How To Win Over Local Prospects With Digital Marketing?

When debating digital marketing, one of the major issues for local businesses is how most of the guides available, the case studies, as well as the success stories are about big companies targeting nation-wide or even multi-national audience. This means that it’s difficult to grasp the concept of local digital marketing.

If you have embarked upon local business, it’s of central importance that you slot in digital marketing in order to appeal to more local customers. At the moment, with the potency of online advertising capabilities, you are able to effortlessly target your local customers and make them familiar with your business. Having said this, there are very particular scopes of strategies which are critical to be incorporated into your digital marketing efforts for local businesses.

Understand Your Customer Behaviour

Digital marketing is fundamentally about putting your product or service before your customers. So, whether it will be successful or not will in the end depend on our understanding of the customer behaviours.

For instance, if most of your ideal customers usually learn about new products from social media posts, advertising on popular blogs might not be so effective. Thus to maximise your local digital marketing strategy, you must first understand how local customers make their purchase decisions.

In general, there are three main ways in which most of us learn about local products or services:

• Through Social Media

This can include influencers who promote local businesses, posts from family and friends, trending posts, and so on.

• Through The Search Engine, Especially Google Search

This can include “near me” searches via text or voice search.

• Through Promotions And Advertising

This can include paid search ads, social media ads, and even email promotions, among others.

So, when planning your local digital marketing strategy, consider these three aspects. The main goal is that the most online prospects find out about your business and purchase from you.

Start With A Call To Action

No digital marketing for local businesses campaign can be successful without a customary call-to-action (CTA). The CTA has the simple purpose of bringing clear instruction into the open that help to move your prospects to the verge of turning into customers.

CTAs are extremely important in every form of digital marketing for local business. These need to focus on the buyer’s journey irrespective of if you’re busy in the promotion of a seasonal sale on Facebook or putting together Google ads. A powerful CTA also has the ability to enhance your brand prominence by resorting to a language that is specific to the particular industry your business belongs to.

What Is Local Search Engine Marketing?

A staggering 46% of all Google searches nowadays have local intent. In addition, 88% of those searchers will visit the company within 24 hours. In short, if you are not optimising for the search engines, you are missing out on a massive market.

A vital thing to keep in mind here is that for local keywords, Google is not only displaying organic results but results from Google Maps as well. This means that when discussing local search, there are three different facets that are similarly important:

1. Google Maps result, which is out above the organic search results. Optimising for Google Maps is significantly different than ‘regular’ SEO and so will require different approaches.
2. Organic result. Although Google Maps results are put above organic ones, you still need organic ranking in order to promote your content.
3. Search ads. These are placed above the Google Maps results and can be very effective in generating short-term results. However, it can be very expensive.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Want to learn more about digital marketing? If you do then you really need to check out our Digital Marketing Course. Follow this link for more information.