5 Best Local Business Marketing Strategies

As a local business you have to learn how to use the internet to your advantage. If you aren't using the internet to bring in more customers you are missing out big time. These days people pull out their mobile device when it comes to finding a local business in their area that has what they are looking for. 

The days of using the Yellow Pages are quickly dwindling, 54% of people use the Internet over the phone book to search for a local plumber, florist, restaurant, mechanic, etc., sometimes just to get a phone number and other times to do research on the required services offered in their area. 

According to SMDigital Partners: 

• 74% of all web users perform local searches
• 100 + million people use Google Maps from mobile phones to find local business every month
• 66% of people use online local search.
• 61% of all local searches result in purchases
• 82% of local searches result in offline actions, including, an in-store visit, phone call or purchase

A recent study from comScore revealed that 78% of local mobile searches resulted in offline purchases. If you aren't popping up in local search they will head over to your competition, this is guaranteed. 

Here are 5 simple things you can incorporate in your local business marketing strategy to help get more people in the door. 

1.  Create A Local Business Profile In The Top Three Search Engines

This is by far one of the easiest things you can do as far as local search marketing goes. All three top search engines, Bing, Google & Yahoo, allow businesses to create a local search business profile. This is absolutely free and it will take you all of 10 minutes. Make sure to include a phone number so that it can show up in search results under your business name. Go do it now!

2.  Get Mobile

These days everyone has a mobile phone. They use it to do all of their searching and other online activities. If your business can't handle mobile users you are in a world of trouble. Your business has to be able to come up in mobile search. Otherwise you will miss out on a ton of potential new customers. 

3.  Optimize Your Website Using Key Local Terms

When the search engines crawl your site they are looking for keywords that help them better understand what your website is all about. Always use the location of your business in the title tags. Include the full address include city and state. 

4.  Get Involved With Social Media Marketing

Well over a billion people are using Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter at any given moment. Think some of your customers are hanging out on these sites? You better believe they are. And as a small business you need to have a strong presence on both of these sites. When it comes to local marketing this is one of the best ways to do it. Build up your following and you will always have customers coming through your doors.  Monitor your reputation on Yelp, the leading consumer review site where thousands of people review various businesses. 

5.  Use Paid Local Search

Paid local search allows you to only receive visitors that are in your region. You can actually tell the search engines the area you want to receive visitors from. This gives you complete control over where your visitors come from. So instead of paying to have visitors come to your site who are less likely to purchase from you, you can only get visitors who are in your local area and are looking for what you have to offer.   Using paid local search will save you a great deal of money. It will also help you increase your conversions as you are only presenting your offers to those who you know are most likely interested. 

And there you have it, 5 of the best local business marketing strategies for small businesses. Use all of them and watch your rankings and profits start to soar.

What Is Content Marketing and Its 7 Benefits

These days traditional marketing just doesn't cut it anymore. Long gone are the days when people actually had to sit and watch commercials in between their favourite shows. Now they can set their DVR and skip all the television advertising. Magazine advertising isn't as effective as it once was anymore either. People just simply ignore it. And those banners and buttons that used to get clicked online, well web traffic has become somewhat immune to those too. 

Smart online marketers know this type of traditional marketing is no longer effective. And that's where content marketing comes into play. Content marketing is a simple marketing technique that requires website owners to create and distribute valuable content on consistent basis. The objective is to get visitors to take a specific action, such as, sign up for a mailing list, make a purchase or simply to develop brand and establish expertise in a given niche or industry. 

Benefits Of Content Marketing

As you can imagine there are a ton of benefits associated with this type of marketing. Below I will share seven benefits of content marketing with you. 

Benefit #1 – It Generates Sales

As a business owner you depend on large sales to survive. The problem is the average small business doesn't have the customer base of their large competitors. That means they have to do much more to generate any sales they get. Content marketing is without a doubt one of the most efficient ways for any business to draw in more customers and ultimately more sales. 

