Changing consumer expectations, including a growing preference for personalized experiences, have made local marketing solutions more important than ever for business success.
For a company to drive sales growth, local marketers must connect with and engage repeat customers as well as potential new customers by understanding their unique needs and interests.
Companies of all sizes face challenges in their local marketing initiatives. Increasingly complex consumer behaviour, rapid technological changes, and the need for Omni channel technology have all changed the traditional marketing structure. Buyers want to engage with fresh, innovative companies that they can rely on to deliver a consistent product or experience.
For maximum impact, businesses must create effective local marketing solutions to expand their customer base and increase sales and revenue.
What is local marketing?
Local marketing—also referred to as local store marketing or neighbourhood marketing—specifically targets the community around a physical store or restaurant. Promotional messages are directed to the local population, rather than the mass market (See also Community Marketing).
In practice, local marketing can take several forms. Many local businesses directly contact consumers through mail, in-town events, local team sponsorships, or advertisements in the town paper. Hoping to not only attract new customers but to drive repeat business, a successful local marketing push allows a store to stake out a significant presence in local consumers’ mental maps of their communities.
Local marketing –– also known as “location-based marketing” and “neighbourhood marketing” –– is the process of optimizing your website and online advertising to help drive foot traffic and awareness in localized regions.
This type of marketing specifically targets potential customers in a physical store’s community.
Why has this type of marketing taken off recently? For one reason specifically:
“Google algorithm uses a searcher’s location to serve up relevant local businesses.”
This means that your business has more of an opportunity to oust non-local competitors through local SEO.
Local marketing leverages this, giving you tools, tactics and strategies to make it easier to convert that local traffic into sales, either online or in person.
The good thing is, there are a ton of apps and software tools helping local businesses market to their customers better than ever before.
Who employs local marketing?
Local marketing is used primarily by small businesses—stores and restaurants with a single location or outlet. Owners of franchised businesses may also employ local marketing to promote their specific locations, supplementing the larger franchise’s regional or national marketing campaigns (which promote the franchise’s name and products, but not specific locations).
Who Can Benefit from Local Marketing?
Brands of all sizes can benefit from local marketing.
That’s because local marketing isn’t just about tagging some location-specific keywords on to your product descriptions and calling it a day. It’s about taking a more targeted approach with your audience and doing it in a manner that seems more personal.
Both consumers and search engines are greatly in favour of hyper-localized marketing, so now’s the time to make it work for your brand.
Here are 6 local marketing solutions to connect with your customers:
- Optimize for Mobile
A Google study in 2017 found that consumers have twice as many brand interactions on mobile devices than on any other channel and that 89% are more likely to recommend a brand to others after a positive mobile experience.
To optimize your website for mobile users, ensure that the site is simple, loads quickly, and easy to navigate. The font must be large enough to be legible, and any photographs, images, or design aspects should be clean, clear, and scale to the appropriate dimensions for mobile viewers.
- Build Custom Landing Pages
Boost local marketing efforts by creating a unique landing page that is location-based. Including unique and relevant content that is city or region-specific, can increase the connection between the site and potential customer, increasing conversions and leads and improving SEO results.
A geo-targeted landing page may be completely rewritten to reflect the interests and concerns of a specific location. It can also contain generalized company and product information with a customized banner, display ad, or introductory paragraph.
Determining the correct mix of location-based and general content depends upon the goal of your campaign. Including geo-targeted information can help a company to segment audiences, increase conversions and sales, and reduce the cost per lead.
- Build your Social Media Presence
A strong social media presence is vital to local marketing efforts, providing an effective, low-cost method of reaching a wide audience. More than 50% of small business owners in the U.S. rely on social media as their primary method of digital marketing, increasing website visits and conversions while improving brand awareness and SEO rankings.
It is important that you know your audience, so you can create a campaign and select the appropriate platform and tone of communication to create a social media strategy for local marketing. For example, Facebook generally has a large reach in terms of users, but a younger audience is more likely to see posts on Instagram.
It is also vital to monitor social media posts, and that any questions, concerns, or criticisms are responded to and resolved immediately.
- Leverage Technology to Streamline Your Campaigns
Executing a brilliant local marketing campaign may sound easy, but there’s a lot of heavy lifting involved, especially for local partners of national franchises who must speak to their unique communities and stay on brand and on message.
Leveraging a marketing automation platform, like Campaign Drive, designers and brand marketers at the corporate level can create a library of marketing assets from flyers to promotional cards to coupons and deliver those templates to their local partners to customize with relevant information. This ensures that local customers are experiencing the same brand value anywhere in the world, which amplifies that brand’s credibility and builds brand loyalty.
- Local Reviews and Testimonials
A recent survey found that online reviews impact 67.7% of local purchasing decisions. Reviews carry weight with customers, and review aggregators, such as Yelp or Angie’s List, may rank higher on search engine results than a company’s actual website.
Reviews are highly influential and usually the first thing potential customers see about your business, making positive reviews a vital part of your local marketing strategy.
Remember to follow up with customers that have had positive experiences with your brand and ask for a review. Just like with social media, responding to negative reviews and addressing bad experiences can help shift poor sentiment to your advantage.
- Sponsor a Community Event
A community event is a great opportunity to connect with local customers, familiarizing them with your brand and reinforcing brand messaging. Not only does sponsorship send a positive message to the community about your brand, it allows customers a chance to interact with the business outside of a targeted, purchasing decision.
Sponsorship can be combined with advertisements – online and offline, or in local publications, and it presents an opportunity to make a special offer, promote products, and partner with local businesses.
As customers expect increasingly personalized experiences with brands, technologies like Campaign Drive that increase the impact of local marketing solutions will become more important to business success. Local marketing automation tools are a great way to connect with customers through consistently branded content to improve overall experience, and drive conversions.
Campaign Drive is a local marketing management platform that enables companies to efficiently build and distribute local marketing materials across business sites to ensure brand consistency at a national and local level.
Adstuck is a digital marketing practice agency working from all over the world with four locations India, Singapore, Estonia and US. Its mission is to provide instant access to a talented workforce to enterprise. They have 491 clients and worked over 700 projects, with 30 fortunes 500 firms.
Adstuck provide services in:
- Improving marketing results
- Creating social media marketing strategy
- Proper assessments of current trends
- Market research
- Campaign creation
- Local marketing
- Growing market share
- Launching new product or enter new market.
It is a strong and leading digital media marketing service provider which can help you with cost cutting, plan execution, perfect reporting, strategy making, data collecting, and response collection from consumers. It handles all the aspects of your business. They don’t focus only on new on emerging brands who wants entail success and distribution in the market but also on brands that have successfully established the customer retail space, and need some assistance in managing their business. It is also involved in local marketing therefore has a strong network for the same.
