Growing Your Local Business With Digital Marketing

Many local business owners are still working on the assumption that digital marketing is only for large corporations with vast resources. The other mistake is assuming that a localised business should only market themselves online if they have customers outside of their immediate vicinity. Both of these misconceptions are hindering your ability to grow your business. It has never been easier to target customers no matter where they are, and for small, local businesses, that can only be a positive. If you want to learn how to grow your small business using digital marketing, then here’s what you need to know.

Why Local Businesses Should Market Digitally

Never assume that you lack the resources to create a digital marketing strategy that will have a positive result on your profit generation capability. Digital marketing offers a wide range of benefits. Those benefits can work just as effectively for a small business as it can for a globally recognised brand. The key benefits to remember when you are weighing up the pros and cons of using digital marketing for growing your business include:

• Ability to Compete: When it comes to digital marketing, all businesses are working with the same rules and the same resources. Just because a large corporation has more money to spend on marketing, that doesn’t mean that smaller businesses are unable to compete. With all of the available resources and tools available online, even the smallest business is now able to compete with the big names.
• Cost-effectiveness: Although there are paid-for elements of some digital marketing methods, the fact is that digital marketing is very low cost when compared to traditional marketing. From social media pages to email marketing, finding low-cost digital strategies to get more from your marketing budget has never been easier for a small business.
• More Sales: Online visibility is crucial, especially for local businesses. Digital marketing is all about improving your ability to be found by internet users, and when most people have an internet device on them at all times, it’s never been more important to get found and to make a sale. Digital marketing priorities conversion rates, and that means more sales and higher profits.
• Engagement: Consumers want to have questions answered, and speed is vital. If your audience does not get the answers that they want from you as quickly as possible, then they will start looking elsewhere. Boost your engagement and you improve brand loyalty, which can be crucial for a local small business.

How to grow a small business with digital marketing

No matter the size or scope of your small business, there are a range of proven tactics and strategies that you can use to get more people visiting your website and spending money. Digital marketing delivers positive results. The challenge is formulating a digital marketing strategy that is both impactful and cost-effective. This could be easier than you think.

1. Know Your Audience

A small business will often have a much clearer idea of who their target audience is. However, too many small business owners simply stock a product and hope that there are people who will buy it. This is not proactive enough. You need to know exactly what your local customers are looking for, and by meeting those needs, you can build on your established authority. Put simply, market research into your customers is absolutely essential and will be the foundation of your digital marketing strategy.

2. Content

If audience research is the foundation, then content is the pillar of your digital marketing. When people search online for local businesses they have a problem that needs to be solved. You need to have content that not only gets you found more easily by your audience, but also provides them with the value they are looking for. Content marketing is in itself a huge area to explore, but you should consider some basic types of content on your website for growing your business, such as:

• Instructions and how-to guides about your products
• Reviews of your products
• Answers to the questions that your customers most commonly ask

Content is a vital component of digital marketing. The right content can widen your positive reputation, make more people aware of you, and attract people to your business.

3. Get Your Website Perfect

Even if your small business doesn’t sell much online, you can be sure that your website will have visitors. More people than ever research a company and its products before they buy them. That means your website needs to be well designed, works just as well on a mobile as it does on a PC, and is easy to navigate. Search engines will rank you lower if your website is slow to load, so speed is important as well.

4. Local SEO

As much as 46% of all Google searches are based on local businesses. With so many customers asking questions about a small business ‘near me,’ that means you could be losing out on a lot of potential custom by not dedicating time to getting your local SEO right. The problem is that local SEO can also be a huge area to research and get right. However, start with some simple and effective steps, such as:

• Making sure that your Google My Business profile is filled out completely
• Encouraging customer reviews
• Creating content that is based on local events or news
• Identifying local keywords
• Being present on local business directories
• Having separate location pages if you trade in different locations

There are many practical methods for improving your local SEO, but these six should be a priority to get you started. The majority of local SEO practices are simple to adopt and can have a huge impact on your online visibility.

5. Social Media

Never underestimate just how much social platforms have transformed the business world. For a small business, having a well-developed social presence can be a huge opportunity to compete with even the biggest brand names. Start by making a business page on the platforms that you intend to use. Remember to:

• Choose the right platform: Your customers might not be Snapchat users but could spend all day on Instagram. Use your audience research to find out where your customers spend their time online.
• Have a goal: Don’t fight for likes if they do not yield the results that you are looking for. If it’s not going to help with growing your business then it should not be a priority.
• Engage: Remember the social side of social media. Respond to comments, get involved in conversations, and answer questions. When people require what you sell, your engagement could be all that it takes for them to remember you.
• Be consistent: Have a tone of voice that matches the personality of your business and stick to it.
• Analyse: Use social media analytics to identify what posts are working for you and helping you meet your goals, and which are not. This makes it much easier to identify what you should be doing, what needs to change, and what you are doing right.

There are many areas to explore when it comes to digital marketing for a local business. Being able to promote your business without a huge budget is critical, especially in particularly tough economic times. The more that you prioritise digital marketing, the easier that you can be found online and remembered. When it only takes a single online query to drive someone to your website and learn more about you, the effects of digital marketing for a small business can be transformative. Don’t fall behind your local or global competitors and start learning more about how to grow a small business using digital marketing.

This article was previously published on Click Intelligence