Top marketing advice for a local business

Show Notes

Top marketing advice for a local business

Episode 88 Transcription

[00:00:00] If you’re a local business, your number one marketing goal should be to increase your visibility in your local market. That’s it. This is by far the biggest return on investment bank for your buck, whatever you wanna call it, you’re gonna get. In your marketing for your business. In this episode, I’m going to tell you exactly what you need to do to effectively market your local business.

[00:00:31] Welcome to the Liquis Digital Marketing Podcast, where each week we’ll be breaking down complex marketing topics into steps you can take now to grow a profitable audience for your business, we’ll discuss organic reach, offer optimization, paid advertising, email market. Content creation, promotion techniques, and so much more.

[00:00:50] I’m your host, Brad Ball, founder of Liquis Digital, a marketing agency that has helped hundreds of clients of every shape and size reach their business goal since 2008. Thanks for joining us today, and be sure to subscribe because you won’t wanna miss a beat. Now let’s grow.

[00:01:09] Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Liquis Digital Marketing Podcast. Today we are talking about the top marketing device for your local business. So before we jump into the details and the content of this episode, I wanna first talk about some big changes we have coming up to our podcast and these videos, uh, at the first of the year, which is coming up very, very soon.

[00:01:33] Um, in fact, January 20, 23, episode 90, you’re gonna start seeing these changes. And basically it’s the change of a new name to the podcast. Format all of this to enhance the value that we bring and improve your experience with the podcast and these videos if you’re watching on YouTube. So stay tuned for that.

[00:01:50] And as a promo to that and a Christmas gift to you, we are opening up our DIY website course called The Wealthy Website. It’s a beta soft launch and it’s free until the end of January. This course is basically, A video core, step by step on building your own website. By the end of it, you will have a professionally built looking website that you built, and we walk through all of it super easy.

[00:02:16] All we ask is we want your honest feedback and a testimonial. So if you think there’s some ways that it can be improved, we wanna know that. And if it’s great, we wanna know that as well. That’s all we ask. You’ll have full access to the course, lifetime access to the course, and all of the resources that come with it, and the private Facebook group that you’ll have access to for life.

[00:02:36] And after the launch, we are looking to price this around the 4 95 mark. So if you’d like to get in, During this period, just go to the wealthy website.com and use promo code Grind and Grow during the checkout. That’s grind and spelled out A and d grow.com. Okay. I’ll put all the details in the show notes so you can check that out.

[00:02:57] Let’s jump into this local marketing. So who can benefit from local marketing? What types of businesses? Really anybody. Really benefit from it. But typically what we think of when we think of local marketing is your brick and mortar businesses, right? Because they are local people that are going to go to that business, are going to be local to them around them, right?

[00:03:18] Who wouldn’t necessarily be a local business would be like an e-comm, like. Amazon, right? That’s not local. There’s nothing local about Amazon, you know? So that would be, you know, something that isn’t local. Well, let’s take us for example. We work with anybody across the world, but we are local and we do get a lot of business with Local Lee because people wanna work with someone who is local and that they have a connection with, and they can come meet.

[00:03:44] So we do get local business. Uh, maybe you’re a coach, you get local business, you might work with people on the other side of the United States, but you still have local ties to what you do. So that would be, again, local. So local services, you know, other places like, uh, plumbers and contractors, obviously roofers, stuff like that.

[00:04:03] Services that are local realtors, super local, so any service based business like us, that is who would benefit from local marketing. The number one goal in local marketing is to increase your online visibility in the local market. So meaning in your area, people know about you. Basically, right. So here are some local marketing tips and strategies that you can use or you should be using to get more visibility in your local area.

[00:04:35] So first off is optimizing your website for your location. If you are in, let’s say, Phoenix, then how to optimize that is basically updating the title Metatags with your location. So for us would be marketing in a web design in Phoenix, Arizona, or if we were in Glendale, California, marketing in in Glendale, California.

[00:04:58] Or if we were a photographer in St. Louis, it would be, you know, wedding photography in St. Louis, putting. Verbiage in your title in Metatags, like your description. This is what Google sees. Also adding a location to the headings in the content of your site. So if you can in the, what we call the H one tag, the main heading in every patient, only have one H one tag.

[00:05:20] By the way, putting your localized, heading content. So custom web design agency in Phoenix might be a good heading tag, right? So the top waiting photographer in St. Louis. Right, so that’s putting it in the heading. So the H one s, the H two. But doing it again naturally. Okay. Like don’t go in and just like start stuffing it in where you think it should go.

[00:05:44] You want it to be readable, will make sense. More importantly, readable will make sense. Before you just start stuffing the location into content. Okay. The other thing is to create a location specific landing page on your website. So let’s say you have multiple locations. Definitely you want this because now you want to be able to have a a page that is specific to.

[00:06:08] That service and that location. So if you have, you know, an acupuncture studio in Phoenix and then also one in Flagstaff and then one in New York, right? You’re gonna want a a location specific page where all of these things, the title tags, the meta descriptions, the heading tags, the content, the map, The what you say in it, have all the information about that location and you’re kind of repeating that this is the location where we’re at.

