How to Use Digital Marketing to Effectively Engage Local Consumers

With digital marketing, it is much easier to build and nurture mutually beneficial marketing relationships with local consumers than traditional marketing methods. With it, you can more easily create new partnerships, nurture leads and establish long-term business relationships with local consumers. The reasons for this are simple. Digital marketing allows business owners to segment consumers and specifically direct marketing messages to the segmented groups where ever they are locally.
 
These are few digital marketing tips to help businesses win new customers and build better relationships with local consumers.

 

Market with Local SEO

As a business owner, if you optimize your website for local searches, you will get more local customers. What your website needs is local Search Engine Optimization SEO. Every business in any case is local and if you make it easy for consumers to locate your business easily online, you get more of local consumers as customers. If your website is optimized for local searches, it helps major search engines particularly Google to direct searchers looking for local businesses to your website. Local SEO helps your website to stay high in the search results and get better local traffic. To enhance this, you must spend time to carefully embed the right keywords on your website. Be sure to use these keywords naturally within the texts throughout your content pages. You get good local traffic if these keywords hone in with what local consumers are searching for “near me.”

Engage with Local Online Business Directories

Yes indeed because these directories consider your business location in their listings. When searchers use these directories, they can locate businesses near them that they can easily do business with. This is how Business Directories help you to increase your business reach. Many of these directories allow free listings on their platforms. Below are some free listing platforms many expert marketers recommend.
1.    Google My Business, GMB
2.    Apple Maps
3.    Bing
4.    Yelp
5.    MapQuest
6.    Super Pages
7.    Yellow Book
8.    Facebook
9.    LinkedIn Company Directory
10.    Instagram
If your business manages to increase the number of citations in these directories, it helps to increase the number of backlinks to your website. This is why it is good to sign up and list your business in all these directories. Doing so helps your business with local SEO. This directly boosts your website in search results, and helps local consumers to easily find you.

Partner with Local Businesses

Partnering with other local businesses helps to cut operational costs and increases efficiency. These are very clear and very tangible benefits. If you review how other businesses are presenting their businesses to local consumers and you use the information for your own marketing strategy, you get better results. You can even arrange mutually beneficial partnerships with other businesses to create better digital sales. Even though every digital marketing strategy may work a little differently for each business, businesses can exchange links and help direct searchers to find items elsewhere similar to what they are marketing themselves. Digital marketing makes that possible.

Leverage Your Contact Us Page

The “Contract Us” and “About Us” pages of any website are usually very powerful marketing tools online. These pages showcase multiple ways to get in touch with the business owner or marketer. The pages make it convenient for potential buyers to easily reach out to the business. Marketers must endeavor to leverage on these pages by optimizing their websites to include detailed location information. Major search engines like Google determine local ranking by relevance, distance, and prominence. This simply translates to how well your location content matches what someone is searching for, how far away their location is to you, and how strong your overall online presence is. This is why it is extremely important to be consistent and accurate with your location information on relevant pages particularly the “Contact Us” and “About Us” pages. If you regularly update your website with accurate information, when local consumers search online for the products you are offering, your business will receive favorable search positioning in search engine results. That translates to more and better organic traffic to your website.

12 Digital marketing Strategies for Ambitious Marketing

Digital marketers are always in search of what works best for them to market their products/services. They adopt any and every strategy that helps to get the results they want. For ambitious digital marketing efforts, here is what expert marketers recommend.

1. Search Engine Marketing, SEM

Search Engine marketing, SEM helps marketers to drive their website traffic through major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. SEM is a marketing strategy popular among digital marketers because they find it handy to target potential customers who are already searching online for a product/service like the ones they are promoting. Anytime an internet user searches for a topic through a search engine, two sets of results usually come up. First set are the organic search results while the second set are results from paid ads because both sets of results come from the use of specific keywords which search engines use to locate them. SEM also includes such activities as Display Advertising, Search Retargeting, Site Remarketing, Mobile Marketing and Paid Social Advertising.

