4 Local Online Marketing Tips to Grow Your Business

As a local ‘brick and mortar’ small business, you depend on foot traffic. The very existence of your business relies on getting customers in your door with money, and out your door with your product or service. You spend most of your time focused on managing your store operations and maximizing your bottom line.

You also have a website but aren’t too sure how to market it. One question to ask yourself is: How much time have you spent on local ONLINE marketing? One of the things we have found with our Clients is that there simply is not enough time in a day to allocate to other areas of the marketing mix.

Local online marketing is growing. Why? Because it works and is measurable. Below are some things you can do to enhance your online presence and get traffic to your business.

1. Conduct Paid Search Campaigns

An increasing percentage of prospective customers conduct much of their pre-buying research online. Many do all of their research online and even come to the point of buying online.

With paid search like Pay Per Click advertising through Google Adwords, you advertise your business on the largest search engine in the world. With Google Adwords, campaigns can have razor specific targeting.

You can be location specific for targeted search terms. For example, if you are a furniture store in Vancouver, you can target people searching for the same products but with different locations such as ‘leather sofa vancouver’, ‘leather sofa richmond’ and so on. If you want your ads to display only to those within a section of a city, that’s also possible.

With a well developed and maintained paid search campaign, you will be able to quantify an ROI, through specific targeting.

2. Get Listed!

Remember the days of opening that big yellow book of business listings, phone numbers and directories? Fewer and fewer people are even bothering to take the plastic shrink wrap off those doorstops. All of that is available digitally. You can now get your store listed with complete business information on popular online directories for FREE.

Yelp.ca is one of the most popular ones. It allows users to rate their experiences and leave recommendations. Sites like 411.ca, brownbook.net and foundlocally.com also offer free listings for your business. Maximum exposure at minimal cost is critical to your bottom line and to your local online marketing strategy. List your business!

3. Engage Through Social Media

You have probably heard this time and time again: get social! It makes sense. More than just a passing fad, social media helps one engage with family, friends, businesses, brands, celebrities and more.

You may be asking yourself: How can I leverage Social Media to support and enhance my local online marketing efforts? What is important to your store-front business is which social network you can best use to promote your store, engage with visitors and convert them into paying customers.

The largest social networks are Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. With the large reach that Facebook has, it is no surprise that it is a no-brainer for any business to have. Additionally, it is important to have a Google+ Local page, for businesses with a storefront. Twitter is a must have as well but one lesser known but growing social network that is increasingly valuable for store-front businesses is Foursquare.

A Foursquare account allows smartphone users to “Check-In” to a certain place they have visited (using the GPS on their smartphone). Users can leave recommendations or tips for others which is especially valuable for local businesses. Foursquare has a “Specials” option where local businesses can offer a special to someone that checks in under certain conditions: these could be milestone visits, a first-time visit or a visit during a period of time.

4.Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Remember how everyone is doing their research online? You now know of Paid Search advertisements. What about the regular search items that come up after or beside the paid ones? Those are Organic Search results.

There is a very long and detailed list as to how these Organic results are ranked. On this list are a bunch of technical terms like title tags, meta descriptions, headers and backlinks that the average business owner isn’t familiar with.

Statistics show that optimizing your website for search engines (Search Engine Optimization) has the highest conversion rate of visitors to qualified leads among all forms of advertising or marketing actions like print, radio, email and so on.

So it is important to make sure this is part of your local online marketing strategy. It is even more important to make sure that you enlist professionals to take care of this.

Lastly …

As a local small business, you owe it to yourself to take all the measures necessary to grow your business. Businesses are allocating more and more of their marketing budget to local online marketing because it has been proven to work. The healthy combination of foot and online traffic are sure-fire steps to success. Taking these measures should give your business the online edge that will take your ‘brick and mortar’ business to the next level.