9 Tips for Choosing a Local Marketing Strategy for Your Business

Around 60% of customers with smartphones have reached out to a business directly from the search results, such as the ‘click to call’ option.

Such realities imply that your business needs to embrace and focus on local marketing to cement its market share. Local marketing, therefore, becomes a mission-critical tool in your arsenal.

Here’s a closer look at nine tips that can help your local marketing strategy deliver outsize results.

What Is Local Marketing?

Local marketing is where you use marketing strategies and tactics to reach an audience within a small but specific geographic location.

Typically, local marketing tends to promote a business with physical locations. Small businesses traditionally rely on local marketing as it’s a cost-efficient way to drive more business.

However, large chains have also been known to use local marketing to drive business in a finely grained locality.

For local marketing to deliver the most value, your business needs to be in-person in nature. Otherwise, if you are selling online, any client can purchase from anywhere, making such an investment a waste of resources.

How to Select a Local Marketing Strategy

There are various types of local marketing ideas you can settle on. Regardless of what strategy you go with, you need to learn how to maximize your local marketing campaign.

Here are some tips to help you create an effective local marketing approach.

1. Define Your Buyer Persona Accurately

Any strategy you select will need to market to a defined audience. A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal audience built from relevant data that helps you shape your communication.

Without a buyer persona, you won’t know where to focus your time and resources in developing and executing the campaign.

Your audience’s psychographic and demographic information is a critical guide for your local marketing.

2. Develop Your Brand

For many customers, smaller businesses represent quality and trustworthiness over big chains. As such, you need to shape your brand to become more trustworthy in the eyes of your local market.

How relatable is your messaging? You need to remember that you are dealing with people and not numbers on a spreadsheet. The more in tune your messaging is with your target audience, the more authentic it seems.

3. Sponsor a Local Initiative

Connecting with the hearts and minds of local customers has to go beyond broad strokes marketing. You need to associate your business with a local initiative that can capture local customers’ hearts and minds.

For example, you may decide to sponsor a local sports team. When the fans see your logo emblazoned on their team’s gear, they will associate your business with the locality, which helps raise awareness.

4. Be a Responsible Citizen

While sponsoring a local initiative can be impactful, it will still come across as a commercial activity. To make your business become a part of the community, you need to get involved by giving first.

For example, you and your staff can volunteer for a vital cause within the community. If there are competitions or contests in your community, you can donate prizes.

Being a responsible citizen within your community will go a long way in gaining more credibility with local customers.

5. Leverage Local Media

Don’t underestimate the impact local media can have in influencing customers. That is especially true if you are operating in a small town.

Target your local marketing to leverage local media. Using the locality’s respectable newspapers and radio outlets can help your brand come across as a home champion.

It’s that association with the locality that holds the potential to bring customers through your doors.

6. Deploy Local SEO

Complementing your offline marketing strategies with local search engine optimization (SEO) is critical in creating 360-degree awareness.

For many of your customers, their journey to buying something starts with an online search. Thus, when you hire an Seo company to help you integrate local SEO, you become more visible.

Once local customers go online to search for a product or service you offer, your SEO will help deliver the right solution at the right time.

When such a customer comes across your solution, the odds are high they will turn to you since they already encountered your business via offline marketing.

7. Turn to Social Media

Social media platforms are powerful tools for highlighting national concerns. That same power can be harnessed for local marketing.

You can run native social media campaigns targeted at customers in a specific area to get your message out.

Another approach you can use is to pair your offline local marketing tactics with social media. For example, you can create physical banners with an offer and direct customers to social media to unlock the offer’s value.

That way, your offline and online local marketing merge to drive more walk-in traffic to your business.

8. Collect Local Testimonials

Customers trust positive reviews from other customers like them. So much so that, according to the Pew Research Center, 82% of American adults scan online reviews before purchasing anything.

With that in mind, you need to collect and display testimonials from the right clients. Specifically, local customers.

As inconsequential as it may seem, seeing that someone from the same area benefited from your offering is critical to influencing a purchase.

That’s because such a testimonial communicates that someone in a similar context got a solution through your offering. Such assurance is of high value.

It’s easier to trust local reviews over national ones as a customer feels more psychologically connected.

9. Localize Your Messaging

Crafting your marketing message in the language a local audience connects with is vital to increasing your return.

Additionally, if there is a major local event or issue at hand, you can offhandedly incorporate that into your message.

Such efforts make your marketing feel more personalized to the local target audience. In turn, that resonates with local customers, increasing potential walk-in traffic for you.

Stay Relevant in Your Local Market

For small (and even big) brands, having a sustainable share of the local market is the starting point to world domination. Whether it be offline or on the internet, you need a local marketing strategy that offers the right solutions to your local audience in a way that resonates with them.

It’s only when you connect your marketing with the local landscape that customers regard your solution as the right one for their unique local needs.

Do you yearn to learn more about how you can make your small business bloom? Check out more of our content for small business tools that can deliver big business success.

Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.