Digital Marketing Strategy for Local Business: A Guide

A big brand is the same as a local business in terms of digital marketing. Although, these brands already have a widely-recognized reputation, this doesn’t mean that business owners like you cannot achieve this too. Besides, the only thing that matters in online marketing is how you plan and establish your campaigns. Hence, you can obtain this through a well-established digital marketing strategy for local business!

Digital Marketing Strategy for Local Business

With consumers going online before buying a product or a service, you should really grab this opportunity to sell while increasing the visibility of your business to the local and global market.
According to Statista, that as of October 2019, there are almost 4.48 billion active internet users worldwide. With this huge numbers, Oberlo estimated that 1.8 billion people purchase goods online and 63% of these purchasing occasions begin on the Internet.
These data only reflect the change in how people purchase something. Gone are the days that consumers need to physically visit stores in order to know what the products and services the business offers. Instead, they just search the name of the business on the Internet, look for its details and reviews, and choose whether to visit their business or not. 
Due to this change of consumer’s purchasing behavior, digital marketing have been added as a new marketing strategy. Simply, this is the process of marketing products and services through the Internet. 
With this in mind, local business owners like you should use this as an opportunity to widen the reach of your business. Remember that Internet encompasses consumers all around the world. Whether you aim to go local or international, you can use this new media to maximize the success of your business.
Other than that, you can also utilize the Internet to connect, engage, and convert prospects into customers. There are various digital marketing tactics that you can use into your digital marketing campaigns. These tips will not just help you build your online presence, these will also help you be closer to your target customers. 
However, this doesn’t mean that you can simply sell your products and services online. Online marketing, like any other types of traditional marketing, requires an  well-planned and in-depth strategy. 
This new type of marketing is like a battlefield of business owners and digital marketers. Military generals during the battle create clear plan in order to succeed — where to attack, which force should go first, and when to start their attack. Same goes with digital marketing. Business owners like you should have carefully-planned strategy on how to market your products and services, where to market these, what tactics you should use on each campaigns, and when to start these. 
The key here is to treat digital marketing strategy for local business as the structure and map of your overall online marketing campaign. This is a series of action to help you achieve your goals through carefully selected online channels. With this, you will be guided on every activity that your business will do on the Internet — from creating a website into partnering with other businesses for your future campaigns. Hence, you should carefully plan your strategy to conquer the competition and lead in marketing your products and services online.

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Advantages of Digital Marketing Strategy for Local Business

According to Smart Insights, 45% of businesses are doing digital marketing without a defined strategy. This is strongly a negative sentiment into these business owners because they have started their marketing game without having a clear idea on what they really want to achieve.
As an owner of a local business, it is important that you create a strategy for each of your marketing tactics. This means that you should build a plan first before utilizing different tactics in order to perfectly align the direction of your local business into its success.
With this in mind, we have gathered these five advantages of building a digital marketing strategy for local business:

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Direction Alignment

Create a clear line between your current business situation into where you want your business to be directed. 
What are your current sales right now? How much do you want to achieve after a year? Do you only have one branch? Do you plan to build five branches after ten years? What past marketing tactics have failed? What are the tactics that you will retain?
These are just some of the basic questions about alignment. This term is an important aspect so that on every success and failure of your marketing strategy, you will still have a definite idea on what your business really want. Besides, this aims to guide you towards the success of your digital marketing campaigns. 
Further, in ensuring the alignment of your company’s direction, you need to link your customers goals to your objectives — the steps that your local business will do to achieve your company’s direction. Your business objectives is one of the efforts in creating your strategy and this is also essential in accomplishing your goal. 
Take this as the baby steps that you should take in order to achieve one goal. For example, if you want to achieve one thousand likes on Facebook. Then, tactics such as creating an advertisement and publishing it for thirty days is an example of an objective. 
An important thing to remember is that objectives should always be SMART which means that these should be  specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound.
Other than that, in aligning your company’s direction, you also needs to relate it into the creation, communication, and execution phase of your digital marketing strategy. Doing this will help you to create an improved strategy that is built according to the values of your business and to what your customers want.
On the creation phase, you need to know what your target customers will buy and the products that you are offering them.
Then, on the next phase, communication is key. The overall strategy together with its other details should be announced to key person in your local business. Doing this simply provides awareness to each of your employees and this will also help you whenever you want insight from them into your next campaigns.
Lastly, the execution should also be aligned with the objectives and goals. Create purposive tactics that are connected to your objectives and goals. 

