professional advisors.
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Starting a local marketing plan for your small business is fast, easy, and free. These tips will help you improve your local marketing right away.
This article is for small business owners who want to use local marketing techniques to reach customers near their store.
Local marketing is an important part of a bigger marketing plan for small businesses because it puts your brand in front of a larger local audience that is likely to buy from your business soon. But what can you do as a business owner to make your small business more accessible to people in your area? This guide gives you seven quick, free ways to improve your local marketing plan right away.
How does neighborhood marketing work?
Local marketing is aimed at people who live or work in the same town or area as your business. It is meant for people who live or work within a certain distance of your business and could buy your product or service at any time. This distance is usually based on an acceptable driving distance.
For example, if you run a business in Red Bank, New Jersey, getting website traffic from Sacramento, California, won’t do you much good. Instead, you should use local marketing strategies to make sure that most of your audience lives close enough to your restaurant that they could drive there or order delivery.
Travis McKnight, senior content manager at Portent Inc., said, “The most important thing people should do is really understand who they’re trying to sell to and what people can get out of the product or service, and then tell them right away.”
He added that this is true for all marketing, but especially for a local marketing plan. One of the most important things you should tell people is where your business is.
The goal of a local marketing plan is to make better use of your money for marketing and advertising. Digital marketing is a useful tool for all types and kinds of businesses. But if you have a local business and can’t get people in your area interested, all of your marketing costs were for nothing. Not all traffic is the same, so a local marketing plan makes sure you’re going after people who might buy from you.
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Local marketing focuses on people who live or work within a certain distance of your business. It can increase the number of people who buy from you by focusing your digital marketing efforts on potential customers who are close by.
What kinds of businesses can gain from marketing in their own area?
Local marketing can help a lot of businesses, but it’s a must for some. Restaurants are a good example because they are real places where you can eat in, pick up, or have food delivered. By definition, a restaurant can only be in one place.
A retail shop is another type of business that needs to do local store marketing. Even small stores often have online stores these days, but local marketing can bring more people into the store and raise brand recognition in the area. This is very important for small shops that are trying to compete with big chains.
In the same way, professional services like law firms and accounting firms should use area marketing. Even though it might be better to reach out to a wider area for these services, it is important for professional advisors to meet with a large number of people in their own area. There are some major exceptions to this rule, like digital marketing companies, which often work entirely online. But nothing beats meeting with someone in person.
There are a lot of businesses that need a local marketing plan, but there are other kinds of companies that should also think about using local marketing. Even if a local strategy isn’t your top goal, you can still benefit from reaching more people in the town or region where your business is located.
Local marketing is good for all businesses, but some, like restaurants and stores that rely on foot traffic, need a local marketing strategy.
11 ways to sell locally that you can start right now
Local marketing starts with a few easy-to-do things that you can start doing right away. Here are a few quick and easy ways to improve how you sell your business locally.
- Make sure your website is optimized and localized.
Website optimization is the key to getting people to visit your site, but is your site designed for people in your area? Heather Lodge, the chief manager at Click and Mortar, said that you should not only follow best practices for search engine optimization (SEO), like using keyword research to shape your website content, but you should also make sure that your website is great for mobile users.
“More than half of the people who visit websites do so on their phones,” she said. “It will be easier to get local business if your website is clean and easy to use, with big text that can be read on a small screen and big buttons that are easy to click.”
Lodge said that in addition to these tips, which are important for any digital marketing plan, your website should also be personalized. That means figuring out keywords and key phrases based on local SEO. Ask yourself, “What is the local market searching for on Google?” A good rule of thumb is to talk about your neighborhood or communities close by often. If you want to reach people in a certain area, you could say something like “serving the tri-state area” on your website.
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You can learn even more about local SEO by using free keyword research tools like Google Analytics, Google Trends, and Google Search Console to find out exactly which local terms you should use. The more you improve your site for local searches, the more likely it is that local customers will find your pages.
- Change the title tags and meta details.
McKnight said that another thing to think about when it comes to SEO is whether or not your website’s title tags and information are up to date.
“Metadata is made up of a few different parts, but most people only need to worry about the meta description and title tag,” he said.
The 60 characters that show up on the search engine results page (SERP) are called the title tag. McKnight said that it’s best to keep your title tag related to your brand and location and no longer than 60 characters.
McKnight said that the meta description is less likely to affect search rankings, but it can increase click-through rates by telling people what kind of information they might find on the page.
