Local business marketing is still a world to discover. It’s no longer just about web marketing for small businesses, but it’s also about so much more. More and more marketing and communication agencies are encouraging small businesses (also called local businesses) to open up to “online commerce”. Use the web, social media, and digital technologies to take advantage of the great opportunities offered by local business.
Local Business Marketing: What is
Local Business Marketing is a set of communication and marketing activities that a small local business puts into practice to bring more customers to the store. Despite the growing popularity of e-commerce and online stores, for the main categories of goods and services, more than 90% of sales still take place through local businesses. While it’s true that some local businesses may not need ecommerce platforms, a web presence is essential for those local businesses that want to increase the influx of customers into physical stores, and want to compete with larger chains and organizations.
Digital marketing channels and web searches have changed the tables for local businesses: offering them new avenues to gain greater visibility online. How many times have you heard “Ecommerce will make you double your earnings”? The truth is that the need to create local relationships is back in fashion. Or rather, the local business has never gone out of fashion. As Aristotle said, we are social animals and, more or less, we need human contact even when they choose to buy a local product or ask for a service from the supplier behind the house. This does not mean that the market will be governed by the same rules as 20, 30, 40 years ago, including local businesses. Small businesses or local businesses have thus started their “glocal marketing” and enter the web.
The best strategies for local businesses
If you really want to get relevant results, you should start thinking about a serious local web marketing strategy. This is very important to stand out in local marketing. First of all, it is necessary to create the Google My business page intended for this purpose. You also need to encourage reviews from local customers, and once you’ve set up your local business listing, you need to make sure you make the most of the interaction and bond with customers that lead to establishing your social proof online. Satisfied and passionate customers are most likely to naturally review your local business. There are many web aggregators of local companies that allow customers/consumers to support their business. Some examples of sites that offer this option are: Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, Google+, Local Business, Tripadvisor, etc.
The importance of comments
Not only do positive comments create social evidence and increase the credibility of your local business, but they strengthen your online positioning. Don’t wait for your customers to write reviews, act to request them! Of course do it discreetly and without being urgent, you can try to add the invitation to review in the footer of your newsletter or on your website. You can then design something temporary or exclusive, something that pushes the customer to participate by perceiving the quality and exclusivity of the reserved initiatives and promotions. Even with a simple creative campaign you can do it.
A good SEO strategy
You also need to search for keywords linked to your business and make the most of them. “With SEO you stop looking for customers, they find you!” To perform this step, you need a prior keyword search. You need to experiment with keyword combinations on your website and find out, through testing, which keywords will allow you to achieve the highest level of conversion. Search queries that included the words “close to me” and “buy” grew by more than 500% between 2015 and 2017. Without considering all that geolocated research with names of cities or countries that were already beginning to be relevant in the past.
Optimisation for smartphones
Optimize your smartphone website: the impact of mobile devices on web traffic is significant, Google knows that. Keep that in mind in case you’re trying to direct local traffic to your website. Your company’s showcase site needs to be responsive, it’s a priority – more and more local searches are being done from mobile devices and tablets than traditional desktops. Creating a backlink network for your local business, i.e. doing link building or acquiring backlinks on your website, is essential to your business. The key is to search for local websites and request useful backlinks. Get in touch with your local Chamber of Commerce and access their online directories that allow you to include a link to your website. Other very valuable domains are .gov and .org. Of course remember to constantly monitor the quality and goodness of your backlinks.
Remember: the right focus on local marketing can generate huge benefits and more sales, if thought out and properly designed.
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