Marketing Strategies for Local Businesses

A large number of business owners – over 80% – tend to depend on word-of-mouth marketing efforts and referrals for business, which shows how important it is for companies to reach customers in their local areas. However, local marketing strategies are slightly different compared to general traditional marketing efforts because these businesses have to invest time and effort into finding, reaching, engaging, and appealing to local consumers.

Local marketing is defined as all of the different marketing strategies and campaigns that target local customers within a certain radius of a business. Sometimes it’s also referred to as location-based marketing or neighborhood marketing and generally consists of traditional offline marketing efforts paired with digital marketing that’s targeted geographically. Another subset that’s beneficial to businesses in terms of local marketing is local search marketing or local SEO, which refers to SEO strategies that ensure a company gets found in location pages, online maps, and search results by local customers.

Business Listing

A large number of small businesses still haven’t claimed their Google Business listing according to some recent research, which means those companies are mission out on one of the most valuable local marketing strategies. On Google’s business listings, companies can include their business’ name, phone number, hours of operation, website link, address, and directions. Some of the best local businesses also add different types of content to these listings– such as photos, which make companies  even more enticing to consumers. 

Local SEO

Leveraging the web to generate more foot traffic to a company’s physical location is another great marketing strategy for local businesses. Any potential customer, when searching for a specific product or service in the company’s area, should be able to find a specific company easily in search results. One of the best places to start local SEO efforts is Google’s Business listings.  However, local search engine optimization encompasses a lot more than that.

Local SEO also entails optimizing a company’s business website to appear higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This is relatively easy to achieve if a company finds the right keywords that consumers use when searching for similar businesses. Additionally, creating valuable and high-quality content is another local SEO strategy that companies can use to attract links and website traffic from local authority websites.

Events

Finally, another great way that local businesses can market themselves is to hold events. Local members of the community can get invited to an event that’s either hosted or sponsored by a company, and where they can get introduced to the business, its products or services, and also get free entertainment, food, and drinks. This is a great way to improve local business visibility and attract more consumers.