Local Digital Marketing in 5 Simple Steps

 

Shops, businesses, service providers, and dining establishments make up neighborhoods and a city’s downtown core. They rely on local digital marketing to survive.

Sometimes, reaching the local population and standing out can be challenging. Luckily, a targeted local digital marketing strategy can help you gain more clients or customers and grow your business.

Knowing you need a local digital marketing strategy and knowing how to get started are two completely different things. Here is what you need to know about starting your local marketing online and the best first steps to get started.

What is Local Digital Marketing?

Local digital marketing targets an audience in the same city, town, or geographic region as a business through online methods. The most important aspect of effective online local marketing is targeting or speaking to those who can physically visit your location (i.e., who use your services or purchase your products).

Local marketing is an important tactic for any business with a brick-and-mortar location, but this is especially true of businesses that rely on foot traffic and in-person transactions above e-commerce sales.

Examples of local digital marketing strategies include Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for local keywords, Google Business Profile claiming and optimization, targeted Google Ads, and social media marketing.

Businesses can use a local marketing strategy to maximize marketing efforts and budget to target those more likely to visit your business to purchase your products or use your services.

How to Do Local Digital Marketing Right

There are several reasons you need a local marketing strategy. Primarily, local marketing tactics increase conversion rates by marketing more effectively to the people most likely to benefit and purchase from your business.

But there is a big difference between doing local marketing and doing it right with a strategy.

Let’s say you operate a high-end clothing boutique with only a brick-and-mortar shop in the Chicago area. If you’re using content marketing to drive traffic to your website, but all of your web traffic stems from Los Angeles, it will not help you make sales.

By creating a local marketing strategy and adapting your current marketing efforts, you can ensure that most of your traffic comes from your desired location. And if you’re a local Chicago business that needs foot traffic for sales, then this means targeting your local Chicago clientele.

5 Steps to Take When Starting Your Local Marketing Strategy

There are a few steps you can take to establish your local presence and marketing strategy.

The following actions will lay the groundwork for all your local marketing tactics. Here’s how to start local marketing in 5 simple steps:

Meet a Local Marketing Coach

No matter where you are in your local marketing journey, consider meeting with a local marketing coach, like Little Jack Marketing, before you start.

At Little Jack Marketing, we take the time to understand your business and its unique value to the local community. Then, we work with you to develop a bespoke local marketing strategy that fits your goals and budget.

You may know that you need to create or optimize a website and start marketing on social media. However, most plans don’t make sense or are ineffective without a comprehensive strategy considering all elements of your business goals.

Establish Your Marketing Objectives

Most importantly, a local marketing coach like us at Little Jack Marketing will help you establish your baseline marketing goals, so you are driving your efforts in the right areas.

First, we help establish your local marketing objective. We use the OKR goal-setting framework (which stands for objectives and key results), which consists of an objective that identifies the path to success for business owners.

Your initial objective must be set before tackling local marketing methods. After all, without an objective, you may not know exactly what you need to do.

Your objective needs to be realistic to your business and something you can work towards obtaining. An example of a good objective is: “Improve our online reputation on relevant review websites to nurture potential customers by the end of this quarter.” Once the objective is established, your marketing strategy will make more sense.

Set Your Key Results

Next, we help you identify your key results. Key results are metrics or tangible milestones you can track to identify if you’ve accomplished your goal.

Here are some examples of key results:

• Increase the number of reviews across both Google and Yelp from 200 to 500 total
• Improve average Google rating from 4 stars to 4.5
• Achieve an average review response time of 24 hours or less

Your marketing coach will work on setting specific and attainable key results for your objective.

Audit Your Current Digital Doorway

While you move through the creation of your digital marketing strategy, audit what you have currently set up so that you have a better grasp on the next steps.

If you don’t know much about online marketing and building your business’ digital doorway, you’ll want to connect with your local marketing coach to get started.

Your digital doorway includes your company website, social media presence, Google Business Profile, and more. Audit all of these parameters to identify gaps or weaknesses.

You’ll want to start collecting your inventory.

Here’s a template to get you started:

Analyze the Results of your Digital Doorway Audit

Now, you can analyze your findings and assess your local marketing opportunities.

For example, your website analysis will want to identify its use of SEO to drive sales. What does that mean for your local marketing strategy if you Googled your business name, and it was not the first to pull up? Most likely, you’ll want to optimize your website so that it does show up and shows up with the geolocator. You’ll need to consider content marketing and SEO in your local marketing strategy to optimize your website.

Your findings are useful for assessing how well you are doing in local marketing. You may find that you won’t need to optimize your website too much for SEO but find you are severely lacking in social media.

Get Started With Local Digital Marketing

It’s important to assess your situation before starting any major campaigns. However, as you’re working with us at Little Jack Marketing, you can get started on the basics if you feel you can move through them comfortably.

Here are some basics which you can consider starting with your local digital marketing strategy:

Claim Your Google Business Profile

Claiming a Google Business Profile is one of the easiest and most effective things you can do to kick-start your local marketing strategy.

Your Google Business Profile appears at the top right-hand side of Google search results, giving potential customers and clients vital information about your business, like location, store hours, directions, contact information, and more. This information will be displayed when anyone searches your name, product/service, or even industry.

Make sure that all information is correct and up to date. You’ll also want to make sure that details are consistent across platforms.

Setup Social Media Presence

Social media is an excellent way to connect with your target audience. When setting up your profile, you should optimize the content for local SEO just as you did your website. This will allow your profiles to show up as Google search results and ensure a more local audience sees your profile.

For best results, keep your profiles active. Use the space to develop your brand identity and bolster your reputation. Promote new products, sales, promotions, or whatever your audience will be interested in. Just be consistent in your tone and voice.

Encourage Online Reviews From Happy Customers

Increasingly, potential customers and prospects turn to online reviews to learn about a brand or business. Negative reviews will paint a certain picture, but so does having no reviews.

Encourage your satisfied customers and clients to go online and leave positive reviews for your business. They can do it on Facebook, Yelp, and Google Reviews.

When you receive a review, you should respond to it. Negative reviews should receive a follow-up to rectify the problem and demonstrate to viewers that you are attentive to and concerned about customer satisfaction. Positive reviews should also get a response from you thanking the customer and encouraging them to return.

Get Involved in the Community

Local businesses make up a big part of our communities. Hosting or sponsoring community events is an excellent way to demonstrate pride in place and connect with community members.

Whether you host the event, volunteer to help, or act as a sponsor, you are putting your brand in front of the people that need to see it. And, as a bonus, it might get you some coverage in local media like the newspaper or evening news broadcast.

Build Your Local Digital Strategy With Little Jack Marketing

When all is said and done, creating an effective, streamlined, and easy-to-use local digital marketing strategy can be difficult. A small business owner may not know where to start. Or, if they do, then they may not have the resources to do it on their own.

With a local marketing coach like Little Jack Marketing, you will have a team guiding you through this process.

Starting with a deep analysis, we get to know your business and its goals to advise on the right marketing avenues. Not only will you be well-equipped to start your local marketing campaign, but we will help along the way and educate you on the importance of each factor.

There’s no need to take on all of the marketing burdens. Trust Little Jack Marketing to help start your local digital marketing strategy and boost your business’ growth and expansion.