How to Advertise Your Business Locally
If you own a small business, you know how important it is to develop a relationship with local customers. Building a relationship with the locals is essential for continued business and growth; for any small business.
After all, if people who live nearby aren’t visiting their local businesses, why would others from further afield make the trip?
Unfortunately, advertising locally is not as simple as you might hope. However, once you understand how to implement effective advertising, the results you will see will be monumental.
Suppose you can successfully separate your offering from the competition and engage with your local customers. In that case, you will see plenty of knock-on effects, such as more business, more positive reviews, and even some more customers that are not local.
This article will guide you on how to advertise your business locally to good effect and help you continue to grow and build your brand.
Key takeaways for your business
From this article, you will learn the following:
- How to create marketing campaigns that resonate with your local customers and help you stand out from the competition.
- You can employ a range of digital and physical marketing tactics to experience more local business from local customers.
- Any business can use several free and cost-effective marketing tools, regardless of size or marketing budget.
Ways You Can Promote Your Local Business
Start a Company Blog
Developing a company blog is one of the most effective marketing strategies available to you. Not only is blogging completely free to execute, but it can also lead to several new potential clients discovering your business.
By writing plenty of blog content surrounding your industry, you will show potential customers just how knowledgeable you are about the field, and it will build your trust and reputation.
Not only that, but Google’s ranking system will also take note. If your content is deemed insightful, engaging, and beneficial, your business will appear at the top of the rankings when local people search for businesses near me them.
However, to achieve this success, your content must be more thought out than simply writing about industry-related topics you anticipate people are searching in Google. To ensure your content has a true impact on where your business ranks on Google, you must implement a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
An SEO strategy includes keyword research, highlighting which topics are constantly searched by your target audience, which you can then use to write content that answers their query. Google values content that solves users’ questions and offers them useful guidance.
There are plenty of free keyword research tools that you can use to map out your blog content, or you can use more advanced tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and SurferSEO if they fall within your marketing budget.
Understanding what your target audience is looking for online is the first step toward building content that will lead to traffic and new local customers.
Keep Your Social Media Channels Updated
Once you have spent time crafting the perfect blog content for your audience, you should start sharing it on social media.
Social media marketing platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, are all excellent ways to interact with potential local customers.
Almost all of your local target audience will use social media platforms to search for the best businesses nearby. Therefore, it is crucial that you remain active on each channel and try to respond to comments, queries, or direct messages, as quickly as possible.
As you will know, first-time customers often have plenty of questions, which is perfectly understandable.
By being active on social media, you allow potential customers to ask these queries, gain more information about what they are looking for, and also build your relationship, making you more trustworthy. The more trustworthy you are, the more likely they are to choose your business.
Each social media platform offers its own unique benefits. Instagram and TikTok offer excellent opportunities to showcase your work and get potential local customers excited over what you can do. Obviously, some social media channels are better than others when it comes to industry; Tattoo artists, stylists, and groomers tend to get much more of their business from Instagram than Facebook or LinkedIn, due to the nature of the industry.
Just remember to keep your social media posts relevant to your local audience, and you will quickly see your follower count grow.
Sign Up for Local Listings or Local Directory
Another important way that you can advertise your small business locally is to submit your contact details and business profile to local listings, ones that are specific to your industry.
Often these local listings are run by professional organizations, such as local directories like Yelp or review sites like Tripadvisor.
By locally listing your business, you allow potential customers to research your business before making a commitment.
Implement Locally Targeted Ads
While some businesses believe that digital marketing is only beneficial for brands that focus on a nationwide or worldwide audience, that isn’t the case.
Facebook advertising has become incredibly popular as a local advertising option for businesses due to the extensive details they have on their users.
You can create digital ads for your business and then personalize them to only target a specific audience, using several targeting options to narrow down your audience:
- Geofencing
- Demographic
- Address
- Interests
- Page likes
- Age
These are just some of the options you can use to identify your local target audience with your advertisements.
Don’t be put off if your audience volume drops significantly; that is always going to happen when you start hyper-targeting.
It is much better to spend advertising money promoting your product or service to people that want to hear about it and are potential buyers rather than focusing on sending it to a large group that doesn’t fit your target audience.