Image from Asset Digital 

Cost-Effective

When you have all the details planned on top of your mind, creating tactics that are aligned towards it is easy to take. Hence, you can strategically choose which cost-effective tools, technology, and tactics to use. 
Unlike marketing strategies that are broadcasted on TV, radio and other traditional media, digital marketing is the most cost-effective way. 
Local business owners like you are for sure saving your money on your products and services to ensure its quality. So, using traditional advertising can become a big hassle because it mainly requires huge amount of budget. 
Take billboards for example. In order to advertise your business through this medium, you need to compete with larger business for ad space. Most of the time, big brands are the ones that are using this. But what about business owners like you?
Good thing, we have the Internet nowadays. With various digital marketing strategies, you can advertise freely on your website and social media business pages through blogging and content posting. You can also choose to promote your products and services to different advertising platforms. 
These networks are significantly cheaper than broadcasting your business on television. Depending on your budget, time span, target customers, keyword, ad platform and others, you can personalize your advertisement.
You also don’t have to pay a huge amount of money because it depends on your target metrics. For example, you can choose to only pay the advertising platform every time someone clicks your ad. This way, you can ensure that those who are most interested in your business are the only ones that your ad is targeted into. 
Hence, with a well-targeted digital marketing strategy, you can reach the right customers at a much lower cost. 

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Personalization

According to Janrain and Harris Interactive that nearly three-fourths (74%) of online customers get frustrated by websites with content that has nothing to do with their interests. These content range from advertisements, promotions, offers and others.
You can avoid this through personalization. This is simply the most powerful way to communicate with your target customers. With this, you can tailor your messages to each prospect and you can communicate with them through a more personal level. 
Besides, one of the most important aspects of a digital marketing strategy is to whom it is targeted into. Because you have a strategy to guide your tactics, you can personalize each according to its platform and audience. 
Take social networks for example. Each social media platform caters different kinds of content. Youtube is mostly used for its wide-range of videos while Instagram is widely-used for its aesthetic photos, quotes, and Stories. Then, Twitter is for short messages or tweets, news and blog liks, and GIFs while LinkedIn is for professional blog posts and company news.
Then, you can also customize your content according to your audience segment. These are mainly the groups that your target customers are included. For example, there are those first time website visitors and those who are on the decision stage of the buyer’s journey. Instead of creating content for your whole audience, you wrote various content targeting each segment. Hence, you posted a tip sheet or checklist for those on the awareness stage and a free trial on the decision stage.
Keep in mind that personalization aims to engage your local business to your target market without sounding too salesy. So, create tactics and content that are strategically customized for your prospects only.

Image from Sprout Social

Audience Insight

When you carefully plan and establish your digital marketing strategy, you will also have a clear idea on who your audience and customers.
On the planning stage of your digital marketing strategy, you should already know who your target customers are through a buyer persona. Referred to as marketing personas, these are fictional representations of your ideal customers. You can create this through market research and customer interviews and should include their basic demographics, behaviors, and buying patterns. This way, you can relate their background to represent each segment of your ideal customer.
Then, when you have already established your strategies, you can learn more about your audience through audience insights and analytics. Platform such as Facebook and Google offers free insights about your audience and how they interact in any of your content or on your overall platform in general.
Checking this insights from these networks are especially important if you aim to know more about your audience. Besides, there’s a big chance that your buyer persona is somehow different to your current audience. With these, you should improve your content by carefully analyzing its details and applying these to your future marketing tactics.