It is a fact that being of value to customers, and offering content they can actually use builds relationships, and loyalty that can last a lifetime.

Benefit #2 – It Establishes You As An Expert 

Content marketing is a great way to separate yourself from all the other businesses in your market. If you are not afraid to say something bold and to express a different point of view on a particular topic it will really make you stand out in the crowd. It will make you look like the expert everyone should follow. When you establish yourself as an expert there is no limit to the amount of money you can make. 

Benefit #3 – It’s Cost Effective

When you compare content marketing to other forms of marketing you will see just how cheap it is. While it won't cost you a lot monetarily it will cost you a lot as far as your time goes. It takes time to create content and it takes patience to continue to do it on a regular basis. If it makes sense for your ROI (return on investment) then outsourcing is always a great option.

The rewards from content marketing won't be instant. It will take some time before you start to see any returns. But once the ball starts rolling it will all be well worth it. 

Expect to spend at least 40 hours a month creating content. If you can't do that you may want to consider hiring someone who can. Again, the results will take time but it will be well worth it in the long run. 

Also, it’s important to think outside the box when it comes to content, sometimes we instantly think of written text, but, did you know that video converts 80% better than text on sales pages? And, YouTube has millions of views each month? People love video and so that is a great form of content.

 Benefit #4 – It Makes You Money

This is the best benefit of all. Content marketing is one of the most effective strategies on the internet. It delivers your message in a very quick and efficient matter. If done
correctly a good content marketing strategy can bring in quite a bit of money in conversions for calls to action on your site. 

Benefit #5 – Brand Building

Brand development is another important benefit of content marketing. The fact is that when people get reliable, useful and accurate information the payoffs for establishing brand reputation can be significant. A smart strategy is to go beyond how the content serves the company or business, but, to consider how it serves the user. Make sure to consider what are and how to solve their problems as they pertain to your niche and industry, and once you do so on a consistent basis you will establish long term and prosperous relationships from a grateful audience. 

Benefit #6 – It Brings Traffic

The simple fact is that the more site pages you have the more traffic you will get. Content brings search engine bots and the more pages of a site those bots index the more traffic they can bring back and traffic means more opportunities to convert any calls to actions that are on that site.

Benefit #7 – Social Media Benefits

Content marketing is the food for social media campaigns. High quality can go viral, it gets shared and it can be posted on the various popular social platforms, in turn, social media marketing campaign brings more traffic, more leads and allows companies to build relationships with their customers.

What Is Internet Marketing And Its Methods?

By definition Internet marketing is promoting something online. This includes promoting products, services, brand or even yourself as a blogger.

Sounds simple enough right? 

Well truth be told it’s not as simple as it might sound. Internet marketing merges two of the most important aspects of marketing together. That would be the technical and the creative. That means advertising, development, design and sales are all one. 

The internet really became popular back in the early 90's. Since then its popularity has grown immensely. Back in 1998 the average number of searches per day was just under 10,000. Fast forward almost 20 years and that number has skyrocketed to well over 1 trillion per year. 

That alone should tell you how popular internet marketing is. It should also tell you how profitable it can be.  In fact, as compared with traditional offline forms of advertising, such as, television, newspapers and magazines, the Internet offers significant advantages, some of the major ones are:

• Global reach 
• Instantaneous mode of conveying marketing messages 
• Cost effectiveness and a high ROI (return on investment) 

In 2011 Internet marketing revenues surpassed cable television and came to close to beating those seen in broadcast television commercials.

2013 saw historic increases in online marketing revenue with an 18% rise from 2012 for a total of $20.1 billion in the first two quarters. 

Methods Of Internet Marketing

So how exactly does Internet marketing work? It’s made up of several different strategies that all work together to help you drive traffic, increase conversions and make sales. 

There are various methods that fall under the umbrella of Internet marketing, all with their own specific designs, end goals and strategies. 

Smart marketers implement more than one method, and best case scenario all of the above in order to appropriately diversify their marketing plans to achieve the desired results and engage the highest amount of leads that can be converted into customers. 

