Digital Marketing Tips for Local Businesses

Building Your Online Presence

By Catherine Park

Marketing a small local business with a limited budget is not easy. However, if you are well versed with the internet, you can still market your business profitably with a small budget.

Small businesses should never underestimate the power of internet marketing though they don’t sell products online as a major part of their customers are online.

Here are some cool tips to expand your local small business online

1. Build your presence online

A lot of small businesses keep away from the internet simply because they don’t sell online. However, they should also consider the fact that customers nowadays refer to the internet before opting for most services these days. In fact, customer purchases are mostly based on the reviews and information available from sources other than the business location itself.

As an instance, customers visit 2-3 stores before purchasing any product. In case the customer visits your store and later, browses the internet for the same product, your competitor’s online website might allure the customer. Through your online presence, your customers will be able to know about your products and prices within a single click and will help you retain your customers.

2. Build a website to get more leads

Leads are immensely important for marketing or promoting local businesses with a small budget. Even if you are not selling your products online, try to get more and more leads from your website. Giving your number and expecting customers to call is completely a waste of time. Instead, get the leads from your website and mail them along with maintaining a regular follow up to extend your business.  Make visitors complete lead forms and you will have contacts to whom you can market your products.

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3. Get involved with the online local community

If you want to get a high number of conversions, choose Instagram, Twitter, Facebook etc. social media platforms. These are the most trending and promising platforms that will help you promote your business. Post everything about your community events over these platforms and within seconds, it will reach to your potential customers leading to more conversions! Also, it is a budget-friendly option.

4. Choose digital banners for your local business

If you think only huge and international brands benefit from digital banners, then you are mistaken. The digital ad network by Google helps local businesses prepare their digital banners and post them on their community. This option might not be very cost effective but helps the businesses target the local community rigorously.

5. Add more localised content on your website

While you put your address and contact details on the contact us page, the search engines will showcase all the cities you serve. This will help you gain more traffic from the surrounding cities. But when you will create individual pages for the cities you serve, better local signals will be sent to the engine. A lot of businesses miss on local customers though they don’t have any competition in the local market due to lack of such localised content on their website.

6. Keep posting about your local community events

If you have a website, make sure you blog about all the community events. Blog about the events on social media too. It might happen that your blog or article gets ranked and represent your website or community to bulk people. Marketing with blogs or articles is a very important marketing tool you should never ignore.

7. Get online reviews

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Generally, people know that reviews improve ranking and rankings can bring you better conversions. Local businesses can grow if they have satisfied customers and thus, ensure to take follow-ups with our customers to get reviews. You might need to push it a little, but go for it.

8. Don’t buy links

No matter how alluring purchasing the links look, it is not a proper way to market your business. Nowadays, you won’t be able to trick Google on this and thus, you must choose natural and ethical ways to promote your business.

9. Don’t forget to market offline

Try to market your products offline as it leads to online marketing. Once you market your business offline, it will make headings online and thus, this is a promising way to expand offline as well as online.

10. Try something innovative

Though marketing isn’t an easy job, you can get innovative; try your hands on something new to get successful. Sometimes, the marketing practices become too common to be noticed and this is the reason, you should hire creative people and try something exceptional. Build something new, fresh and controversial for getting your business noticed.

Marketing requires a rigorous and creative approach. Through different and unusual tactics and online marketing tools, you will definitely be able to grab a larger and better-converting audience.

The blog post Digital Marketing Tips for Local Businesses is courtesy of http://www.ssprosvcs.com