Local businesses and self-employed workers still rely heavily on the more traditional forms of marketing such as advertising in local newspapers, featuring in print directories, and posting flyers through the door. These are all perfectly sound ways of promoting a local business, but if you aren’t exploiting the opportunities provided by digital forms of marketing, you will increasingly be missing out on a valuable form of promotion. Maybe you don’t think you need an online presence, and if business is good, you might be content to carry on as you are. Over time, however, your competitors will start to embrace the power of digital and you will gradually lose business unless you embrace it too.
What is digital marketing?
It’s a catch-all term for everything that is based on electronic media, like the internet, TV, radio, and cell phones. Many local business owners are failing to engage with these outlets because they can’t see how a website that is available all over the world is going to bring in the customers who live within their catchment area, which could be as small as a ten-mile radius of their home location. If you don’t have a national or international offering, what help will a website be? The answer is in location-specific search engine inquiries, which are overtaking print publications and have even made some of them obsolete.
How digital works for local businesses
It’s true that people will often look at the services section of their local paper to find what they’re looking for, but the number of searches done online for local providers is increasing, and you need to be a part of it. To gain visibility, you need to have your business positioned at or near the top of a list of results when someone searches for your type of business. The key to rising to the top of the search engine listings is to use location-specific keywords on your website and raise your profile by employing as many digital platforms as you can. This is known as local SEO (search engine optimization) and is the best way of attracting new customers to your local business.
Understanding how digital marketing works
If your eyes have started to glaze over after reading phrases like “search engine optimization” and “location specific keywords,” don’t let that put you off. You don’t need to be a technical wizard to make digital marketing work for you; you just need to understand how it can help you, and then get the professionals to carry out the work for you. For example, say you are an electrician working within a twenty-mile radius of your hometown. To build your online presence and thus rise up the list of search results when someone looks for local electricians, you need to have:
- A well-constructed website: A page that just says who you are and what you do may be better than nothing, but to really engage people and boost your search engine rankings you need to have a well-developed site that gives plenty of information about you and your business, as well as useful links and well-written content that is interesting and helpful for readers. A website that is little more than an online poster won’t give the best impression to potential customers, whereas one that looks professional and well-maintained will give people confidence in your business being sound and you being knowledgeable.
- A selection of social media accounts: You can utilize the power of social media to enhance your presence and thus your rankings, and direct people towards your website.
- Detailed entries in online directories: These are replacing print directories, and you’ll find there are multiple websites listing services in your area. Most of them have a basic entry for all registered businesses within a certain locale, but to stand out and make the directories truly useful, you need to update your entry with more information about the business and why people should choose you.
- Locally focused online advertising: Platforms such as Facebook have targeted advertising that uses the information held on all their users to show your adverts to specific types of people. So, you could create an ad that will only appear to people living in a certain geographic area, and further define it using demographic information such as age, gender, marital status and so on. You can also run a pay per click campaign that uses local place names as keywords so that your ad will be at the top of the front page when a search is conducted looking for services in a specific location.
Creating your online presence and digital marketing strategy
If you lack the time, inclination, or skills to do all these digital marketing tasks yourself, there are specialist services who can take care of everything for you. For instance, you could use a professional website designer to create your business site and an SEO expert to ensure that your website meets the parameters that will satisfy the current requirements of the search engine algorithms. You can use social media management and email campaign marketing tools to streamline the process of communicating with your customers or employ a freelancer or part-time assistant to do this work for you. It can all be done remotely as well, so you could employ anyone from across the world to take care of your digital marketing requirements. You can find more info about how these professional services work and the advantages of using them by visiting relevant websites and assessing what is on offer.
If you don’t get started with your digital marketing now, you risk getting left behind as other businesses take up the challenge and start reaping the rewards. Many of these digital services and tools are very low cost and sometimes even free, so it needn’t be too great a drain on your budget. What is certain is that making the best use of digital marketing opportunities will contribute a great deal to your business success in the future.
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