Local Marketing has taken the spotlight
This marketing strategy is all about staying in front of your local customers as much as possible. One thing marketers keep hearing over and over is the brands that stay closest to their customers win the business. The following items should be considered prior to jumping head first into a local marketing initiative:
1. Know your business! Does a local marketing strategy need to be high on the priority list? This is a great thing to consider and the answer is something you, the business owner, need to answer rather than the marketer. You know your business much better than the marketing professional and sure the marketer will do their best to learn your business inside and out but they aren’t you. They will never know everything you do about the success, struggles and goals of your business. Some examples of businesses that might benefit from a local marketing campaign would be a flower shop, a local restaurant, or a bike shop. These businesses depend on customers that typically live or shop within a certain radius of their location. Another key item to consider is if you are a multi location business. A local marketing strategy is important for multi location businesses to make sure customers can find the location closest to them. If your customers or if your business is aggressively mobile it would benefit to have a local strategy. With the increased use of mobile phones and programs like google maps, and siri for local search it is important to deliver the best experience to your potential customers.
2. How should you adopt local marketing? It’s best to determine where you are right now and where you want to be so the best possible strategy can be developed and deployed. Are you crawling, walking, or already running? If you haven’t taken on any local marketing initiatives then the time spent here might be very valuable to your business and your marketing strategy. If you are walking, it’s critical to determine what else you could be doing to be found locally and what is the cost and will it produce the needed ROI. If you are running and there isn’t much left to do then we would work together to determine the next marketing program outside local marketing that might help deliver results. We work with businesses that tell us they have no local marketing strategy and after doing a little digging we find a robust local marketing campaign has been at work for sometime and just needs a few minor tweaks.
Get Closer to Customers with Local Marketing
If we work together on these two items it will become clear if a local marketing campaign is needed for your business and where we would need to start. The purpose of a local marketing initiative is to stay close to your customers and be found when they need your products or service. As with most marketing programs, determining a local marketing strategy will take some discovery about the business goals, the needs, and research on the current customers.