Local Marketing: What Businesses Need to Know 2022
Local Marketing: What businesses need to know.
Here are the things you need to consider when planning your local strategy.
Local target marketing follows a multi-phase cycle. Here are the things you need to consider when planning your local strategy.
Local business marketing is going through a transition.
Smartphones are superior to other avenues for finding local businesses.
Increasingly when people search for a business, the information they see comes in the form of:
Listings (address, contact information, hours, etc.).
Content (images, reviews, menus, products, and so on).
…submitted to media such as Google, Waze, Alexa, or Yelp.
In this cycle the objective of the customer is essential.
Seventy-six percent of people who search for something nearby on their smartphone visit a business within a day.
Gone are the days when customers visit only business websites. Many business results appear in the form of digital business videos.
For this reason, businesses with multiple locations urgently need to improve and improve their presence on those sites.
Data and inventory have become the starting point for customer purchase intent. Businesses need to start thinking about objective marketing.
This means not only maintaining accurate information across digital platforms but looking at those sites as major business drivers. They are the source of customer intent.
And when done right, local target marketing follows a four-phase cycle.
Phase 1: Presence
Presence refers to the basic information and relative accuracy that people find when they search for a local business using search or voice, map apps, social media, or review sites.
To avoid lost customers or opportunities, businesses need to ensure that their basic information (location, hours, contact information) is accurate not only for Google but for the entire ecosystem of consumer research channels.
A proper digital presence is important for all survey tools.
Think of a time when you realized your navigation app took you to the wrong address or you clicked on a phone number in a review app and realized it was wrong.
If you are like most people, the experience stuck with you because of its negative emotions.
Few things hurt a business as directly as a bad customer experience. No brick-and-mortar location can afford that risk in the new digital consumer landscape.
For many small businesses, simply maintaining accuracy across sites can be a difficult proposition. Manually updating information, especially if it changes (think holiday hours), can require hours of tedious input.
Stage 2: Content
Information that a customer may encounter when they find a business anywhere in the digital world.
The second phase of the local objective marketing cycle is content.
This refers to all the additional information that a customer may encounter when they find a business anywhere in the digital world.
Content may include user-generated images or product listings linked to the Google My Business (GMB) profile, or chats on the business’s Facebook page.
Content optimization and management should never be allowed to lose focus.
Think about the last time you searched for a local business on your phone and made a series of quick but meaningful judgments based on the photos and reviews that appeared at the top of your search results.
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The truth is, many customer journeys start (and end) like that.
Local businesses and their agency partners need efficient, streamlined solutions to fully optimize their content before falling victim to stagnation and lost conversion opportunities.
Stage 3: Vision
The third part of any local marketing strategy is insights – the data and corresponding effectiveness that comes from tracking and analyzing the presence of the business on the platforms.
The theory includes:
Behavioral tracking of how customers interact with your brand across media channels.
The impact this has on your organic search rankings, customer inquiries, and acquisitions
If retail traffic suddenly drops, it’s important to recognize if it’s the result of, say, a bad customer review on Yelp that suddenly appeared at the top of the results page.
Also, if customers are attracted to a conflicting business that is listed in a very convenient location, it is important to know, too (especially in light of the recent controversy about fake listings on Google Maps).
Staying one step ahead of the business cycle (and an increasingly unacceptable business landscape for local businesses) is critical in the age of digital disruption and ecommerce.
Stage 4: Reputation
So you’ve laid the groundwork to ensure that customers:
Access to accurate information related to your business.
Finding wherever they can start their shopping journey.
Now is the time to consider a long-term reputation management project.
Reputation management is tedious and difficult enough that many businesses choose to outsource it.
The task of monitoring and responding to reviews and comments across ever-expanding discovery channels such as online review sites and social media requires time and attention that many businesses cannot spare.
It may seem obvious that reputation management would be a challenge for small independent businesses. But the same problem exists for large commercial companies with multiple video sites.
The largest fast food chain in the United States has more than 25,000 stores nationwide – most of which are owned and operated as independent businesses.
Each of these sites has its own digital presence, with customer-generated reviews of each individual store spread across platforms such as GMB, Yelp, and TripAdvisor.
Keeping track of all these sprawling assessments and reviews across devices quickly becomes unmanageable without a unified technology solution, even with multiple enterprise resources.
Conclusion
Putting these four phases into a comprehensive low-target marketing strategy is difficult. However, businesses cannot afford to – at least – think in these terms.
Marketing a local business – be it a retailer, restaurant, professional service provider or bank branch – is an exercise in Darwinian competition. Only the strong survive.
Businesses that want to thrive need to somehow answer these questions if they want to survive in the digital age, be it:
Finding the right agency partner.
Looking for a technology provider.
Or by manually solving the problem on your own.
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