Local Business Digital Marketing Strategy is essential before any tactics as it determines your ability to attact, grow and scale your leads for your business.
– RUBEN LICERA
Most of us if not all rely on the internet when searching for something: a price, location, a brand or anything under the sun. This internet-dependence is advantageous for both consumers and sellers. So if you are in the local scene doing local business, how do you make the most out of digital marketing?
With the digital world making the real world smaller, more people are also getting interested in getting to know local things.
Take tourism for example.
When you wanted to visit the Philippines, there should be a lot of blogs that will take you to the list of places that you could visit here.
However, if you input “Bohol”, specifically “Anda Town”, you’ll only get a handful of information available online.
The general information you could get is that it has a long coastline with white sand. It also boasts of crystal clear water that you can enjoy.
But as to the number of places that you could stay in or activities to do there, there may only be a handful you can search online.
Unless you already know a local from there, it would be quite difficult for you to set a budget in mind for your trip to Anda Town, Bohol.
It would have helped if local businesses that offer room accommodations or even homestays have put up their businesses online or even in social media. Here comes the problem.
Local businesses are more reliant mostly on who gets to visit their area and books a room, physically and on the spot.
They also rely on traditional word of mouth. What some have failed to see is the vast potential of their business when it goes online.
Local businesses under the hotel and resorts industry can learn from Airbnb.
Airbnb is an online market place that allows you to have your place rented for someone who’s on vacation.
More than that, the site also offers you a list of sites and places that you can visit while you’re there!
You’d be surprised that if you type Anda, Bohol for your next trip, you will find at least 27 places that offer room rentals.
The place has now gotten much attention, thanks to its inclusion of the list of places you can visit in Bohol province in the Philippines.
Not only that, Airbnb also offers other useful information like restaurants you could dine in, bars you could go out and party to, and learn experiences from other users who have already been there.
Are you already hyped to know how you could make your business big using the online platform? Let’s dig in to the real thing about local digital marketing to grow your business!
Local Digital Marketing
According to Neil Patel, digital marketing is the marketing of products or services that involves electronic devices.
But what does local digital marketing mean? It’s simply the usage of local businesses of digital marketing techniques, tools, strategy and platforms.
Get to know how local and small-medium enterprises can benefit from local digital marketing further down.
Importance of Local Digital Marketing to SMEs
With big thanks to Facebook Pages, SMEs can now boost their posts and run ads targeting a specific number of users based on their geographical location, demographics, behaviors, etc on Facebook.
If your business is located in Cebu, Philippines, you can pay Facebook to boost your post for more people to see it rather than your usual limited followers and audience.
Because traditional ads are more expensive, SMEs and even big businesses now turn to digital platforms for a choice of affordable ad packages.
Now, how do you make the most out of digital marketing? Get to know the hacks below!
15 Local Business Digital Marketing Strategy Hacks you can use for your Business
- Mobile-friendly website
Since most internet users always carry with them their smartphones and use it to access their social media accounts and visit other sites, you need to make sure that your very own website is mobile-friendly.
Websites that are on desktop versions are harder to navigate and time-consuming. If you have a mobile-friendly website, you are at an advantage!
One of the coolest local business with a mobile-friendly website is Sunniesface. Check them out now!
2. Simplicity is key
You don’t need an overly-done website just so you could impress your visitors.
What makes up a simple website? It should be clean and presentable.
But what’s more interesting about making it as simple as possible is that you could showcase only the products and services that you offer.
You can highlight these by putting up professionally taken photographs.
This makes a more human appeal to your website and gives a more local vibe.
Try to visit the world-famous Rico’s Lechon website.
Apart from the page’s speed which takes about a few seconds to load, it only has two dominant colors – green and cream palette.
The font sizes of the texts are very readable and the site itself is easier to navigate.
Plus, the qualities of the photos are not pixilated.
The landing page or the home page has everything you want to know about the product they are selling.
3. Accessibility to your Business
Make sure you employ a multi-channel approach when it comes to making your business accessible to your target audience.
