What Is Local Business Marketing?

Catering to local audiences is a must for any brand with a physical store location. You can ensure that your brand reaches and converts nearby consumers by leveraging local business marketing. With an effective local marketing strategy, your business will remain relevant within your community and resonate with your target audience.

What Is Local Business Marketing?

Local marketing is a strategy that targets consumers who live or work within a close radius of a brand’s physical location, such as in the same city, town, or region. Through this marketing tactic, brands put their resources toward an audience that’s most likely to invest in their products and services due to their close proximity to one another. As a result, local business marketing allows for an efficient use of a brand’s marketing and advertising budget.

Who Benefits From Local Marketing?

Any business can benefit from a local marketing strategy, so long as they have a brick-and-mortar location where they serve customers face-to-face. That means everything from large chains to small businesses can make use of local marketing. However, this tactic is most crucial for locally based organizations that conduct the majority of their business in-store versus online.

Advantages of Local Marketing Strategies for Businesses

Brands that use local marketing to reach their target audiences experience many key benefits, including:

• Building brand awareness: By marketing directly to local consumers, you increase your company’s brand awareness. When customers know your brand exists, they’re more likely to use your products or services.
• Improving rankings: Location-based services tend to rank well on search engine results pages (SERPs), making your brand more visible to consumers in your area.
• Reaching the right consumers: Local marketing tactics enable you to reach individuals who are most likely to purchase your products or services.
• Increasing conversions: Because local advertising helps brands reach the right audience, it results in higher conversions.
• Achieving value: Local business marketing is cost-effective, helping brands get the most of out their limited marketing dollars.

Local Business SEO and Marketing Tactics

Now that you know what local marketing is, it’s time to define your local marketing strategy. You can incorporate many effective marketing tactics into your brand’s action plan to increase local sales.

1. Facebook Ads

Running local advertisements on Facebook is a great way to reach consumers and familiarize them with your brand. The more web users scroll through their newsfeeds, the more they’ll be exposed to your brand, and the more likely they’ll go to you for products or services.

When marketing on Facebook, make sure you know who you’re targeting by clearly defining your location radius, audience size, and demographic information. Then, you should define your marketing objective to get the most out of your Facebook ad campaign. Do you want to find new customers, increase brand awareness, or drive conversions? The goal you choose will impact how you market to your consumers.

For example, if you were looking to increase brand awareness with your Facebook ads, you might run top-of-funnel ads that educate and engage users, such as videos, blog content, and social posts.

2. Google Advertising

Google Ads are excellent for targeting local consumers with paid advertising. By creating pay-per-click (PPC) ads through Google, you can improve brand awareness, increase inquiries and referrals, and ultimately boost sales down the road.

To get the most success from your Google Ads, use the following best practices:

• Refine your location targeting: Google allows you to define specific regions and radiuses for your ads. If you have multiple brick-and-mortar locations, you can drive search traffic to each of them by establishing specific radiuses around each store.
• Create highly specified campaigns: Using single-keyword ad groups allows you to be hyper-specific with your advertising by using one relevant keyword per ad, such as “sandwiches near me” or “swimsuits on sale.”
• Add site extensions: Local customers don’t always want to view your website – sometimes, they’d rather call or visit you at your location. Adding site extensions to your PPC ads provides this information to searchers to increase the likelihood of contact.
• Track conversions: Google Tag Manager allows you to track conversions, giving you insight into your ad’s performance.

3. Local Listing and Review Sites

You can claim local listings for your brand on third-party review sites and directories that direct consumers to local businesses when searching for products and services in the area. These websites also enable individuals to leave service reviews.

Popular local business directories on which you can list your business include sites like Yelp, Google My Business, Yellow Pages, Citysearch, and MerchantCircle.

When listing your business on local listing and review sites, it’s important to:

• Be specific: Make sure your listing information is highly detailed and consistent across listings to make it easy for customers to find and contact you.
• Stay up to date: If your business encounters any changes, it's vital to update your listings to ensure complete accuracy and credibility with your customers.
• Encourage reviews: It’s a good rule of thumb to encourage your customers to leave reviews for your brand. Consumers tend to trust businesses with reviews more than those without them.

4. Local SEO

Local search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your website to improve site rankings for local searches. Leveraging local SEO helps brands improve their organic traffic from locally relevant keywords and search queries submitted by web users in nearby areas.

You can better reach your target audience with local search using the following strategies:

• Perform an SEO audit: Audit your existing website to identify any issues that can hinder your SEO success and make changes accordingly.
• Develop a backlink strategy: Utilize internal linking on your website to improve the authority of your content. You should also aim to get backlinks from other websites by creating high-quality content that other sites will want to link to.
• Create location pages: If you have more than one physical store location, consider creating a service area page for each of them. Each location page should feature unique content to improve local SEO.
• Implement on-page SEO: On-page SEO is the process of optimizing elements of your website to improve search engine rankings, such as keywords, meta descriptions, title tags, URL structures, and content.

5. Social Media Marketing

Every local marketing strategy should include social media. Social media is among the easiest and most effective means of connecting with local consumers – plus, it offers plenty of creative opportunities for your brand.

Keep the following tips in mind when marketing locally through social media:

• Utilize localization: Most social media platforms provide localization options that enable brands to adapt their social media content to specific regions. You can localize your social posts by including location tags, profile locations, and location hashtags to market to local users.
• Update your information: It’s vital that your social media pages contain up-to-date information about your brand and its business locations.
• Stay active: Being active on social media helps you increase brand awareness and improve credibility with consumers. Be sure to post several times a week, interact with your audience, and promote your account.

6. Email Marketing

Email marketing is essential to local business marketing, as it helps brands gain new customers while retaining existing ones. Using email to connect with your local audience is simple, inexpensive, and effective, and it keeps your brand top-of-mind with consumers.

To build your local email list, start by adding your existing customers’ data. Then, you can add new contacts to your list by creating pop-up forms, chatbots, and landing pages to encourage web users to enter their information. You can also collect email addresses with offline methods like in-store subscriptions and local events.

Types of emails you can incorporate into your local marketing strategy include:

• Newsletters
• Welcome emails
• Promotional emails
• Local event invites
• Updates
• Coupons and special offers
• Transactional emails
• Reengagement emails

7. Community-Based Marketing

As a local business, your community’s support is crucial to your brand’s success. That’s why it’s essential to increase your visibility in the local area by interacting with community members. When you support your community, your community is more likely to support your business.

You can embrace community-based marketing by:

• Sponsoring local events
• Doing volunteer work
• Participating in nonprofit activities
• Attending community events
• Forming local partnerships
• Distributing flyers, business cards, or coupons
• Placing newspaper ads
• Leveraging word-of-mouth marketing

Optimize Your Local Business Marketing With BrandMuscle

If you’re looking to amplify your brand through effective local marketing execution, BrandMuscle is your solution. Partnering with us means taking the first step toward empowering your local partners to make the greatest impact on your customers.

Contact us to learn more.