Measurable Results

Unlike traditional marketing, you won’t be able to analyze its data because these are directed to the masses and there is no tool to assess it. So, you don’t have any ideas if your marketing tactics have failed or succeeded. 
However, with a well-planned digital marketing strategy, you can gain insight about your various digital marketing tactics. You can analyze the audience that have seen your content and how they interacted with your online platform. Then, you can also have an idea on how your various digital marketing tactics performs. 
For instance, when you have a website, you can use Google Analytics to give you data about your website and its visitors. Then, if you are using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, these platforms mostly give you details on the performance of each content, which content perform the best, and other metrics.
The key here is analysis. As an owner, you should have an effective digital marketing strategy for local business. With this, you should perform content and audience analysis into your website, social media platforms, and other online campaigns because this will give you data that you can use to learn not just about your business but also about your customers that you can use in your future digital marketing campaigns. 

Tips in Building a Digital Marketing Strategy for Local Business

Creating a digital marketing strategy requires planning, establishing, and analyzing. In this process, we will walk you through the steps that you need to obtain so that you can start your online marketing campaigns with a full-proof strategy.
Keep in mind that there is no main ingredient in achieving success online. All of these tips are essential and will keep you moving from one success into the other. So, without further ado, these are the tips in creating digital marketing strategy that will help each of your campaigns successful:

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Identify your goals and objectives

Before starting your campaigns, you need to determine your goals and objectives first. Your business goal is what your company expects to achieve over specific period of time while the objectives are the steps to achieve your goals. These two terms are essential in creating a strategy as this align your local business towards your company’s direction.
What do your business hope to accomplish over a period of time? What are the problems you are trying to solve for your prospects? How is your local business different from your competitors? What experience do you want to give to your customers?
The above questions are only some of the questions that you should ask yourself and your team. You need to answer all of these to clearly identify your goals and objectives.
Other than that, these two should also be SMART so that it will help you set realistic targets.

• Specific – Your goals and objectives should be detailed and is able to pinpoint the strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Measurable – These should have both qualitative and quantitative qualities that can be applied in creating a metric.
• Achievable – Your goals and objectives should be used to improve your strategy’s and employee’s performance.
• Realistic – These should be relevant to your business or your industry in general.
• Time-bound – Your goals and objectives should be used within a time period for you to review afterwards.

Image from IMPACT

Determine your Buyer Persona

After creating realistic targets for your local business, identifying your target market comes next. 
Who is your target market? Who is your ideal customer? What past clients think about your products and services? What do they think about your brands?
Analyzing your target market is important in keeping your local business on track. Besides, you should not create any product or service that are not relevant to these individuals. So, understanding what they want from your company is key in the next step of your digital marketing success.
You can accomplish this through buyer personas. These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. You can research these through surveys, existing customer data and through market research. 
In doing these, you should include a combination of demographic and psychographic information. The demographic data is the quantitative aspect of your research which mainly includes the location, age, income and job title of your prospects. Meanwhile, the psychographic or the qualitative information includes the goals, hobbies, interests, and priorities of your customers.
You can also add in this section the purchasing behavior of your target market. What products and services do they search online? How many of these have they purchased? How many times do they shop online? What products and services do they mainly purchase? These are some of the questions that will tell how your target market buy products online. Make sure to include this to know how your ideal customer choose what to buy on the Internet.

Create a professional and optimized website

In establishing the name of your local business online, you should start with your website. Your website is one of the main places that you spread the branding, message, and campaigns of your company. This is the best place to sell your products and services online because this serves as the digital storefront of your business. In order to do so, you need to create a professional-looking website that are perfectly optimized.
To start with website optimization, you should buy a domain name and web hosting. Don’t rely on a free domain website because this negatively affect your business. Remember that you are building the name of your business on a huge market, so create a website that does not scream ‘free’ on its link. Instead, buy a domain and hosting through various website creation platforms like WordPress and BlueHost.
Thereafter, you need to present your business in your digital storefront. When people visit your website, they mainly want to know more about your business. With this in mind, provide them with your business details like your location, contact numbers and others. Also, make your site as customer-friendly as possible. Keep in mind that although this is just your website, you should strongly represent your business through this. Add your company logo and other pictures about your business. You might have a past event that you want to highlight with some descriptions. Sp, don’t be afraid to post this in your platform. 
Lastly, optimize your website to all digital devices. Is your design responsive? Does it took too long to respond? Is it easy to navigate? If your answer on all of the questions is yes, then you are good to go. If not, then optimize your website. 
Keep in mind that website optimization is an important aspect in attracting audience and customers. Don’t let your possible customers be annoyed by your website. Instead, make sure that you choose a website template that is responsive because this means that it has an ease of use when viewed on different electronic devices. Hence, make it the best place to know more about your local business. 