If they want to personally visit you and your shop, don’t forget to place your exact address.
If they are not familiar with your location, you can use the aid of Google My Business. This service can help you and your business be placed on the map. So when someone searches for your business and types your business name, they can easily locate you.
If they want to call you, make sure you have an updated telephone or mobile number too.
Also, set-up your very own email for your business so queries and other concerns could be sent there.
Are you active on social media? Indicate your social media accounts too! It’s one of the best highlights you can take advantage of.
The more options they have, the more accessible and approachable you will be for those who look up your business.
4. Consistency in Posting
Don’t just post when you feel like it. You need to keep the momentum coming especially for your followers.
Apart from building brand awareness, consistency in posting allows you to establish authority and credibility in your business.
Whether you are talking about organic farming and the by-products out of your farm, you need to keep them hooked about your brand.
Another plus factor you need to add is consistency and your content quality.
Take note that longer content is more credible than shorter ones. So, make sure you produce a well-researched quality content.
5. Keep your target audience in mind, ALWAYS!
Who are you marketing again? Oh, yes, your target audience.
So, when you do content on your website or your social platform, make sure you keep them in mind while you do it.
Some marketers tend to forget that campaigns and ads are usually created for the end-users.
When you think of your end-users, you think of their current geographic location and the location of your business too.
If you want to attract them, keep it as local as possible.
If you are a restaurant selling good coffee and at the same time advocating for coffee education to clients, then, you should talk more about it on your website and social accounts.
The more distinguishable you are to the people, the more they’ll come to you as a brand.
6. Take Advantage of Locally Targeted Ads
Your target audiences maybe the people who are living near your business location, right?
Why? You need platforms that can do advertising while at the same time targeting the people you’d want to see the ads.
Remember Facebook Pages? About how you can now have the choice to put up ads and target those people within the reach of your business?
That’s just only one option.
There’s also Google Ads that can help you appear in the geographic location that you choose.
7. Google Search Ads
Have you tried searching using Google’s search engine? Have you noticed the texts that first pop up on your list of searches? Do you see a green text that says “Ad”?
Those are just samples of Search Ads on Google.
When you do searches and if you are employing this feature from Google, once they’ll look for a certain keyword, those businesses that availed this feature may be placed on top of the search results.
What is the good thing about this feature? You only pay them if someone clicks on your link.
It’s cost-efficient for a small business such as yours, isn’t it?
Plus, it’s also convenient since you can also indicate the budget for the ads and how frequent you want it to appear on searches.
8. Retargeting
Have you noticed that when you get to visit a website, it follows you anywhere you are in the Internet?
An example would be visiting e-commerce sites like Shopee, Lazada and Zalora.
After visiting the website, you will then notice that when you open your social accounts like Facebook, you could see a carousel or an ad about the products you have viewed from those e-commerce sites.
That’s what they call retargeting.
It’s also helpful for local businesses like yours as this always puts you on top of your customer’s mind.
9. Monitoring your Online Progress
Have you read feedbacks from clients about the product on your website?
What about on your social media accounts?
You need to listen to your customers. Whether positive or negative feedback, you need to take note of it.
If there are negative ones, take it as a way to improve the quality of your products and services.
If it’s mostly positive ones, well, keep up the work you’re doing or take it up a notch higher.
It always pays to monitor progress online so you would know where you could improve.
If there aren’t any feedback at all, you can encourage them to leave one by giving out incentives like discounts on their favorite items on your product line.
Just like what Shopee is doing. They encourage users to leave feedback about the product. The longer and the more detailed it is, the higher the chance they get to earn points. These points can be used when shopping using the app.
10. Promote your online presence
When you have a physical shop, it’s also good to know that the customers can reach you on wherever they are.
You can place your social accounts on your store signage.
People love to take pictures and post it on social media.
So, when they know that you are also online, they can either tag you or your business on their posts.
