Digital marketing has revolutionised the way that companies reach out to and interact with their customers over the past decade. Traditional local businesses have been slower to adopt these new technologies, but with the rise of the smartphone, local online marketing has become increasingly important.
At AsOne, we’ve worked with a variety of customers, tailoring marketing techniques to help them target a local demographic.
Local Online Marketing Approaches
Aspects of most digital marketing strategies can be adapted to make them more suited to a local audience, including SEO, social and paid ads.
There are several steps you can take to help ensure that your site ranks organically for local search terms including:
- Contact page – Ensure your “Contact” page is up to date with the correct address
- Register for Google My Business – Make sure that all your details are registered and correct with Google so that people can easily find your business pin in searches. Local online marketing is worth doing because you want local customers, and customers want local businesses.
- Register for local directories – This is useful as a link building tool, helping to establish your credibility in a local area
- Location-based titles – Where appropriate, include your city or town in page titles and other metadata
Paid Search for Local Marketing
While it is important to do the above steps to help boost your organic search ranking, it can be some time before they start to make an impact and in some instances, paid ads can be far more effective.
You can take two different approaches to paid search for local businesses. Let’s say, for instance, that you are designing a paid search campaign for a shoe shop in Manchester that is looking to do some local online marketing:
- Broad search terms, narrow geographic focus – In this approach you target a broad search term related to your business. So you would use the search term “shoe shop” but in the settings for the campaign, you select to only show the ad to people in your target area. This means that you’ll appear at the top of the search rankings for people searching for “shoe shop” in your target area.
- Narrow search term, broad geographic focus – This approach involves specifying the location in the keyword that you want to target. So, with this approach, you would target the search term “shoe shop Manchester”, but you don’t specify an exact location in the ad settings. This means that anyone in the UK searching for “shoe shop Manchester” could potentially see your ad. This approach works better for businesses where someone is likely to travel to a particular location. For instance, if you were managing the local online marketing campaign for a hotel, you may prefer this approach, as people already in your city are not likely to need a hotel in the same place.
Paid ads such as this are also very effective for targeting specific events. As you don’t have the lead time of content marketing or SEO you can very quickly set up and test campaigns related to a variety of different seasonal events, and you could even test multiple ads at the same time.
Local Marketing, AsOne Style
At AsOne, our approach has always been to partner with our customers over the long-term, getting to know the ins and outs of their business and crafting digital business development strategies that help them to thrive. For businesses targeting a specific local audience, we take the time to analyse the local landscape, including any major competitors – and factor this into the plan as well.
For more information on how AsOne can accelerate your business through local online marketing campaigns, don’t hesitate to get in touch and speak to one of our experts. For businesses located in the North East, we are proud to be involved in the NEBSF program, meaning that you could qualify for up to 40% off your first project.
