In the last two years, the high street has been dwindling with more businesses not being able to afford high street rentals meaning that many businesses are now moving their efforts to be online. This is an essential role for growth and for a business to succeed in recent years. If you don’t already have an online presence, then this is something that needs to be implemented right away. In this article, we will go through some easy ways in which you can boost traffic, improve your click-through rate and in turn bring you more sales and enquiries.
What Is Local Digital Marketing?
Local marketing is an essential part of a marketing strategy for a business to present its product or service to people within a specified location. It is also essential because it can bring in new lines of traffic to a businesses site and building a follow base where potential customers know who you are and how they can benefit from you as a business. Local marketing is perfect for those who have a real store or office to visit or provide a service in a certain area. These include businesses such as restaurants plumbers, bakeries and much more.
Create A Free Google My Business Page
Having a Google My Business page will help to build trust with your customers and for a local business, this is an extremely effective marketing strategy. The free listing will benefit a business by showing up on Google Maps, the local section for Googles search and will also give you a full knowledge panel of all the relevant information of your business. To get higher up the profile you will need to optimise your Google My Business Account. This will also improve your click-through rate, once you start getting some Google reviews as this will bring in another line of trust between the business and its clients.
Post And Engage On Social Media
Being online isn’t enough to hedge your beds against your competitors, customers want to know you as a business. What do you get up to every day, what are your new lines of products, what are your achievements etc? They also want opportunities to get free stuff through competitions. This is a great way to show the businesses personality and beliefs which is exactly what will turn into sales and a loyal customer base. Create business accounts on all media platforms that will benefit you, an example of this is a bakery that sells bakery products will benefit from an Instagram account as customers will want to see the product before ordering or going to the store.
You can also run ads on social media as they all have a paid advertising program that allows you to reach new prospective customers that haven’t found your business yet. The great thing about social media ads is that you can really pin down your target audience by setting parameters to meet their interests, hobbies, location and much more.
Optimise Your Website For Local Listings
SEO should be something that is implemented in every website, yet so many businesses are missing out on traffic and conversions due to them missing the mark on their SEO strategy. Googles algorithm is designed to get the most relevant, high quality and accurate sites to the end-user, which tells you that you need to make every page like this. This is free if you do it yourself and it is an effective and efficient way of marketing your business. It is worth mentioning that this is a long marketing strategy so don’t expect results in the first month or two.
Tips for Local SEO
- Add Location Keywords to the titles, headings and content to every page. If you provide services in different locations, have them on separate pages so they are competing with each other.
- List on Local directories, ensuring all information is correct on all of them.
Encourage Customers To Leave Reviews
It’s nice to know what you are doing well and what you could improve on. The only way you are going to learn about this is by asking your customers by asking them to leave a review for you. It also helps to confirm everything that you are trying to achieve by helping potential customers to decide whether you are the right company for them. If you can encourage them to leave reviews on platforms like Google Reviews, Trustpilot, Yelp or any other review platform it will encourage buyers to commit to you as a business. A simple way of getting them to leave a review is by giving them a discount on the next order or putting them in a prize draw.
Just as you like to know what you’re doing well and not so well, customers like to know that you have read the review and taken it on board. Take an hour or two out of your week to respond to reviews as this will show the customers you are engaged with constructive criticism. Don’t go for a generic response for all, respond individually to give your brand more personality.
Partner With Other Businesses
A powerful marketing tool is the power of partnerships. It is a fantastic way to build relationships and exposure. Having partnerships with other local businesses can seriously increase the volume of traffic go to your website due to your new partner having followers that may not have heard of your business before and vice versa. For partnerships to work well, it is best to not go with direct competitors but with someone who is relevant within your field or have the same values and beliefs. An example of this would be a vegan shop that sells whole foods, you would want to be partnered with a company that tests on animals or sell meat products.
Create Locally Focused Content
Content is something that will get you up the ranks and get you the exposure you need. Many businesses focus less on this for other strategies, and we get it, not every business has the time to create content for the website when you are juggling everything else with it. If you do have time though start looking at creating a content plan and stick to it as it will benefit you greatly.
By creating locally focused content it will increase your visibility through SEO as well as build a trust base with your customers in communities. If you are struggling to find topics to write about, try and put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Think about what your customers might want to know or analyse what there common questions or what products or services would benefit from some extra content.
Optimise Your Website For Mobile
This may not come as a surprise to anyone but around 50% of searches are done on a mobile. Due to more local searches being searched for on a mobile or tablet so it is best to give the users a good experience without having to compromise on the quality. It is crucial to have your website optimised for both desktop and mobile as this can have a direct impact on the amount of traffic coming through to your website.
Reach Local Customers Through Pay-Per-Click
Pay-per-click ads are a great add on to your online marketing campaign due to them being more directly as opposed to SEO. The ads help a business to reach potential customers that are more interested and are also looking in your area, leading you to better conversions. Pay-per-click results indicate that customers are 50% more likely to convert rather than organic visitors.
When you start with pay per click you will want to do some keywords research first for the most relevant keywords, local keywords such as “bakery in Leeds”. This will have a direct impact on you reaching the most qualified users.
Include Directions and Store Hours On Website
This one is a bit obvious but you will be surprised how many sites forget the simple things or at least make it extremely difficult to find their opening hours. It is important to have all the details in one place where customers can find out where you are based, the opening times and also contact details. The easier things are to find on your website, the less likely customers are going to go to a different company.
Bring Previous Customers Back To Your Site
The conversion rate of a user performing a conversion is around 2% which means that 98% of potential customers leave your site without finishing a purchase or asking for an enquiry. Luckily there is a marketing strategy that can help get the 98% of customers to perform a conversion through something call retargeting. Retargeting aims to serve ads at users who have only been on your website that has shown some interest but haven’t completed any call to action by tagging them with cookies. It has been found that with a retargeting ad, a user is 70% more likely to convert with click-through rates averaging at 0.7% so it is definitely worth doing once you have some data from your social media ads and PPC campaigns.