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If you have a physical store or you offer services in your local area, having a local marketing strategy in place is essential. It’s one of the best ways to drive calls, bookings and store visits.

In addition, Google’s algorithm uses searcher’s locations to show them the most relevant businesses and services.

What is local marketing and why is it important?

Local marketing allows you to target customers in your local area by optimising your website and marketing campaigns to drive foot traffic and awareness in your area.

Figures show,  50% of consumers who performed a local search on their smartphone visited a store within 24 hours. Customers who make a local search have already decided they want to make a purchase so optimising for this will help you to drive more qualified traffic to your business.  

In addition, 88% of mobile online searches for local businesses result in either a call or visit within one day.‘Near me’ or ‘close by’ type searches grew by more than 900% over two years.

Here are the key local marketing tactics you should be employing for your business:

1. Paid search

Local advertising through paid search is an extremely effective method for reaching your local customers. Not only does it allow you to pinpoint specific personas and audiences, it also allows you to add relevant local keywords to your ad copy.

Google Ads has a number of features that you can utilise for local marketing to ensure that your ads appear for customers in your local area. Most importantly, you can target based on age, gender, interests and a range of other factors to make sure you’re reaching the right people, at the right time.

Location targeting

Location targeting allows you to choose which geographic locations you want to advertise in. This means your ads will only show for people in that particular area and means you’re not paying to advertise to those who are too far away from you to visit.

If your business depends on driving footfall to your store, this feature is essential. Google Ads allows you to use post codes, towns and city boundaries to target specific areas. You can also adjust your bids based on these locations too.

You can also use negative geographic locations to prevent your ads from showing in areas that are not relevant to your business.

Location extensions

Location extensions allow you to drive foot traffic to your business. Not only do they mean your ads take up more space on the search engine results page (SERP), they also provide more information such as your address and phone number to searchers.

In order to use these extensions, you must have a Google My Business Page. This will also display your business location on Google Maps and on the SERP.

Ad groups and copy based on location

If you want to target a specific location or multiple locations, you can create separate ad campaigns in Google ads for these locations. Create ad groups and ads based on the local keywords used for your business and in your local area.

This will help to make your ads more relevant for a local audience and increase the chances of customers clicking through.

2. Social media

Social media provides an effective way to build relationships with local customers and share information and news about your business.

Organically, you can set your business location in your social media profiles so customers know where you are. You can also tag the locations of your posts and research shows that posts with a geo-tag receive 79% more engagement from social media users.

Social media allows you to show your brand’s personality which will help to build trust with your local customers. Customers want to know that they’re valued by the brands they buy from and interact with and replying to comments, posts and reviews is a great way to build relationships and trust.

Customers have the chance to leave reviews on social media platforms and are something that other potential customers will read to decide whether or not to purchase from your brand.

Paid social media

All social media platforms now allow you to create and target ads specifically for your local area. This means ads will only show to potential local customers and will help you to drive traffic to your business.

You can target specific personas, at specific times and with specific messages to them. Consumers prefer ads that are specifically targeted to them and their needs so local marketing on social media is the perfect way to do this. You can drill down by age, gender, interests and connections so, by choosing the right target audience, you increase the number of conversions you’re likely to receive from your ads.

The benefits of social media ads include:

Good return on investment

In comparison to traditional advertising campaigns, such as print and media, social media advertising costs much less, is more targeted and makes it easier to track return on investment.

Highly targeted

Social media ads allow you to target very granular audiences and takes the guesswork out of marketing. The ability to target by age, gender, interest and location means you can target the customers most relevant to your business. These customers are more likely to click on your ads and more likely to convert.

Performance analysis

The ability to track the performance of your ads means you can continuously improve them to get a better return on investment and continue targeting the right audience.

3. Local SEO campaigns

Optimising your website and SEO campaigns for local search is one of the key ways you’re going to be noticed by local customers.

As we mentioned before, Google now serves local results to searchers to make sure their results are as relevant as possible. In addition, competing on a national level with your competitors can be tricky when it comes to SEO but optimising for local SEO increases your chances of being shown at the top of the SERPs.

To optimise for local SEO, make use of local-focused keywords and keep your business blog updated with relevant and useful information. Make sure your business name, address and phone number is consistent across all of the online directories you’re listed on as well as your website and social media profiles.

Google My Business listing

If you want to target customers locally, a Google My Business (GMB) listing is a must. They appear above organic search results in the SERPs so if your GMB listing ranks in one of the top three, you’re likely to see much better results.

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