6 Things to Avoid With Local Marketing

Local marketing tactics are the best path forward if you want to grow your local small business. And while this may seem like a super simple process, there are some things to avoid so your campaign can reach its full potential, saving you time and money.

Fortunately, with some knowledge, you can prevent these mistakes and reach your desired outcomes.

To help you keep your local marketing tactics on track, we’ve put together this quick guide to things you should avoid in the process!

What is Local Marketing?

Local marketing is aimed at an audience within the same city or region as the business. These people live or work near the location of the business and will benefit most from the products or services being sold.

The growth of local marketing is increasing as people search online to find and learn about companies. Analysis has shown that 97% of people learn more about a company online than anywhere else. Moreover, 46% of all Google searches are for local information, and 88% of consumers conducting local searches will call or visit the location within a day.

Businesses need local marketing and local search engine optimization to leverage their available business opportunities.

A good example of a business that needs local marketing is a local service provider, like a dental clinic. They might target the wrong demographic if they do not include local indicators like their city or state. If the clinic is located in Chicago, it doesn’t do much good to market generally online. They won’t be considered in local search results without indicating a local parameter. They would be wasting their marketing budget without a local marketing strategy.

6 Things to Avoid With Local Marketing

It’s clear that local marketing is important, but that doesn’t mean you should just set out blindly without thinking things through and considering what will work best for you AND what will work best for your target audience.

Here are the top 6 things to avoid when enacting your local marketing strategy:

Working Without a Plan

The most successful business tactics are built with a solid plan or strategy as its foundation.

Sure, a marketing plan will lay out the steps you want to take to reach your local market, but it does so much more than that.

It helps you identify who exactly this market is, how or where you’re likely to find them (specific key search terms, social media platforms, etc), and what makes you different from your competitors. While you may already know or have a sense of these elements, putting them on paper and acting on them can help you find the right direction.

A local marketing plan will also give you a baseline for measuring the success or failure of your implemented strategy. It can help you see why something works or doesn’t, so you can better reach your ideal customer.

You Do Too Much Yourself

Local marketing can be time-consuming. And for most small business owners, time comes at a premium.

Even if you have a team of enthusiastic employees helping you out, there are only so many hours in a day. The most pressing focus will be on running your business, so it is a good idea to leverage experienced partners for as much of your marketing as possible.

You may think you are saving money by keeping everything in-house, but the reality is that you are likely limiting your reach and handcuffing your marketing efforts.

Hiring a local marketing coach can make a huge difference. A marketing coach will work with you to truly understand you, your business, and your customers. At Little Jack Marketing, we learn who you are and support you in developing strategies and objectives that fit your unique needs. We don’t make decisions on your behalf, but we check in regularly and offer our expert advice, so you have all the necessary information to make the decisions yourself.

As your local marketing coach, we will handle the day-to-day marketing tasks, like updating local SEO, optimizing your web presence, and soliciting reviews while you concentrate your energy on operations.

Ignoring Local Keywords

Local SEO is a key part of local marketing.

Local SEO considers your location and the searcher’s location when returning results.

This is why it is important to include local terms on your web pages and blog content. Let’s consider the dental clinic mentioned earlier; including terms like “Chicago area dentist,” “dental clinic Chicago” or variations of these terms on their web page will connect with local residents and lead to higher ranking results for their targeted demographic and greater success.

Another place where these local search terms become important is in the copy of paid online marketing like Google Ads or Facebook Ads. Both platforms use location to determine search results, so the more you can do to indicate your location, the better your opportunities will be.

Limiting Your Online Presence

One thing that can support local SEO and local marketing strategies is to expand your online presence. A website and social media profiles are the perfect starting point. You’ll also want to consider claiming your Google Business Profile and listing your business with relevant directories.

Consider creating a profile on review sites to take control of your brand messaging and respond directly to any reviews and complaints.

If you list your business in multiple directories and review sites, keep a list so you can regularly update your information or respond to comments and reviews.

Ignoring Customer Reviews

People are increasingly turning to reviews to learn about a brand. Reviews provide social proof, telling readers what to expect when dealing with your brand.

Many consumers use negative reviews as a determining factor. The reviewer may not be overly concerned about the problem that caused the complaint; they may, instead, be looking for your response. Your response will tell them a lot about you as a business or business owner and could be a driver of whether or not they spend money at your business in the future.

The right response to a negative review can eliminate some of the risks a consumer feels. If negative reviews just sit there unanswered, potential customers will not have trust in your brand and may simply go elsewhere.

Take time to respond to positive and negative reviews to improve your reputation.

You appear grateful and welcoming if you thank people for their business and positive reviews. Responding to negative reviews with a potential solution shows you care about the customer experience.

Not Monitoring Campaign Progress and Results

Local marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing. You must check the data to understand your audience and identify what speaks to them.

If you’ve run content on Instagram, for example, trying to boost your followers, but don’t ever look to see how many followers you got and who those followers are, what was the point?

You can learn a lot from the responses to your local marketing tactics. Audience demographics can lead you to uncover the needs and interests that are most important to that demographic. The more you can learn about your audience, the better you’ll be at reaching them.

Failed local marketing strategies can be useful, too. Analyzing where and how something went wrong can lead to more successful strategies.

If you have a local marketing coach, they can help you review this data and strategize ways to use it to your advantage. If you’re flying solo, look for the metrics that most closely align with your goals. From there, you can determine the campaign’s success and figure out ways to improve. You may also discover that you have an audience or niche that you weren’t anticipating.

Avoid Local Marketing Missteps with a Trusted Local Marketing Coach

Local marketing is a pivotal part of any local business growth strategy. Whether you want to build brand awareness, increase customers in the local community, or expand within the local market, it is best to have someone along for the ride.

Your local marketing efforts can benefit from a local marketing coach.

At Little Jack Marketing, we take the time to understand what makes you, you. And that is why we can offer recommendations for a bespoke marketing strategy that accounts for where you are and where you want to go.

Why take it on yourself when you don’t have to? Contact Little Jack Marketing to schedule a discovery call to learn more about what we can do for you!