Don’t Fall Behind: Tips for Marketing Your Local Business

It’s hard to believe that the leaves are turning, and it’s Fall already. It feels like just yesterday we were revving you up for your Summer marketing strategy and now here we are ready to prepare for Autumn. Just creating a catchy Fall campaign will not ensure your success. We have provided some tips and insights for marketing your local business and to help you guarantee, that this Fall, leaves are falling and your customers are calling.

You do not have to have the biggest marketing budget to be the most flourishing business, you just need to know where to spend your budget and how to effectively get in front of the right audience. By focusing on a few elements, you can outshine the competition in no time.

Business Listing Management: To start, as we have mentioned before, you need to take ownership of your business listings. Business listing management has become a key component to your local business not only being found but being discovered by the right audience and telling the proper story. The foundation of successful local marketing is clean data and accurate listings. National brands lose a huge amount of local business every year due to inaccurate online listings (Marketing Land).

Imagine that you’re looking for a new furniture store to check out in your new town. You search for one that a neighbor recommended and find that they don’t have an online presence on any review sites. They have an incomplete business listing and virtually no information online about hours or products. How likely are you to visit that store? Incomplete listing information makes it difficult for customers to make informed decisions. It also makes your business look less trustworthy than a business that has all that information readily available (G2 Learning Hub).

Search engines have become the yellow pages of our present, and people are looking for your business every day. If your information is missing, incomplete, or inaccurate, you are likely to lose business and customers’ interest. In this dog eat dog world, can you afford to have even one potential customer turn away? Having a strong business listing management process will help you guarantee success in marketing your local business.

Local Search Engine Optimization: Local SEO and business listing management are closely connected: accurate, complete, and consistent listings improve your search engine rankings. Your customers are looking for you and the more you do to be found, the larger the return on your investment. 51 percent of all website traffic comes from OrganicSearch, and over 40 percent of revenue is captured by organic traffic (SearchEngine Journal).

Local SEO works by adding your geographic information to a search engine listing, which will allow it to be more easily found based on the customer’s location. Because smartphones know exactly where their users are at any given time, this has become crucial for marketing – especially if you’re a physical store and not a business that sells only online (Studio C5). Search Engine Optimization helps your business to be seen, where your customers are looking. Local SEO takes OrganicSearch to the next level by focusing on keywords and phrases that are related to your business location.

To guarantee success in marketing your local business this Fall, you need to put an emphasis on local SEO. Localizing title tags, meta descriptions, URLs and local landing pages can be the difference from you leading the charge against your competition or being just another leaf in a lawn bag.

Local Landing Pages: If you have multiple locations, connecting to your local audience by having local landing pages, is a must. Local landing pages help to draw your customers in by allowing you to connect with them on a different level. By addressing local favorites, locations, and terms, you show your audience that you are one of them. Consumers are looking for you locally – often on the go – and a local landing page can be the hub for all local marketing and SEO efforts (Marketing Land).

As a business, local landing pages allow you to connect specifically to the local audience. This connection makes them more likely to purchase from you and your business. If you have multiple locations, but don’t have local landing pages for each location, you are falling behind your competition. With the average Internet user spending 6.4 hours online every day, it is important to be where your customers are and to ensure you are delivering to them the message that you intend to send. 

Local landing pages should have a strong headline, localized ad copy and context, a specific call to action, highlight product/service features, include social proof (reviews and testimonials from local customers), show your local team or contact information, and have a location map to the specific local location. For your business to be successful this Fall, local landing pages are a key element to that victory.

Reviews and Ratings: 90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a local business. User-generated reviews and ratings have a significant influence on potential buyers, with around 80% of your customer base trusting online reviews as much as recommendations from family and friends. Having an online reputation that is solidified with reviews from local consumers will help you get customers in the door.

Reviews and ratings are just as important to your business as showing up in the local search listings. If potential customers find you and they can’t easily see what others are saying about your business, they will likely shy away. Using business listing management tools to manage your reputation online and to ask for and respond to reviews will lead to you to yelling “Touchdown!” this Fall.

As previously mentioned, you should display the local reviews on your local landing pages. This makes it easy for consumers to find them and shows that you are happy to allow your customers to do the selling for you. Getting ahead this Fall means pulling out all the stops and letting your customers help you market your local business.

Local PaidSearch and Social Media: Lastly, and perhaps the most familiar ways to market your local business and to help you guarantee success this Fall, is local paid search advertising and social media marketing.

Paid search advertising is the most tried and true online advertising method. Ensuring that your paid search campaign focuses on local keywords, demographics, and geographic locations, is key to you accomplishing a successful local marketing campaign this Fall. Delivering the right message for the right moment to the correct audience improves ad relevance and drives more qualified clicks from your search ads (Water Bear Marketing).

Along with paid search, it should go without saying that having a local social media presence, can not be avoided. More and more users are looking for businesses via social media to see how they are interacting with their local audience and to see what those followers are saying about them. Nearly 50% of the world’s population uses social media. That’s over 3 billion users worldwide (Statista). Social networks are the biggest source of inspiration for consumer purchases with 37% of consumers finding purchase inspiration through the channel (PWC).

Having a local paid search engine and social media presence, can not be avoided if you want to guarantee that this Fall, only leaves are falling but your customers are calling.

Water Bear Marketing works with local businesses to ensure their success. Your success is our success. We strive to provide our clients with the highest return on investment while also providing in-depth tracking and reporting. Our proprietary technology and industry knowledge guarantees we provide our clients with their desired outcomes. Our team improves our clients’ ad campaigns and provides valuable insights that would have gone undiscovered with other advertising techniques.

To learn more about how we can help you take your local marketing strategy to the next level this Fall, contact us today for a free consultation.

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