In an effort to keep my expertise sharp, I attend a lot of marketing programs. In the last month, I have been to four presentations about accentuating local search rankings to build sales. It seems that local marketing on the web will be the marketing theme for this year.
Back in January, Forbes published the 10 Local Marketing Trends to watch. They made it clear that marketers need to be concentrating on improving their local presence on the web. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) must make sure that their websites are mobile friendly and that location pages and review sites are beneficial. When a company has many different stores, it will need to keep the parent brand presence consistent but also market uniquely to the local marketplace; on the web, the search engines assume that all search is local and favor the local location.
Last week I attended the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) meeting in Dallas to hear Tiffany Monholon from ReachLocal discuss why we all need to be doing local marketing. She supported the position that local marketing strategies are essential for businesses large and small.
Why? Because business is personal and therefore local—even when it’s global.
We are in the middle of the transition from strictly brick and mortar toward conducting business virtually. Since early in the 21st Century it has been increasingly necessary for every company, no matter how small, to have a website. Many businesses are now managing the entire transaction online, but most companies still maintain a tangible presence. For instance, Barnes and Noble still has stores that sell physical books but also sells e-readers and digital books. A large proportion of their total book sales are conducted entirely on the web. Personally, I hope they never close the neighborhood stores but I do buy a lot online.
The Challenges of the Local Online Presence
This shift to online operations, marketing, sales, and fulfillment has allowed even small businesses to go global but has also created many new challenges for local companies. Every company needs a website and neighborhood establishments find it difficult to publish one, keep it current, and respond to comments and inquiries on social media, blogs, and websites.
It is extremely important to make sure the business is listed on location websites like Google Maps, Yelp, Urbanspoon, Citysearch, and the online Yellow Pages. It is also critical to monitor and manage service review sites like Google+ Local, Zagat, and evaluation websites that are organized by city or service/product.
Prioritizing Your Online Local Marketing Activities
The best approach for being successful online is to carefully allocate your resources in order to maximize the return for your investment. Only do those things that are most likely to improve the ability of the company to be found online and will convert traffic to sales. Don’t waste time on activities with lesser impact. In most cases, the primary concerns should be:
- Have a website that is easy to update and for users to navigate. It should also be optimized for mobile devices and includes keywords and tags, and appropriate plugins. The newest WordPress themes make all this easy.
- Include calls to action with links that lead your web visitors to do something that will move them down the sales funnel. Some great examples are “Get a free sample NOW,” “Tell me how,” “Enter to Win,” etc.
- Make sure that your name, address, and phone number are consistent in every place they appear online. Use the same capitalization, spelling, and abbreviations everywhere you give contact information. If you write “Clayton St.” in one place, it shouldn’t be “Clayton Street” in another.
- Pick keywords that are relevant to your business but are not so general that you will find a lot of competition on the search engines. For instance, “hairdresser” has a flood of entries, but “dallas hairdresser specializing in grey hair” would be more likely to attract a specific clientele.
- Stay on top of your online presence.
- Regularly check your website for broken links or inaccuracies.
- Post frequently on social media if that will benefit you. (social media doesn’t help some local businesses).
- Check your location pages often to make sure they are working correctly and the information is accurate.
- Be aware of activity on all the relevant review sites to make sure that the evaluations are deserved and correct. You can contest erroneous evaluations if you catch them quickly.
There will always be more to do, but restricting your activities to those that will accentuate your online presence will have the greatest impact on the success of your local marketing. If you cannot manage it all, you are trying to do too much. Marketing today is all local, commit to maintaining those online activities that are most likely to help you.
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