As a small business grows – whether e-commerce or traditional retail – the geographical reach of the business is sure to expand. For ecommerce ventures, this means drawing in potential customers from much further afield. For traditional retail, this has usually meant opening more outlets to be managed from some central location.
When we speak of local marketing today then, it might seem like the goal is to leave it behind. If expanding reach means encompassing wider and wider areas, then surely local marketing goes out the window when those areas can no longer be described as local? This is not true. The accepted route to retail success typically involves subdividing the areas of operation into areas where regional marketing is concentrated.
At the top end of the scale – multinational corporations – even more concentration is focused on regional marketing, albeit with hopes of having all customers identify with a single global brand.
The key take-away, therefore, is that local marketing – marketing focused on a local customer base – is vital to a business’s success. For small businesses, there is an excellent opportunity to foster local trust and have your brand forever identified with the place where it first concentrated its efforts. Only by factoring in a solid local marketing strategy can the financial budgeting of a small business be complete.
As the company grows, strategies need to be adapted to the new reality – embracing new markets while not alienating old ones.
What Type of Businesses Benefit Most?
When you stop and think about it though, it is easier to consider the type of businesses that benefit most from local marketing (although it’s important to remember that all businesses can benefit from it to some extent). Nevertheless, you only need to consider a business like a restaurant to see how local marketing can sometimes be absolutely essential. Even if a restaurant is franchised, each unit only has a local reach and so marketing revenue should be provided to each local area.
If you are selling printer cartridges, for example, then admittedly the product’s place of origin or where it ends up are not so important. However, when the company is small, you can still concentrate advertising on the region where you can ship to most easily. Utah-based small business invoice factoring experts, fastFACTR, say that all marketing for small businesses is to some extent local.
Tips for Local Marketing
So, how do you go about it? Here follows some useful tips:
Use Local SEO
SEO is vital, and it is in a large part determined by what type of keywords are commonly searched for by internet users looking for a particular product. Here is the thing, those keywords vary area to area, and this is down to many factors. Accordingly, all your online marketing can be local-SEO optimized if this is where you would place your market reach.
Use Local Landing Pages
When your reach is significant enough – or if you typically distribute to quite a diverse range of locations – then you can make sure that website visitors from those areas have a different locally-tailored experience by being directed to different landing pages.
Big-Up Local Prestige
Sometimes, products are strongly associated with the areas of their original manufacture. Just think of how Tabasco is associated with Avery Island, Louisiana, or how Jack Daniels is associated with Tennessee. It is wise to specially target the markets in your place of origin, as local identification can be a great marketing tool.
Despite its name and even though many businesses could hardly be described as “local”, local marketing is something pretty much every business should engage in.
