So I want to talk today about local marketing. So I hear from a lot of businesses that are concerned about losing business to these large online entities like Amazon, you know, we're all shopping more and more online. And that's a concern. But I did some research. And the good news is about 84% of all purchases are still done in a physical location. So you know, that is a really good, that's really good news. 

And what we're going to talk about today is how you can combine your local marketing and advertising with a digital strategy, which will be a powerhouse for your business and how to how to do that specifically. So we're going to talk about that. So local marketing, when I talk about that, that is a strategy that targets customers within a certain radius to your physical location. And so again, by focusing your marketing efforts in this local area, with a combination of digital and traditional marketing, you're going to be able to increase your sales can grow your customer base, and bring traffic in your doors. 

Before I go into some of the specifics on that I do want to mention, and I feel like a broken record, often because I say this so often, because it is so important that we really have to define our audiences and narrow the focus of our marketing efforts in order to be effective. So you want to define your buyer persona, or your customer avatar for your products and services, which will help you clarify your message and keep your focus narrow enough with your marketing and advertising that you'll save a lot of money and time, it doesn't mean that you're not promoting to other business or other clients and customers. But if you focus your spending on a specific customer avatar, you're going to be so much more effective. And you're just going to save, you're going to save time and money in the long run. 

So now for the details. The very first thing which seems very simple and obvious to some would be to make sure your site that you have a website that's mobile friendly, it's not enough just to have an online brochure for your business, which is what you know, the old websites were like, it's just a, you know, a placeholder a place to put your talk about how you know your business and, and just just so that you have a presence online, a website that will bring your local customers to your business is mobile friendly. It includes local content, and it's updated frequently. And it also includes the names of the locations that you serve. So we often forget about this. But if you serve a particular county, or several cities, you want to make sure those those names are on your website. So peppered throughout your content, you want to mention those communities. If you have different locations for your business, you want to have a separate page on your website for each of those locations so that the local searches will pick those up. That's critically important. 

So for instance, if you are a local junk removal company, you want to have the names of the cities and towns that you serve mentioned on your website. And again, if you have two locations for your store, so you have a clothing store with two locations, you want to have a separate page on your website for each of those locations. that's critically important. 

You want to optimize for local searches. So when someone's looking for products or services, or they're looking they're they're putting in certain keywords or phrases, when they're doing a search online, you want to make sure that your business shows up. So make sure your Google My Business presence is very solid, make sure you've got that set up, you want to make sure that you're you have reviews on your on Google, you want to make sure you post things on your Google account, you know, post, just almost like a website, you want to make sure that your Google presence is updated frequently has good content, has good photos has lots of reviews and comments and things like that. So that's that goes in a little bit into search engine optimization. And I could do several episodes on search engine optimization, and how critically important this is to your online presence. But I'll just mention that you want to make sure your Google My Business is updated. You want to make sure that you have the important keywords and phrases and long tail keywords on your website that are related to your business. Google Trends is a great way to find what's currently trending out there. And then you can also use the keyword planner in Google. That's a really good free service that can help you find the right keywords for your type of business. There's a couple of other paid services that you can use for that if you're if you're highly technical, but really just it's very important to just think about what keywords people might be using.

When they're searching for products and services similar to yours and make sure those words are on your website, the other important piece of search engine optimization SEO is to make sure you have good content on your website. And as I said before your your mobile friendly website should be updated frequently. So write content and have frequent content posted to your website. That's not just selling, you know, not just selling your products and services and telling people how great you are, but offering them some, some educational content, things that are helpful and useful to them do this on your social media too, and that we can talk about that another day. But that's a really important strategy is to not just always be selling, but you know, give them useful, helpful content that builds trust, and builds that as you as the credible source for related products and services. And then the other thing to do is to consider the local advertising. So the most affordable and most effective promotion that you can do for your local business is the local advertising. I know local newspapers struggle to continue to be relevant, because we can get our frequent news, our daily news in so many ways now. But local billboards and local magazines, your community magazines are very powerful in establishing your business in your local community. And it reaches new residents to the community all the time. I don't know if you know this, I spent 16 years leading Marketing and Communications teams for three major universities and I had lots of sometimes I had really small advertising budgets. And sometimes I have very large advertising budgets. And I always advertised in the local magazines, because that's where I was reaching new visitors to the communities, new residents to the communities and showing the local residents that we were part of the community and that we cared about the community and we were included in the community. And so the local magazines are a very valuable way to promote your business and, and pretty affordable when you compare it to other outlets. So those are really important. And I wouldn't, I would definitely consider that as you combine that with a digital strategy and a social media strategy. So digital advertising targeted to your local community is critically important. There's ways to do that with geo fencing, you can, you can create like a virtual perimeter around certain areas. And you can have your ads served up to those people, when they enter into those that virtual perimeter. That's a simple way of explaining geo fencing, you can target specific types of people online, and you can really know where your money is being spent and how many people are converting and coming back to your business. But you want to communicate Are you want to combine that digital strategy, your social media strategy with a traditional strategy and all focusing on your local market. So you want to drive traffic to your to your physical location of your business, you also want them to purchase from you online. So you want to combine all of these things together to really make your business successful. The other important aspect to think about with local marketing is community outreach. So to establish your business in the local community, it's really important to be seen, consider sponsoring local charities, sporting events, or civic organizations have a booth at a local vendor event and show up in any way that you can collaborate with other businesses. There's great ways to do that and share in the opportunities that are out there to get in front of the right customers. There are lots of networking organizations that you can join, you can visit I belong to be an AI, which is business networking International, it's a great way to meet new people that you wouldn't, wouldn't otherwise meet and get involved in your local community. So local marketing helps you stay in touch with local residents while also attracting new customers visiting or moving to the area. And so if you combine the above strategies, you will improve your online search rankings, you're going to increase local traffic to your website. And most importantly, you're gonna bring customers into your local, physical location. So I hope that's really helpful. I think it's really important for us to give think about our marketing strategy holistically, looking at all of the tactics together. I know a lot of people who focus just on social media and they think I'm just gonna bring business bring customers to my business through social media that is not a effective strategy, especially today. We're
We're finding you know, it's more and more competitive on the social media space. So we really want to think of our marketing strategy holistically. If you'd like more information on that I do have a course for building a micro marketing plan. It takes about an hour and a half to go through it's pretty easy. If you'd like one on one consultation I'm always available to help and you can reach me at Jan at Jay del Sur marketing calm So thanks very much. I hope you found this helpful.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of The it's all Marketing Podcast. The purpose of this podcast is to share about local businesses get to know them and also learn from them you know what they've achieved the challenges and struggles that they may have had and how they overcame those and what marketing strategies helped them grow their businesses so that you can learn and you can grow your business. If you have any questions about what you've heard today or if you have feedback or ideas for our podcast, please don't hesitate to let me know I am so open to suggestions and feedback. You can reach me at Jan at Jay del Sur marketing calm and you can call 912 to 955406 to reach us and if you'd like information on just to get started in some marketing information, please go to our website Jay del Sur marketing calm right now we have a free download of the top six marketing tactics revealed just kind of gives you a great overview, what to use what's out there and how to get started. So please take advantage of that and I'm so glad you're here and I hope you enjoy today's episode.