Seven Tips to Market Your Business Locally

If your business services a local area, it can be fairly easy to get some quick wins to bring in customers. However local businesses are run on the good words and word of mouth referrals of your happy customers so do always make sure you have that sorted out first.

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Before you start jumping into marketing your business, you need to really define who you are selling to and what you are selling them. Even though you’re a local business marketing to local people, it doesn’t mean everyone in your location wants to buy from you. It’s still really important to find your target market, the people you’re talking to and have a think about where they hang out, what they do, what they see, and who they talk to, to make a decision around the best sort of marketing for you to do. With all that said and done, here are seven top tips to help you market your business better locally.

1. Make a Simple Website (Or a more complex one) and pop a Facebook Pixel on it

The first thing I’d like you to try and do is to make a simple website and put a Facebook pixel on it. The Facebook pixel is a little cookie that helps track people when they come to your website so you can target them on Facebook. For local businesses this is really important because we want to target anyone that comes to your website that is local and then you can retarget them on Facebook. So it’s a really important one for you to have on there. 

2. Make a Google My Business Page

The second thing that you need to do is you need to join Google My Business. You literally Google ‘Google My Business’ to get started. Create a Google My Business business page that links to your website and tells Google who you are. Google loves using Google My Business to help promote local businesses. It will help you be found when people search for you on Google. It’s free and it’s really easy to set up. 

3. Post Regularly on Social Media

Generally we say Facebook is best for locals. Instagram can be really great too but generally Facebook is best for locals for most areas. Make sure your posts aren’t too sales-y. Prioritise value and how people really benefit from reading about things that you’re doing and information not just sales and talking about yourself but thinking about the community and building up ways to interact and produce conversation.

4. Join networking groups (online and/or offline)

Besides traditional networking groups, consider joining some local facebook groups. Choose ones that fit your industry or fit who you are and add value to them. This is not about you selling. It’s about you adding value and giving them some important ideas and information that help them understand what sort of person, you are what sort of business you are and that you are generally a nice person. (people buy from people they like!)

5. Ask for reviews (and earn them!)

Encourage your clients to give you reviews on Facebook and Google My Business. The more reviews you have, the more people will see and trust you if they haven’t heard from you before. It also helps just generally with word of mouth. Of course, to get good reviews, you’ve got to be doing a good job so looking after your customers is a really important part of marketing. If you’re not doing that, if you’re not looking after your customers, you need to actually do that before you start doing any of your marketing.

6. Consider traditional marketing

The sixth thing you can do is consider some of the traditional forms of marketing such as radio, for example. In Rodney district (so covering the Hibiscus Coast, Orewa, Silverdale and Whangaparaoa) radio is a good option because it is only for our area so it’s relatively cheap. Use print if your clients read it. – local papers are great for businesses servicing over 65 year olds. 

7. Use Facebook Advertising

We find this works really well for service-based and professional businesses, as well as retail. For those of you that haven’t used it before, it’s not Facebook boosting. We recommend a budget of about $100 a month initially to drive traffic to your website or place of business. 

There are lots of different ways that you can market your business locally and simply. We haven’t even covered email marketing, influencer marketing, flyers, events and many more ideas. However these basics can help you get started. 

Make a go of it, and if you need some help doing it we’d love to help you at Identify Marketing.