Image from Vizion Interactive

Set up local listing

In digital marketing strategy for local business, you should not forget the keyword ‘local’.  Most people nowadays will just search for terms like ‘restaurants near me’ and ‘bike shops in’ followed by the name of a city or locality. These search queries are triggers for local listing sites to provide the nearest businesses in the area
This means that the more searchable you are, the more search engines will recommend you to people who are searching for businesses in your locality. Even when you list your business to other websites, search engines will still think of it as a trigger to increase your rank. With this, search engines will put your listing to relevant search results according to their user’s intent. 
Still, listing your sites is just the initial part on ranking high on the SERP. You still needs to optimize your listing. This means that you should also add your business details and pictures. Also, Google My Business lets you post various content for your customers like announcements, offers, event details, and whatnot. Hence, you can directly communicate with your customers, and promote your business through these local listing platforms.
Other than that, doing this also improves your customer’s experience. People who want to visit your business can ask questions about your product and services. By answering their queries in public or private, you are able to help them decide what to do next. Then, this also lets past customers post their reviews, add pictures, and rate your services. With this, they are not just helping other people, they are also helping you to improve your services and online ranking. Thus, you can solve both the problems in your overall service and your customer’s experience.

Start blogging

Blogging is not yet dead. It’s just that more people prefer other types of content to fulfill their needs for information. However, this doesn’t mean that you should avoid blogging altogether. Instead, increase the reach of your blog through sharing it on your social media business accounts and start incorporating voice search with your content too.
To improve the visibility of your blog and your website in general, provide more time on semantic search. Write blog content in a natural and conversational voice. You also need to understand the intent of the search users, target long-tail keywords, provide concise answers and focus on action queries. 
Then, make sure that the structure of your website is perfectly organized. With this, include a structured data markup in the backend of your website. Doing this is necessary so that search engines will understand your content better. 
Although blogging is not that popular nowadays like multimedia content, this is still essential in increasing the authority and visibility of your website. Besides, this is the most effective ways to reach your customers as a brand. So, create blogs for your website and incorporate it with the latest trends in content marketing.

Set up social media accounts

According to the Global Digital Report 2019, there are already 3.484 billion social media users worldwide. This means that you should also utilize these networks to increase the visibility of your business worldwide. 
The top three things to consider when establishing your social media presence are the platform, policy, and engagement. 
When you talk about social media, there are five platforms that will surely be on your mind and these include Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Although, these platforms have the same use which is to be a place for people to communicate, these have also become a marketplace for businesses and consumers to interact with. Due to this reason, here are some key aspects that you should keep in mind when using these platforms. 
Facebook – You should interact with your target market through the Facebook Page. Then, when posting on this platform, it is recommended that you use a conversational and often informal voice that playfully engages with your audience. Also, you can post long-form of content, images, videos, and other visual content in order to capture the attention of your prospects and customers. There are also other features that you can use to widen your reach such as the Page Groups and add call-to-action buttons. 
Instagram – In using this platform, focus on photos and maintain good aesthetic. Because the main users of this platform are millenial, you should post pictures with good quality and captions that are conversational and engaging. Although this platform focus on photos, you can also post videos through its IGTV, Live, or Stories features. Lastly, to reach more people with your eye-catching images, don’t forget to use hashtags and add your location.
YouTube – Long-form videos are the main highlight of this platform. Then, if you want to optimize your video, you should add a description about that video, use tags to reach audiences that are following the same tags, share links to your social media accounts, and connect with your audience in the comment section.
Twitter – With this platform, you can send quick information, messages and reminders with its 140-character limit in every tweet. This is also ideal in researching for ongoing trends with the use of hashtags.
LinkedIn – Mainly used by business owners and professionals, you can use LinkedIn to connect with other people in the industry through a formal voice. This also lets you gain industry insights that could be helpful in building the name of your local business to the global market.
Now that you already know which platform to use, create a social media policy for your local business. This policy is a code of conduct that your team should follow in using the above-mentioned platforms. Using this is essential to avoid conflict and problems surrounding how your team use your business accounts and how they communicate with your target market. In creating one for your business, you should include these components:
Social Media Team – Clearly state the people behind your social media accounts. This doesn’t mean that you should provide their personal information. Instead, clarify that you have a team behind every activity in your various accounts.
Conflict Plan – Create a plan on how to solve conflicts. This should include response during crisis, message approval, social engagement and information management. 
Personal Accounts Guidelines – Your team and employees still represent your business. So, whether they are using their own accounts or not, there should still be a guidelines for them to follow as what they do reflect the place they work on. 
Potential Legal Risks – Include guidelines on copyright, confidentiality and disclaimers to avoid potential legal risks. Provide a clear instruction on how your team will use and credit third-party content. Also, give them guidelines on which information are allowed to be shared and what should be kept. Lastly, inform them on how disclaimers work on social media.
Employee and Account Security – Avoid security breach by securing your business accounts. Include guidelines that your team should follow to prevent this. Then, make sure that every account has a secure password and set up a two-factor authentication.
Lastly, keep in mind that social media platforms are still named as it is for people to be social. With this, you should not just post content about your local business, instead connect and engage with your audience. 
Achieve engagement by building a relationship with your prospects and showing the human side of your brand. Nurture your audience by answering their queries, comment on their shared post, check-ins and other engagement styles that will open a conversation. Immerse them in your industry and make them come back to your business pages again and again.
You can check more about our full article on Social Media Marketing for Local Business here.

