A digital marketing strategy for small local businesses is an extremely effective tool and crucial to help reach their marketing objectives.
Every business, regardless of size, can benefit from using a local digital element in their marketing practice. Small local businesses, in particular, stand to gain the most from its inclusion.
In this article, we delve into what you’ll need to focus on to craft and develop an effective digital marketing strategy for your small business success.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing refers to the marketing of products or services, using digital technologies. This involves using the internet (social media, search engines, email, and websites) and electronic devices to connect with current and prospective customers.
Digital marketing strategies for local businesses are important because they’re financially feasible.
Cost-Effective Digital Marketing Strategies
A characteristic of all small businesses, especially those just starting, is small budgets. Small businesses utilize digital channels to increase their local visibility. These often include social media and search engines. These enhance their presence while keeping expenses down.
How to Craft a Local Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Small Business
Developing a digital marketing strategy for a local business isn’t as difficult as you may think. Your strategy should include these core elements:
1) Understanding Your Objective
Before anything, you should have a clear understanding of your marketing goals. Do you want to generate more leads? Increase sales? Boost your social media following or email subscribers? Build brand recognition? Whatever your goal/goals are, every detail listed in your local digital marketing strategy should be in line with your intentions.
2) Create a Target Audience Persona
What is a ‘target audience persona’? It refers to an idealized depiction of the customer you’d like to attract to your brand’s products or services via your marketing efforts.
The practice includes understanding and building a strategy around your target audience persona. It entails using the blueprint already created by your best customers.
- Who are your best existing customers?
- What qualities do these customers possess?
- When are they purchasing your products and services?
- Where are they making the majority of their purchases (online or in-store)?
- Why are they purchasing from your business?
- ABOVE ALL – what are the pain points your products or services resolve for them?
You can achieve this understanding by sending out customer surveys (online or in-store). Ask questions that can be useful in learning about the information listed above.
3) Content Marketing
Once you’ve identified your objectives and target audience personas, its time to start crafting relevant, valuable, and shareable content.
You need to make sure your content is going to be addressing the various pain points and concerns that your target audience personas are dealing with in the various stages of the purchasing cycle funnel.
Content marketing is defined as the creation and sharing of online material such as social media posts, blogs, and videos for the purpose of growing interest around your business’s products or services. This can be improved by doing keyword research and incorporating practices such as SEO.
It’s also important to understand the current algorithms and the dynamics associated with your most-used digital channel.
Additionally, you need to be disseminating your content on the platforms and mediums your target audience hangs out on. Doing this will increase the chances of your content being seen and engaged with. This draws more people with intent back to your website or into your store.
4) Understanding Local SEO Fundamentals
Local SEO refers to the process of increasing the online visibility of a business that services a specific community.
There are two ways to boost local SEO. One involves including a business’s name, address, and phone number on all digital channels. The second way can help small businesses with or without a brick and mortar location, achieved by simply optimizing the content your business produces.
Some easy-to-follow local SEO fundamentals that can have a huge impact on your business include:
– Keywords:
Put high-ranking keywords into the description of your business’s services online and the content your business produces. This can profoundly impact your local SERP (search engine results page) ranking.
Finding the right keywords isn’t a difficult task; all you need to do is little research using Google’s Keyword Planner and SEMrush (to name a few tools).
There are some free or very inexpensive keyword research tools that are very effective and can be invaluable for a small business on a budget. Examples include UberSuggest and Keywords Everywhere (a Chrome extension).
Additionally, a bit of surveillance of your competitors to study their keyword selection goes a long way.
– Business Listings:
Many search engine platforms Google My Business (the most important), Apple Maps Listings, and Bing Places are essential tools for managing how your business appears online. The management aspect of these tools lets you control how your business name, hours of operation, location, and phone number will appear, all while monitoring how and where people are searching for your business.
– Local Citations:
This refers to online mentions of your business including display NAP (name, address, phone) collectively. Local citations are important because they help your local ranking positions on search engines.
– On-Page SEO:
On-page SEO refers to good, traditional SEO practices, including proper page formatting and combining keywords in H1, keywords in the title tag, keyword in URL, simple URL’s, and interesting meta descriptions.
– Link Building:
Link building refers to increasing the number of times your webpage and website is used by other sites, which usually comes from giving users helpful material. When other sites and pages use your sites as links, your business ranks higher on search engines.
5) Advanced Local SEO Tactics
Online competition continues to grow and search engine algorithms constantly update. It’s now becoming much harder to rank using the usual SEO tactics.
Due to the increased difficulty, we are beginning to see the use of more advanced SEO tactics which involve three major SEO pillars: relevance, proximity, and prominence. They all work to help give businesses struggling for position, a slight advantage.
6) PPC/Google Ads
PPC (pay-per-click) is another way in which small business owners can help increase their online visibility (by drawing online traffic to their website). Specifically, it refers to the process of advertisers (your business) paying a fee each time their ad is clicked. The most popular PPC system in the world is Google Ad (or Google AdWords).
7) Measuring/Monitoring Success
There are many ways to track the success of your local digital marketing strategy. One is tracking data on your CRM (customer relationship management) software or using a platform like Google Analytics. This allows you to monitor information such as engagement metrics, search traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, scroll depth, and pages per visit.
The benefit of digital marketing is that everything digital can be measured and tracked. By analyzing your Key Performance Indicators, allows seeing what’s working and what’s not. This enables you to make data-driven decisions to improve your business and get a leg up on the competition.
Consider Working with a Digital Marketing Agency
If you’d prefer to rid yourself of the headache associated with the constant monitoring and strategy adjusting, you can also hire a professional, like the team over at LocalBizGuru.
For small local business owners looking to boost their online presence, but prefer working with a team of professionals, look no further.
LocalBizGuru is here to help you reach your marketing objectives. We will be happy to help develop and execute an effective and affordable digital marketing strategy with you.
To learn more about how we can help increase your local online traffic, visit and contact LocalBizGuru today.