“Research shows that a good meta description… can increase the number of clicks. On the other hand, having a phone number in the meta description is huge for a business like a restaurant that wants people to call. “Meta descriptions should never be longer than 160 characters.”
The tools for the administrator of the web hosting site you use will let you change the title tag and meta description. McKnight said that WordPress makes it easy for many small business owners to use SEO.
- Make landing pages for each place of your business.
If your business has more than one location, you should give each area its own page on your website to help with localization.
“Companies that have a lot of different locations often don’t have pages on their website that tell you about those different locations,” Lodge said. “These pages should have information about each store’s location, how to get there, and when the store is open.”
Lodge said that these pages should have information that is specific to your business. For example, a real estate agent in Nashville, Tennessee, shouldn’t just say on their website that they are a “real estate agent.” Instead, including the key phrase “leading real estate agent in Nashville” tells search engines where the agent is based and helps them show results to a local audience. It also takes into account how people look for real estate agents. They don’t just want anyone; they want “the best” or “leading” real estate agents.
- Claim your page on Google My Business.
Claiming your Google My Business page is one of the easiest and most effective ways to start marketing your business locally right away. Google My Business gives people who use search engines information like your location, shop hours, directions, contact information, and more right on the SERP (search engine results page).
McKnight said, “Claim your Google My Business knowledge panel and make sure it is up to date.” “Make sure it shows the store’s current hours and accurately explains any restrictions, like takeout or delivery only, especially during COVID-19.”
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Lodge said that you should also claim local ads on sites like Yelp that are not owned by you. The better your local marketing will work, the more places people can find your business and find out where it is.
- Optimize social media pages.
When it comes to online marketing in your local area, social media marketing is very important. Your social media pages should be optimized and personalized in the same way that your website should be. This means giving accurate information, like where your business is, how to reach you, and when it’s open. It also means keeping a social media account up to date. Using tools like Hootsuite, you can plan ahead for your social media posts.
“From a small business’s point of view, most social media communication is about deals, store reopenings, or sales,” McKnight said. “A lot of it is just taking care of your reputation.”
- Ask people to leave good reviews and interact online.
Encourage your happy customers to write good reviews about you online, whether it’s on Google Reviews, Facebook, Yelp, or somewhere else. You could even give them a discount or an offer, like a raffle or giveaway, to get them to write good reviews.
You should also take the time to answer the online reviews that your customers leave. McKnight said to always be honest and not copy and paste basic answers.
“Most of the time, respond to people with authenticity, humility, and honesty,” McKnight said. “This goes for both positive and negative reviews.” “Give yourself an hour a week to go through, reply, and make sure it’s not just a canned answer. Users don’t like that and feel like they aren’t being heard.”
- Host or sponsor events in your neighborhood.
Digital marketing is great, but it’s much more important to build a real-world connection between your audience and your business. If you want more people in your neighborhood to know about your brand, you could sponsor or host a local event. This is also a great way to get local news coverage, which makes it more likely that local people will find you online.
- Use targeted email marketing in your area.
Email marketing techniques can be some of the least expensive ways to market your business. Getting good email addresses is where most of the money goes. There is nothing in an email address that tells you where the user is based, but you can start using email-gathering methods that filter users by location. The easiest way is to have a sign-up sheet in your store, preferably by the register, or at booths or events that you sponsor, so that interested customers can see it and sign up to get information and promotions from you.
- Try using direct letters.
Direct mail is a lot cheaper than it might seem as a way to reach people. You can get back what you spend on stamps by not spending money on mailing lists and skilled targeting. You can often reach your target audience by looking at places that have the same kind of people as your target audience.
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- Join forces with other businesses in your area.
Having a partnership with another business can be a very useful tool. These partnerships can help both companies reach more people. This works best when you find businesses with similar values and goals that don’t directly compete with yours.
For example, you and your partner companies can put on events together. You can work with your SEO content to create a bond that is good for both of you. You can also link to each other. If you use these strategies, every outreach effort you make is multiplied by the efforts of the companies you work with.
- Put paid ads in the right places.
Ad groups can filter ads based on region and IP address. Google, Facebook, and other digital advertisers use this function to show ads to people in a certain area.
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Localized paid ads are still useful even when they are not online. Some of the best ways to get your brand in front of local customers are through local newspapers, radio spots, coupon books, movie theaters, and local partnerships.
Key Point: You can make it easier for people in your area to find your business by putting location information on your website and social media pages and making sure your Google and Yelp listings are up to date.