Include multimedia content

Blogging might be one of your marketing tactics but you should also incorporate it with multimedia content like images and videos. 
Images is one of the visual contents that you can post together with your long-form content. Because text, alone, bores readers easily, you should use these two together. Add relevant images to your long-form content and make sure that these are inclined with the purpose of your content.
Also consider optimizing your images. Nowadays, other than the voice search, people like to find products, services, and other things through visual search. Make sure that its size are not big enough to affect your website’s performance. Then, add a long-tail keyword in your image alt-text, title, and description so that search engines can read what your images are all. Lastly, include a caption that carefully describes what your images are.
Other than images, videos are by far gathers the top spot of visual content nowadays. People now consume more videos other than normal content. Besides, according to Cisco Visual Networking Index Complete Forecast, it was predicted that nearly 1.9 billion Web video users will be watching 3 trillion minutes of videos per month in 2021.
However, this doesn’t mean that you will just upload videos and that’s just it. You should also include a closed caption for your videos as this helps your SEO ranking.

Increase reach through advertising

Promote your products and services through targeted advertising.
Unlike traditional advertising, you pay ad platforms to promote your business to various online platforms in the Internet. This means that your ad can be seen by more than just one platform. Hence, increasing the reach of your advertisement. 
Still, the success of your advertisement still lies in your content. This means that no matter how perfect your services and offers are, if your ads are not eye-catching and click-worthy, you will still fail on your goal. Hence, you should create an effective content for your ads.
In terms of type, there are various kinds of advertising techniques that includes native advertising, display advertising, search engine marketing, social media advertising, and Pay-Per-Click marketing. Although these approaches are mainly displayed through different platforms, these are all similar in one thing — allowing you to only play when someone clicks your advertisement. 

Create an effective landing page

Before advertising your business online, create an effective landing page first. 
According to Madeline Blasberg, digital marketing manager at Leadpages, that a landing page is a web page specifically designed to prompt visitors to take an action. 
Besides, a landing page’s primary purpose is to increase conversion. So, when people click your ad, this must end up with them purchasing your products and services. 
Ensure that this goal should be achieved by completely filling all the information on your landing page to prevent prospects from bouncing off this page and not becoming one of your customers. First, identify the purpose of your landing page. Then, decide what content to be used and include call-to-action buttons. Lastly, make sure that all of these details do not look crowded on the same page and your overall landing page is optimized for all devices. 