[00:06:37] Right? Okay. That’s the location page. So could be different from your homepage. It could be just a specific landing page that talks about this location where you’re using that location verbiage. The other thing is to claim and optimize your Google business. So if you have had a business for any length of time, you probably already have a business profile and don’t know it yet.

[00:07:03] If you haven’t already claimed it, cuz Google will go out and get and find what it thinks our business is and index them and log them as, okay. This is a business because it’s registered as a business, your job is to get access to that listing. And you can do that by, they have tools, and this would be a whole probably episode of its own how to do that.

[00:07:23] But there’s a little link somewhere in that listing. Do you own this? And you’re gonna go walk through the steps. They’re probably gonna mail you something and you’re gonna have go do something with the thing they mailed you so you can verify that it’s you that owns that local business. Claim that, and then fill it out a hundred percent.

[00:07:41] Get as much information that is. Out on your Google business profile. Don’t just like, eh, I don’t know what this, what I should put. Put something, put something in every piece. Put photos, put logos, put videos. Put your location, put your phone number, put the links, put your services, select all the categories.

[00:07:59] Do all of the things inside of your business profile. This is one of the biggest ways people will find you on local searches. The next. is to focus on getting positive reviews to your Google profile. This is gonna help you rank higher in local searches. It’s gonna look for your business and it’s gonna rank businesses that have more reviews.

[00:08:22] It’s just gonna naturally Google and its algorithm will give you a little bit higher of a ranking. Now, this isn’t like if you have more reviews than this one, you always show higher. It’s not like that, but it’s just one of. Indicators that tell it were to rank you and fix your app, what we call the nap, the name, the address, the phone number.

[00:08:41] All of this should be consistent through all of your, on your website, in your Google Business profile, on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn. The same identical. If you have sweet A, then make sure. Spelled out suite A or however it shows up in your Google business profile. Make sure it’s like that everywhere else.

[00:09:05] The more consistent, the better. Google wants to see this consistently, and it helps tell Google that this is the location and the more pieces out there that point to it. And say, Hey, yep. This is the same information from all these places. We are even validating it more that how legitimate this business is.

[00:09:24] So we call that the nap. We call these, you know, getting these directories and these listings, these citations fixed out for your business. And then there is the three pack, right? So, The three pack is basically when you do a search. This is a local search, so if you say dentist near me, the very first thing that it pulls up underneath the ads is going to be the three pack the map, right?

[00:09:46] Because it’s a local search, so it’s gonna show the top three local results, and that’s where you wanna be. We call this the three pack that is the most clicked on thing in Google. You want to be in local searches, you want to be in the three pack. Doing the things that I just mentioned are going to drastically, drastically help you get into the three pack.

[00:10:05] And if people in your industry aren’t doing these things, it’s gonna be a lot easier. So this is an could be an easy way to get into the three pack. So the other thing to do if you’re a local business in your marketing is to do local targeted ads. Running at Facebook, running an Instagram running. A TikTok local ad, meaning that you can select the radius, like let’s say your customers are typically within a 10 mile radius of you.

[00:10:31] You can run ads to the 10 mile radius around your exact location, and that’s a local targeted ad, so only people in that area are gonna see that ad. You definitely wanna do that if you’re gonna run ads. The other piece is retargeting. Every business should be retargeting, so this is just, if they visited your.

[00:10:49] If they’ve interacted with you on social, they’re seeing an ad about you, right? So this is already a warm audience that you just wanna be capturing. Okay? So here’s some other alternative strategies to increase your online visibility for a local business. One is mailers old school technique, right?

[00:11:08] Sending out mailers. 90% of this stuff is junk and gets thrown away. But depending on your industry, depending on the market, depending on what you’re doing and how you do it, they could be successful. Like especially these days, it’s being done less, you know, like. It’s usually if you can go where everybody isn’t, then you might start to have a little bit more success there.

[00:11:29] So test out mailers. I’m not saying just go spend a bunch of money on mailers, but if there is an inexpensive way to test your industry with some mailers, give it a shot. I think it can work depending on your business too. You know, if you’re a coach in you, probably mailers may not be the answer, but if you are a local restaurant, mailers might be the answer to help you get more visibility in your local.

[00:11:52] The other thing is to partner with local businesses. Other businesses like that are doing things in some ways you can do this is with sponsored events. So if there’s an event happening, be a sponsor, you know, at the local high schools. You know, be a sponsor there at the sporting events, at the, uh, business events.

[00:12:08] Um, you know, also join your businesses associations. So get into those and that’s another way to disconnect with people and spread the word. Um, so there you have it. That is my top marketing. For a local business. Uh, we are a local business and we incorporate a lot of this ourselves. So I stand behind all of this because we do it ourselves.

[00:12:30] So, um, if you have any questions on this stuff, let me know. Um, we’re here to help and please leave us a review and it just takes 10 seconds. So we’ll see you in the next episode. Thanks for listening in today. I hope you enjoyed the show. And hey, if you did, please take a second to leave a review and share this episode with someone who you think might also benefit from it.

[00:12:51] I appreciate you so much, and as always, we’re here to help. If you have any questions about this episode or want to talk strategy with us about your own project, just shoot us an email to info Liquis Digital dot com and we’ll catch you in the next episode.