Local small businesses can really profit from good digital marketing. E-commerce may have started with large shopping portals and mega chains, but it’s making its way to Main Street. Nowadays, so much of what people buy gets bought over the web that small businesses almost have to invest in good digital marketing to survive. Customers might be right down the street, but they’re still on their smartphones.
Here are some foundational pillars of digital marketing that work for small local businesses.
Content Building
In general, businesses that want visibility on the Internet need quality content — but specifically, local businesses benefit from locally directed content. Unfortunately, the vast majority of businesses have not understood this principle, and they still have SEO people writing bland, generic content that could be posted anywhere in the country. Instead, if you focus on local issues, and hire local people to craft stories about what’s happening in the local area, you’re going to get great ranking, a vibrant sets of page views and good click-through rates.
Engage the Community
Another way to really boost visibility for small local businesses is to get out and talk to the neighbors. You can go and ask for feedback on your business, and even give out free samples to try to get people to stop by and chat. You can build public events that get people participating in the conversation. All of this is extremely important in word-of-mouth marketing and building brand visibility over time.
Giving Back
Small, local businesses are also embracing the concept of charity, a concept that’s often present in board rooms and practiced by big corporations. The idea is that you set aside some of your profit and give it back to the community. It’s often done in public ways, so that it will capture some marketing value. For example, different types of public charity in the local community can generate high-quality referral links, which are excellent for SEO, apart from the fact that it elevates your company’s image in the local community.
Paid Media and Paid Search
In addition to natural, organic web content, companies are also investing in marketing tactics like PPC advertising. Paid search can be an excellent way to supplement all the other kinds of digital marketing that you do, in concrete ways that involve transactional results. You pay a certain amount of money for paid search or other paid promotions on social media platforms, and you get a certain amount of traffic in return. Usually traffic from the paid search is highly qualified. It’s a good idea to try to estimate your return on investment (ROI), to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth — just like you would in print marketing. Google very recently introduced many new features like Expanded Text Ads (ETA) that can boost up a local business’s sales or lead generation. And by the way, adding a little print marketing still works, too. Some of the experts talk about multichannel marketing, where you’re doing SEO, PPC, and print, all together and investing a certain amount of money in each.
WebSubstance can help your local business set up a quality website and market your products or services through multichannel marketing tactics and help you participate in your community. Let us engineer the structural design of your site and help you build out the results to get more market share in your local market.