Customize and automate email

Email marketing is one of the most personal marketing strategies as this lets you send something to your target market through their email addresses. This also gives you the opportunity to effectively convert your prospects into customers.
Further, like the above marketing strategies, you should also nurture your target customers through lead magnets, segmentation, and sending personalized emails. 
Firstly, lead magnets are things that you offer in exchange of the email addresses of your audience. These magnets include ebooks, checklists, webinars, and case studies. Also, because this is one of your content, you should make it valuable and relevant. This way, they are enticed on what your lead magnet offers and they will directly give you their email addresses. However, do keep in mind that you are already asking your audience’s personal information. So, create a privacy policy on your website.
Afterwards, properly group your audience. This is what we call email segmentation wherein you break your subscribers into smaller groups based on various criteria like their demographics, interests, and others. When you do this, this will let you send content that each of the segments will find relevant. Hence, this will help you in personalizing your emails according to your audience’s buyer journey. 
Lastly, remember that emails are content too. Entice your prospects with a subject line that makes them curious about its content. Then, customize it like you are writing to only one person. Finally, optimize your emails by only adding small-sized media and keeping your format clean. 

Top Digital Marketing Strategy Tools  for Local Businesses to Use

Digital marketing requires planning and strategizing. From building a website into promoting your products and services through various Internet platforms, you need effective tools to help you establish your strategy in an efficient manner. Hence, to ensure that you maximize the full potential of your online marketing strategy, these are the tools that you need:

Google My Business

Creating a listing for your local business is essential in building your brand because you are allowing your target market to see what your business is, how to reach you, and what other people think about you. With this in mind, Google My Business is a free tool that you can use to manage how your local business appears to Google Search and Maps.
This tool provides the same features like any other listing sites however it also offers businesses to post various types of content which is why it is already referred to as a social media platform. To start with, just add all of your business details in your free Google My Business account to provide better information to people who search for businesses near them. Then, monitor and reply to customer reviews and learn where and how people search about your business. Lastly, this tool also lets business owners like you to post content and add a call-to-action such as ‘buy now’ and ‘visit the website.’ So maximize your local reach with this tool and provide your target market a better customer experience.

Asana

When you are working with various online marketing strategies, projects, campaigns, and tactics, you need to store all of these business processes in one place. With this in mind, Asana will help you organize, track, and manage all of your projects. 
In using this tool, you can manage all of your tactics in one place. You can simply create a task under a project, add the key individual that should accomplish this, and include the deadline, description, and other files. You don’t have to open another program just to check how your other projects are doing and communicate with your team. Instead, you can make each of your campaigns a success with all of its features that includes mapping out each of your steps, organizing all of its details on the platform, and communicating with your team.
Asana also offers boards, calendars, and timeline to visualize all of the tasks for each project. Whether it is creating a blog or posting content, you can see all of these in the timeline. You can also review the tasks of each of your employees through their dashboards and calendars. With this feature, you can assess every tactic so that you can hit your desired deadline. 
Other than its main feature, you can also monitor the performance of your team through their workload. With this, you can see how busy your team is — whether they are underwork or not. So that you can keep the initiatives on your track.

Google Trends

Provide better service and content by learning more about the latest trends worldwide or in your industry with Google Trends. This tool offers a search trends feature which analyzes the total search volumes in Google’s search engine over a period of time. 
Because this is a great tool in monitoring industry trends, this allows you to evaluate the popularity of a certain term, compare them against other keywords, assess its popularity over time and in different regions, and show related industry keyword in coming up with new keywords which can be helpful in creating new content. 
Apart from that, this also lets you monitor your competitor’s position in Google. Compare your business to other brands and see how they’re performing against your business.
Using Google Trend, carefully analyze your digital marketing strategies, the channels that you use, the content that you create, and various tactics that you impose in your platforms.

Canva

Visually appealing content attracts more audience and for this reason, you need a tool like Canva to help you create images and videos that are specifically curated for your website and social media platforms. 
Canva is a graphics editing software that provides free and paid subscription service. This tool mainly offers free templates for you to work on where you can create shapes, logos, charts, graphs, presentation and your custom fonts using its design tools. Other than that, you can already use this tool to edit videos. Hence, this improves the main use of this tool which mainly aimed to easily create designs following the content size requirement of any platforms with its mobile-optimized application and drag-and-drop features.