Each of these strategies work to help boost the online visibility of your business. 

• Email Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
  
• Video Marketing
• Display Advertising
• Mobile Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing - that comes in the form of 
  low ticket affiliate sales where you can earn a smaller commission or get paid for leads and high ticket affiliate sales where commissions are much higher such as programmes Groove and ReThink Social Media.   These are my current favourite affiliate programs for online marketing but in other niches there are a multitude of programmes on Clickbank and elsewhere too, offering both lower and higher ticket prices.
• Search Engine Marketing (Pay Per Click)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Top Rankings (SEO)

When you consider just how much new business is being conducted online every year you will understand how much competition there is out there for that coveted #1 spot in the search engine page results (SERPS) and especially Google since they are the most widely used search engine in the world. 

It is crucial that every business, be it local or national, have a strong online presence in search engines. When you have a spot on the first page of the major search engines it not only facilitates the highest possible level of organic traffic, but, it can create a significant level of trust with consumers. 

They believe you are a reputable and a credible company all because you have the top spot. When you are able to build trust you will be able to make a lot of money through Internet marketing. 

End Goals 

The end goal of all Internet marketing strategies is to increase a brand or business’s online visibility and to increase conversions of calls to actions.

A call to action is simply what you want your site visitors to do when they come to your website. This could be a landing page where you want to entice them to sign up for more information so you get their email address, making a donation, making a purchase, filling out a form or buying a service. It is whatever you want the visitor to do. 

The key is to figure out which Internet marketing strategy will work best for your business. Don't try to implement all the strategies at one time. This will never work. Start with one and add in others as you see success. You don't want to overwhelm yourself as that will lead to inaction, which in turn leads to self-sabotage. 

How To Network to Promote Your Home Business

When it comes to business opportunities, sometimes it’s not “what” you know but “who” you know. That is the basis of networking – meeting others who might be able to help you sometime down the road. Here are some ideas about networking when it comes to promoting your work from home business.

What Is Networking?

In simple terms, networking describes techniques used to meet others who are like-minded. For you, that would be people who are also in business for themselves. It is not just making contact and handing out business cards, but also forming lasting mutually beneficial relationships. To that end, showing interest in their enterprise is just as important as them wanting to know more about you. Some relationships go beyond business and develop into friendships over time through shared interests.

Ways to Network for Home-Based Businesses

• Be prepared – If it’s good enough for the boy scouts, then it’s good enough for business. Before heading into a networking situation, practice a bit. Get used to the idea of small talk. Learn a little about the event you are attending so that you can speak intelligently to others in the room. Always have a handful of business cards on you at all times to pass along to new people.  Since Covid lockdown a lot more networking has taken place online, but in a lot of areas life has gone back to before and so you may find a hybrid way to network - both in person locally and also online.
  
  
• Find local business associations – Check with the Chamber of Commerce to find out about local associations for home-based businesses. Get to know others who have started businesses. Pick their brains as to what works and what doesn’t. Attend sponsored events and get the word out about your new enterprise.
  
  
• Attend conferences – Look online and see what types of events are going on for your type of business. Conferences are places where business professionals can get together, discuss new policies and legislation and share information. If you are a private detective, for instance, events on law enforcement, future of the business and others would be useful to you.
  
  
• Create social media profiles – Social media allows one to search globally for their target market. Creating profiles on Facebook and Twitter will foster interaction between you and your customers as well as update the general public on what is new and happening in your company. For business professionals, there is also LinkedIn, a social site that caters to those who want to network. You can link your other profiles to that one so that people can check up on you before introducing themselves. 
  
  
• Join forums – These can be found on social media sites as well as online home-based business sites. The key to successful networking online is to participate. Don’t just read the comments, but post useful information for others and really get involved. It is easy to spot a spammer who only talks about their accomplishments and business happenings.

Networking is a two-way street. Show your support for others and they will reciprocate in kind, possibly with advice and opportunities that open new doors for you.