Geofencing allows you to only target people within a certain radius of your business, ensuring you are only targeting local people.
From there, you can also add rules surrounding the demographic, their interests, what pages they have liked, and even how old they are.
Focusing on people who show an interest in your industry or similar industries is a good way to identify people who are likely interested in getting one at some point.
Create a few very similar audiences, possibly split by age or by interests, and see which ones perform the best.
Once you have identified the best-performing ads, put more of your budget into those groups to reach more similar people, and take money out of the underperforming ads.
Locally targeted ads take a little bit of funding and trial and error, but once you identify your audience, you will quickly see results.
Create a Direct Mail Campaign
While digital marketing campaigns have plenty of value and can be really fun to get your head around, don’t discard traditional local advertising methods like direct mail.
Direct mail might’ve been around for a long time now and may not be the most popular choice, but it is still extremely effective.
Due to how the internet is set up, users are hit with ads almost everywhere they go. While this gives you plenty of advertising opportunities, it also means they lose some of their impact.
One way to stand out from the crowd is to go back to basics and start sending out physical brochures.
You may want to design your own brochure or hire a freelance designer to do it for you. Whichever option you choose, ensure you include your business details and contact information, and possibly a first purchase incentive, such as a discount.
You could also consider posting an advert in the local paper, although that might not be as effective depending on whether or not your target audience is avid readers of the daily newspaper.
Build Your Email List
It might not be quite as traditional as direct marketing, but email marketing is another effective advertising technique that has proven successful over many years.
Email marketing is fantastic for building brand awareness, increasing customer acquisition, convincing customers to repurchase, and so many other benefits.
The bigger your email list, the more opportunities can come from each message you send.
Offer incentives for people to register for your email list, and include them on local flyers, direct marketing, and even on small business cards you have on show at your business.
Take Part in Community Activities
If you are searching for the most organic way to promote your business locally, then showing potential clients you are a contributing member of the local community is a great place to start.
Showing people you genuinely care about the area will go a long way to showing prospective customers that you are loyal to the area, and they should be loyal to you.
Keep an eye out for volunteering opportunities, fundraisers your business can donate to, or any local events your business can get involved in.
The key to these events is not to heavily promote your brand, as the local people will see through this as fake generosity and loyalty. Instead, offer genuine support and allow people to learn about the brand behind your support organically.
You might even consider partnering with local charities or hosting your own fundraising event for a local cause. Essentially, any opportunity to get involved with the local community should be taken.
Create a Loyalty Program
Another way to advertise your business locally is by promoting a loyalty program for your customers. This type of advertising will help you gain repeat business from locals and develop customer loyalty.
Existing local customers will be more tempted to work with your business again if there is an incentive to do so.
That incentive could be gaining a discount on each purchase or a free gift after a certain amount of purchases are made, for example.
The more you work with existing customers, the more you will build up your local business community and develop a foundation that you can build upon.
Build a Referral Program
Finally, one excellent way to build up your local customer base is by offering a referral program. While some of your customers will willingly share how amazing your business is with their friends and family, others may need a little push.
Offering a discount on their next purchase with you is a great referral option. You can increase the discount the more people they refer to your business. The choice is up to you.
For any customer who is happy with their experience, they will be more likely to want a second one. Offering them the chance to get a discount will incentivize them to promote your brand to other people, which will carry much more weight than any marketing message you can create.
Studies have shown that over 60% of customers trust recommendations from friends and family over the word of a company.
Therefore you can quickly start to see why this advertising strategy is a fantastic way to develop awareness organically via word of mouth.
Final Thoughts on How to Advertise Your Business Locally
Now you have several ways to advertise your small business efficiently and effectively. Many of these options of easy to implement, and while some do come with an associated cost, they should not be too significant.
However, marketing can take plenty of your time, the time you may not have to spare. To free up time for essential marketing strategies, consider using Daysmart.
Ditch the pen and paper and embrace tech to manage more of your business. DaySmart software solutions help businesses simplify the way they schedule, take payments, communicate, and manage tasks.
Once you have freed up additional time with this software, you can start implementing your marketing strategies and growing your business.
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