MailChimp

Sending email is one of the most personalized marketing tactics that you can use to engage with your target market. In order for you to effectively plan your email marketing campaigns, you should use MailChimp. 
This is an email automation tool that is highly effective in creating and establishing email marketing campaigns as this gives you basic template and standard behavioral targeting facilities. Using this, you can store up to 2, 000 contacts, use their content studio to design and customize your emails, and target your email list based on their segments. 
Also, this enables you to track the activity of your various email campaigns. When your emails are sent, this tool provides you data if your content is opened or left closed. This data also includes how many clicks your content received, its bounce rate, and how your content performed compared to other email or in your industry. Lastly, this tool provides data which is broken down by country and highlighted on a map to give you an insight on how your content performed by region.

Hootsuite

If you use different social media platforms to connect and engage with your audience and customers, then you need a tool that lets you manage all of these in one place. With this, you can use Hootsuite to help you simplify and automate your social media strategies.
Using this tool, you can manage all of your social networking platform in one place. With a free plan, you can already connect up to three social media profiles and schedule up to 30 posts at the same time. If you want to manage more platforms, you can upgrade it with its other paid plans that provides more advantages for your local business.
Moreover, this tool also provides engagement management and analytics. You can respond and engage directly with your audience as it helps you centralize all mentions and messages in one dashboard. This also helps you analyze the performance of all your social media accounts through its Hootsuite Insight.
Hence, if you aim to manage your social media accounts, connect with your audience, improve social listening, and increase the performance of your business, then you should use this tools.

Yoast SEO

Ensuring that your contents are SEO-ready is key so that you can establish the name of your local business online. Achieve this through a Yoast SEO, a built-in plugin when you create a website with WordPress. 
This tool helps businesses to rank better on search engine platforms in terms of content and readability.
If you are already done adding this plugin, this will directly suggest some changes to your title and meta descriptions so that your content will really have a good SEO. Then, thisalso analyze all parts of your content to give you repost if you are stuffing too many keywords or not, have you added inbound and outbound links, and other important factors that your content should follow to improve its SEO.
Other than that, this also provides details if your content is easy to read or not, how many percentage of the sentences in your content has more than twenty characters and other aspects in improving your content’s readability.

LeadPages

Landing pages are designed to convert audience into customers. Because these pages are important in generating leads and increasing conversion, you should use a tool that will help you create a mobile-friendly landing page.
Through LeadPages, you can create landing pages that are engaging and optimized to different devices. In using this tool, you can easily choose a template depending on your branding, edit the content of these pages by adding widgets for CTAs, set up different form, and attach a lead magnet and a thank you page. This also lets you test your landing pages before publishing it to ensure that it is effective.

Google Analytics

Tracking your website’s progress and analyzing its success is essential in a digital marketing strategy for local business and one of the best tools to use is Google Analytics.
This is a free search data tracking tool that lets you monitor and assess your website’s activities  including onsite engagement, referral sources, and resource of unique visitors.
In using this tool, you will then discover more about your website visitors, the sites that send traffic into your site, which part of your website your audience stays the most, and the actions that your visitors take on your platform. Hence, you can get useful insights on how to improve your website, products and services, and your local business in general.

Key Takeaways
The Internet is a resource that local business owners like you should utilize in order to build the name of your brand online, increase the visibility of your company, improve customer satisfaction, generate leads, and double sales and revenue. 
There are a variety of digital marketing strategies to choose from. These include search engine optimization, social media marketing, paid advertising, content marketing, lead generation, and email marketing. With all of these marketing strategies, you can achieve success for your local business. 
However, this doesn’t mean that you should just implement various marketing tactics and campaigns without a well-defined plan.
A digital marketing strategy is a crucial aspect of your overall marketing success. It acts as an outline of all of your marketing tactics online. Understand that this strategy will direct your local business on where you should play and how you can win the game. Hence, this is not only used to plan everything that you will do in all of your marketing tactics and platforms, this will also guide you in aligning all of your tactics towards your company’s direction.
This means that before creating a website for your business, build a systematic process first. This procedure starts by having a clear idea of who your target customers. Decide on which segment each prospect will be placed and create a tactic that is only made for the specific segment. 
Only then, when you already have a clear goal, target, and strategy, you can already start thinking about your tactics and the tools needed in every strategy.