Done right, you can 3x your local business leads and sales.
You just need the tried and tested strategies that seasoned marketers use to create winning local marketing campaigns.
In this guide, we’ll cover just that.
Learn the proven local marketing strategies that can 3x your local business leads and sales.
Let’s hop right in.
1. Invest in local SEO
I start with this tip because it’s an absolute must.
SEO is still, and will almost always be, the best source of online traffic.
SEO traffic is recurring, has longevity, is relevant, and is free. (At least, once you start ranking, you don’t need to keep paying to get traffic, unlike paid ads.)
There is a handful of tried and tested local SEO strategies that can do wonders for your local ranking.
Consider using these:
- Identify geo-specific keywords and optimize your pages
- Claim and optimize your Global My Business (GMB) listing
- Focus on local link building
- Ensure your site loads fast
- Ensure your site is mobile friendly
- Produce content highly relevant to your readers while optimizing for geo-specific keywords
Remember that SEO is a long-term game. You might not see immediate results, but in the long run, you’ll thank yourself for investing in SEO.
When your pages start ranking for relevant keywords, you’ll pull in hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of relevant traffic without you spending wads of cash. That means you’ll see an increase in leads and sales while you reduce your marketing spend.
Bonus tips:
- Conduct site audit. Uncover the SEO gaps on your site and fix them. Site issues can hinder your rankings.
- Setup your site analytics. Learn which relevant keywords and pages are bringing you the most traffic, then further optimize them.
- Invest in quality SEO content. Your website content is a crucial part of your SEO. With poorly written and poorly optimized content, your chances of ranking drastically decreases.
2. Pack your social media posts with winning elements
What winning elements are we talking about?
Think graphics, questions, hashtags, data, etc.
Most local store owners who use social media fail to reap real meaningful results out of their social media marketing campaigns because their posts lack oomph!
Let’s say you’re using Instagram to market your local business. Consider using these tips:
- Use Instagram poll questions to generate engagements and customer feedback
- Use Instagram viral hashtags to increase the reach and visibility of your posts
- Use one-word captions to make your posts more engaging
- Run contests. Make your prizes exciting and keep the mechanics for joining simple, easy, and short.
- Add relevant, exciting background songs
- Use graphics or videos
- Test your publishing times. Check out which times will get you the most engagements.
The points above are some of the many proven tips you can follow to get more meaningful results out of your social media posts.
Bonus tips:
- Conduct split tests. Analyze the results of your split tests to know which content pieces are performing better and which ones are performing poorly. Invest more in the parts that are getting great results and improve (or totally remove) those that are low-performing.
- Use social media management tools to streamline and optimize your social media marketing campaigns. These tools often have automation, scheduling, and reporting features that play a crucial role in the success of your campaigns.
3. Turn your customer support into sales-generating experts
Want to turn your customer support team into a lean, mean, sales-generating machine?
Use ERP tools with robust customer relationship management features. The CRM aspect of your ERP software helps manage your interaction with your customers/clients.
It allows you to track the products they purchased, store their personal info, send them promotional materials at the right time, etc.
Highly trained customer support teams can do wonders to a local store’s sales.
Customers phone in or send emails to customer support because they have issues or concerns. The customer support team can then offer another product to address the customer’s problems.
Of course, for this to succeed, your customer support team needs to learn how to de-escalate, make the customers feel heard, address concerns, offer helpful tips and advice, etc.
After giving your customers a pleasant experience, they can upsell or cross-sell.
Bonus tips:
- Invest in training your customer support team. The more training they get, the better they become at selling. Zig Ziglar’s book “Secretes of Closing the Sale” is hands down one of the best materials your team can dissect and learn to get better at sales.
- Make your customer support phone number and chat support highly visible on your website. That way, it’s easy for your customers to reach out to you should they need help.
4. Retarget your customers
The people currently buying from you are a lot easier to sell to compared to someone who hasn’t transacted with you.
It has to do with trust.
Your current customers trust you to some extent, proof of which is they bought from you, that’s why it’s easier to sell to them again.
It’s also why retargeting your existing customers makes absolute sense.
Cross-sell your products. Check out your product analytics dashboard to figure out the top products bought by a customer segment then retarget them by cross-selling.
Let’s say you run a general merchandise business and you managed to successfully segment people who bought gardening gloves.
Since these people are into gardening, it makes sense to retarget them by selling other gardening products, such as pruning shears, spades, etc.
Bonus tip:
- Put a premium on continuity and seamless customer experience. Your retargeting efforts should make sense. If you retarget your customers through email offering gardening products, don’t reach out to them on Facebook selling car wash materials. Everything you offer should be about the product they’re interested in. Your retargeting efforts should be aligned.
Take your local business to the next level
You don’t need to break the bank to come up with winning marketing campaigns.
Use the tried and tested strategies in this guide to 3X your leads and sales.
If there are tips you think should be added to this list, feel free to add them in the comments section below.
Marc lives and breathes writing. He writes just about anything and everything under the sun from digital marketing, web development, and cryptocurrencies among other things.
