If you own a small, localized company, you’ve probably heard your marketing partners extol the value of digital marketing hundreds of times before. However, the importance of a great marketing plan can’t be overstated. If you’re looking to succeed in the long term and continue building your client base, you’ll need to stay on top of your digital marketing strategy.
Of course, if you’re hoping to see your digital marketing endeavors succeed, you can’t simply throw ideas at the wall until something sticks. Instead, you’ll need to devote considerable thought and planning to develop an informed digital marketing plan. The better organized your localized company’s digital marketing campaigns and strategies, the more likely you are to succeed at reaching your target audience and holding their attention.
Taking a Look at Consumer Behavior: The Role of Digital Marketing
To understand how to develop a marketing plan for your local company, you need to understand consumer behavior and how it relates to digital marketing. While it may seem to today’s consumers that marketing for the digital space is old hat, it’s relatively new in terms of marketing. Digital marketing has not risen to prominence in a vacuum; its growth has been in response to a more digitized world. It’s worth acknowledging how consumer behavior has shifted in response to the fast-changing digital world.
By developing a better understanding of consumer behavior, localized businesses of any size can begin to interact with their potential client base more effectively. Understanding your target market can help you fine-tune several localized digital marketing techniques, including:
● Improving user experience (UX)
● Developing content marketing
● Promoting influencer marketing
● Encouraging user-generated content (UGC)
● Capitalizing on electronic word of mouth (eWOM)
If you’re seeking to grow your small, localized business, you’ll likely utilize most of the above techniques. However, without a strong understanding of consumer behavior in the digital age, your efforts may be in vain.
For example, consider the growing tendency of consumers to opt for higher-end, less expensive, or easily shipped products from online retailers rather than those available via local retailers. The rise of the internet has enabled nearly limitless access to the global marketplace with little effort on the part of the consumer. As a small business, you’ll need to compete with large online retailers for the attention of local customers. Without direct attention to your local audience, you run the risk of being overlooked entirely.
This broader range of options has also changed the way the consumer interacts with local businesses. It isn’t surprising that many consumers have increased their expectations of the local businesses they support. If your products or services don’t meet these expectations, large, online companies are waiting in the wings with similar offerings, often provided more quickly and at a lower cost.
Because the digital marketplace has increased the speed at which we can receive products or services, consumers have naturally begun to crave convenience. This need for instant gratification has bred a unique kind of impulsiveness. Depending upon their immediate impression of your business, potential customers make instantaneous decisions regarding whether to consider your brand.
Can Digital Marketing Really Affect Your Localized Company?
What if you rely predominantly on local traffic? Localized companies need to realize that digital marketing doesn’t just influence the online sales your business makes — it also has a powerful effect on your offline sales from potential customers in your area. By directly targeting a local audience in your digital marketing, you’re influencing consumers to seek out your company over web-based retailers.
The percentage of Google searches with local intent is approaching 50%. That means that, in their search for a local business with products and services like yours, consumers are entering an online search query. Modern consumer behavior indicates that concentrating on your digital marketing plan increases both your local foot traffic and your digital reach.
Digital vs. Traditional Marketing
As we’ve already established, digital marketing does far more than expose your localized business to a larger, more global audience. Your digital marketing materials have a powerful impact on the local customers you generate, both online and in-person. But what if you already have a traditional marketing strategy in place?
Compared to digital marketing, traditional marketing strategies come with some unique complications. Return on investment (ROI) can be difficult to measure, and your strategy may come with a more significant investment. If you cannot gauge the cost-effectiveness of these more expensive techniques, you risk draining your marketing budget without benefit.
In addition, most traditional marketing methods are a one-way street — you’re advertising to potential customers, but interaction is limited. If you’re looking to convert consumers into customers, your localized business can benefit from opening up this avenue of communication. Digital marketing makes it easier for potential customers to interact with other individuals who’ve supported your business, as well as your marketing materials. By forming an interactive relationship with potential customers, you’re further incentivizing them to continue to patronize your company.
Unlock the Full Potential of Social Media Marketing
One of the most fruitful forms of modern-day local marketing comes in the form of social media marketing. Focusing on your business’s social media presence is one of the most efficient ways to stimulate brand awareness among your local audience. The social media presence you cultivate can redirect new leads and customers alike to your website, both to gather more information and to engage with your products and services. Increased site traffic can help you boost online sales and enable your customer base to learn more about your brick-and-mortar location.
Social media marketing also enables you to boost interaction with your audience. Most social platforms allow you to quickly and easily address customer questions and concerns, either publicly or via private message. Better yet, you can encourage your local audience to share your curated content or create their own user-generated content for the ultimate in low-cost, interactive, digital marketing.
How to Give Your Local Business’s Digital Marketing Plan a Boost
A strong digital marketing plan is essential to stimulate the healthy growth of your localized business. These tips can help you get started:
Be concise.
First and foremost, ensure your digital marketing materials are both concise and effective. You don’t need to offer walls of text or hour-long videos to draw in local customers. In fact, in the world of digital marketing, this can be detrimental — as mentioned earlier, today’s culture of instant gratification is more relevant than ever regarding how consumers interact with your digital marketing materials.
Don’t forget local SEO.
Learning about the keywords local users frequently search to access products and services like yours can help you include them in page content, meta content, and more to become more visible on Google’s SERP. Then, taking your company’s location into account can help you hone in on key phrases that will better rein in your target market. Finally, consider leveraging a professional SEO service to dial in more localized ranking factors as Google updates its algorithm.
Create local business profiles.
Use resources like Google My Business (GMB) and other business listing pages to ensure your localized company appears prominently in the search results when locals are looking for companies like yours. GMB can help you manage your online presence, including hours of operation, location, maps, contact information, reviews, and more. Business listing pages can further improve your local visibility and increase your brand awareness.
Create a social media presence.
As mentioned above, creating an active social media presence is one of the most beneficial steps you can take if you’re hoping to reach local consumers online. Pick one or two platforms to start, based on the particular demographics of your target market, and update these regularly. Importantly, make sure you’re taking advantage of social media to form two-way relationships with your customers. Maintaining a continuous dialogue with your audience is one of the most effective ways to capture and retain the close attention of customers.
Offer expert information.
Wherever possible, consider offering expert information, whether through blogs and content marketing, infographics, or even informative social posts. Posting expert information on your social profiles can help encourage user sharing and expand your brand awareness. This can help to make your business a prominent expert among your local and web-based competition.
Encourage reviews and interaction.
Don’t overlook reviews or comments on your social profiles, GMB listing, and other business listings. Instead, maximize your ability to interact and form positive relationships with customers. Encourage reviews from your satisfied customers, and address or resolve complaints as soon as possible. This helps demonstrate that you care about the satisfaction of your customers or clients, helping to set you apart from other local businesses and major online retailers.
A Local Digital Marketing Strategy Is Critical to Success
In the digital age, the web serves as an enormous, global equivalent to the traditional local marketplace. To successfully tap into its local potential, you’ll need to develop a strategy that considers its scope as well as its ability to reach local consumers wherever they choose to access your marketing materials. Once you’ve captured the attention of local prospects in the online marketplace, you’re well on your way to gaining loyal customers.
