Digital Marketing Posted On: Nov 7, 2019
Here’s the thing. Many local businesses either try digital marketing strategies that are so yesteryear or are completely irrelevant to their marketing goals.
They end up targeting the wrong audience, waste money on ads, and don’t leverage the right tools.
The result? They ultimately FAIL.
Which, if you’re a local business yourself, is not what you’d want to do, right?
This is why we’ve compiled some of the most underrated yet SUPER-EFFECTIVE tips. The secret sauce that will definitely spice up your local business sales.
Try these best hand-picked tips to grow your local or small business.
Google’s MyBusiness is definitely one of the most important tools you can (and you should) use to boost your local rankings.
It’s a free tool from Google that lets you manage your business’s online presence on Search and Google Maps.
Recently Google has added plenty of new features to it, especially to help small businesses rank better.
You can now add short names to your business listing, add cover photos, and even make your business look visually appealing with photo displays.
You can also share offers with new customers once they start following your business. This feature is one of the most useful features for small businesses which can help attract their customers and claim discounts or other offers after purchase.
What’s more, you can also track conversion through those purchases straight from your Google Business listing.
Don’t have a Google Business listing? You can get in touch with us and we can help you set it up in no time.
Let’s start with the meat of local SEO: Keywords!
The first major mistake local businesses do is stuff a hell lot of keywords and expect Google to rank their website.
But that’s not how it works.
To rank locally, you need to add a specialized set of location-centric keywords along with your main target keywords.
Start by doing some extensive keyword research. The best way you can curate location-centric keywords is by finding words and key phrases actually used by people living in your area.
You can get those simply by asking questions like “What words they might be using?”, “What’s the common dialect used by people in my area?”, etc.
Here’s a neat little trick you can use to rank for local searches: For all your industry-relevant and important service-based keywords try adding the city or region name next to them.
For example, if you own a small bakery in New York City, you can add keywords like “New York City bakery”, “Buy cakes in New York City”, “Pastry shop in New York”, etc.
This technique will help you generate plenty of localized search phrases. It’s also one of the most popular local seo services offered by companies to help businesses rank locally.
You can also experiment with different keyword combinations and using the most relevant ones on your website to generate higher conversions.
The whole goal behind content marketing is to attract and engage a certain target customer by providing value to them.
REAL VALUE.
And for small and local businesses, that’s true as well.
Which means you have to stop creating dull and boring content for some fresh and highly-engaging content, that actually GETS SHARED.
To make your content shareable, here are a few tips:
Another simple yet effective way to make your content more shareable is through blogs.
By writing quality and local keyword-rich blogs, you can enhance your chances of ranking for local searches.
For example, if you are a juice company in Abilene, Texas that sells healthy fruit juice you can craft a blog like “Top Fruity Drinks to Try in the Texas Summer.”
In that way, the location-centric keywords and useful content will help you rank higher in local searches and drive more shares.
Social media is the holy grail of customer engagement channels, the place where your audience ‘hangs out!’, so small businesses shouldn’t miss the opportunity.
The best thing about social media is that you don’t necessarily need to have a big budget to run campaigns, by using some smart organic strategies you can grow your brand and get AMAZING results.
Start by creating a social media calendar and maintaining a daily posting schedule. You can incorporate important days and use relevant hashtags for your posts.
Stay consistent with your efforts and post on a timely basis. Also, actively engage with your customers. Your daily posting will increase trust with your audience and even outrun your competitors (if they’re not consistent).
You can also change the settings of your posts to target more specific type of demographic and geographical areas. This will give you a heads up in terms of organic potential.
Once you start gaining followers, you can try paid social media ads to generate more leads.
Speaking of paid ads, if you do have the budget to run promotional campaigns you should definitely not overlook Local PPC campaigns.
Never heard of them?
Basically Local PPC or ‘Geo-targeting’ is a paid advertising strategy that lets you target an audience within a particular region or area. It’s the ultimate tool to create custom and highly-targeted ads.
To get started, first choose the exact locations you want to target, those that are relevant for your business. This will let you display your ads to the right people and also save your ad budget.
Then using the aforementioned local SEO keyword strategies you can add relevant location-centric keywords in your campaigns.
By adding a varied mix of long-tail keywords, short-tail keywords, area codes and street names you can target your customers by location and search intent for more effective results.
You can also incorporate more hyper-local messaging specific to the area you’re targeting.
By researching your targeted areas, you can learn about the language spoken by locals and use it to resonate with customers.
There you have it! Some of the most underrated yet result-oriented digital marketing tips to help you grow your local business.
While there are plenty of other strategies you can use, these will help you achieve practical results and cost-effectively promote your business in local searches.
Ready to make your small business grow big? We can also help you out.
We are a reputed digital marketing agency ourselves that has helped countless small businesses and startups grow their sales using digital marketing and advertising strategies.