Restaurants nowadays are doing innovative and stylish interiors so they could be among the list of Instagrammable places for Instagram.
It’s one way where customers can also promote your business.
11. Email marketing
Have you included email subscription as one of the services on your website?
Email marketing does help when it comes to bringing news to your customers about your latest product line.
Also, it’s one way of keeping up with them so the regular ones will keep coming back.
However, it doesn’t mean that you need to bombard them with a lot of emails everyday.
Don’t do that. They might just unsubscribe to your emails.
You wouldn’t want to lose a customer, right?
Just keep it short and simple.
You can also let your photo do the talking.
12. Always on the lookout
Remember about always putting your customers on top of your mind?
When you do this, you need to think like them or think about what they feel about your product.
You don’t always need to wait for customers to point out that there’s something you need to improve on your products.
You can be your own lookout and see what products may need improvement in terms of quality.Z
13. Content Marketing
A brand with compelling content always gets the attention of its customers.
You need to produce content that attracts customers and will keep them coming back for more.
Whether its tips, recipes or DIYs, you need to make your brand on top of the customer’s mind.
Look at Rico’s Lechon. When people talk about lechon, the franchise always pops into the conversation.
People are talking about it because aside from its products, there are also stories behind the famous lechon brand that draws people to it.
14. Partnerships with local influencers
You don’t need to employ or hire actors or actresses in order to up the image of your brand.
In fact, it is more convincing if you connect with local influencers.
Apart from the fact that they know the language that you speak, they also have the following that you need in order to promote your business.
Do you already have an influencer in mind? If you haven’t thought about one yet, you can do some research about the local influencers in your area.
Go for influencers who have a specific niche as yours. In this way, they can align their interests with your business too.
15. Evaluate your overall marketing strategy
Is it working? Have you checked your sales? How is it doing?
You need to see the impact or effect of all your efforts through checking the revenue growth in your business.
If it’s not making any progress, then, you need to do something different or implement changes.
You need to see what strategy you should abandon and what you should replace it with.
Now that you are already aware of the different strategies that you can do to start your digital marketing strategy for your local business, have you asked yourself if you can do this all on your own?
Have you thought about the amount of work this would entail?
Fret not. This is the reason why local digital marketing agencies exist. They are in the industry to help local businesses like yours be up on the race.
Here are some of the few good reasons to convince you on hiring one for your local business.
Why Hire a Local Digital Marketing Agency to do it for you?
There are a lot of reasons that I can think of why you need to hire a local business digital marketing expert to work for you
- Because they are operating locally, they have already established local connections in order to successfully market your local business.
- Compared to hiring a digital marketing agency that’s based overseas or outside of your location, local digital marketing agencies have the ability to know what’s really going on in your locality.
- Since they are also based in the same location as you, you can easily call them up for meetings to address your needs. You don’t need to have video calls, as you can meet them in person.
- They don’t just depend their market studies on research done on the Internet but also based on actual consumers.
- They know how to connect you with the right people in order to promote your products and services.
- You are assured that they can work on your concern.
- Because you know that they know their own market, you can now focus on working on other things that matter to the operation of your business.
- They can easily adapt to the changes in the marketing industry. They know their work because they’ve been there and done that.
I don’t know about you but if these reasons don’t convince you to get a local digital marketing agency, then, you’d better start learning the ropes of digital marketing on your own.
Kidding aside, you need to take things seriously right now.
Now is the right time to make that shift and to embrace digital marketing into your business.
Who knows the success of Rico’s Lechon will also come to you, right?
Do you already have a local digital marketing agency in mind?
If not, don’t worry because ESTRAT can help you with your digital marketing strategy!
ESTRAT is one of the leading digital and social media marketing agency in the Philippines.
The company will help you grow through their relevant, up-to-date and effective Internet marketing strategies.
This will ensure you that ESTRAT will provide a professional service that is perfect for your business!
So, for your problems, hire ESTRAT Digital Marketing Company right now!
All Rights Reserved | Enjoy the rest of your Day! 