2. Google My Business, GMB

Google now provides a free tool to business owners called Google My Business. Ambitious digital marketers use this tool to improve their online search presence. Once marketers create a GMB listing, it generates a Google Maps location that synchronizes with Google Search to enhance location-based searchability. What marketers simply do on opening GMB listing is to add important business information such as their location, contact information, photos/graphics, and the products/services they are promoting. GMB listing allows customers to leave reviews and even their own photos. Marketers must therefore provide as much information as possible to help their rankings on Google for relevant search queries. The more info available to Google, the easier it is for Google to show it to the right people. A well-completed business profile with the right info helps with SEO for the business. You get better results if you compliment that with paid Google ads on the account.

3. Business Website

To market successfully online, a business website is a necessary requirement. A business website serves as online business window and the centerpiece of the digital marketing strategy for the business. It is from the site marketers can deploy all the digital marketing tools and techniques to promote their businesses. Marketers in all their marketer efforts aim at driving traffic to their websites where they usually convert prospects and leads into customers. For this reason, a business website must be attractive, eye-catching and memorable. It must be fast loading, easy to use, easy to navigate, and mobile-friendly enough to attract traffic.

4. Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search Engine Optimization, SEO is essentially a technical way of tweaking a website with keywords to make it easier for it to come up naturally or organically in search results of major search engines. SEO helps the higher listing in their SERPs. SEO does this for your business free by optimizing content on your website, including blog articles, videos, photos and infographics. What SEO simply requires is an investment of time and effort (if you have the knowhow) as against direct advertising spend.

5. Social Media Marketing, SMM

The primary goal of SMM is to widely increase brand awareness and establish trust with the target audience using the huge popularity of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and the likes. Most social media platforms allow marketers to run ads on their sites to build the much-needed awareness even when such marketers only have a small audience and reach of their own. The platforms help marketers to direct traffic to their business websites and generate customer leads and sales.

6. Content Marketing

Content marketing involves creating and promoting any marketing content online. It aims primarily to generate brand awareness, increase social media following, increase website traffic, and ultimately generate customer leads and sales for the business. For any content to meet this great expectation, it must be informative, engaging, educational and even entertaining. That is what the content needs to capture the attention of the target audience. Content is often published on a business website, but for good results, it can also be shared through social media, email marketing, SEO, and paid ads. The type of content ambitious marketers like to use include eBooks, case studies, how-to guides, glossaries, industry news, videos, images and banners, podcasts, webinars, blogs, online courses, and infographics.

7. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is now catching on among digital marketers because of the sole aim of saving time and money while still maintaining efficiency. Marketers depend on online software to get going most of the time. You can have access to marketing automation software in websites such as HubSpot. Such software allows marketers to streamline their processes by helping them to connect social media channels in one place to schedule and automate content across platforms. These software platforms also automate your basic marketing operations and repetitive tasks such as Email newsletters, CRM, Social media post scheduling and campaign tracking and reporting. However, because each social media network has a unique community and has preferences for content types, adequate care must be taken to create only content that works best across multi-platforms.

8. Marketing and Sales Funnels

For many digital marketers, marketing and sales funnels have become a very vital tool for their digital marketing strategies. Marketers now use lead capture pages to build and grow their email lists. They use token gifts like eBooks and Discount Coupons to get prospects to sign up to get value that the eBooks and Discount Coupons represent. Once users sign up to get these values, marketers capture their email addresses into their email lists. That is part of the not-too-obvious bargain for them to get the eBooks and or Coupons. As the email list grows, your audience, leads and sales grow along by way of a marketing or sales funnel pattern. 

9. Online PR

Digital marketers use online Public Relations, PR to secure earned coverage for their brands. It works much like traditional PR even though it poses much more challenges to measure the success of online PR than other online marketing methods. However, marketers need not underestimate the lack of analytics for measuring a positive news article’s impact. That it gets traffic, and it sure does, is all that really matters on the long run. Some common examples of online PR activities include, press releases on your website or social media, sharing content about causes that connect people, engaging with comments on social media content or your blog, emailing outreach to reporters and media organizations with pitches for news content/articles. This is in addition to such other activities that help establish your online reputation and attract traffic to your website.

10. Pay-Per-Click, PPC

PPC is the ads system used in search engine marketing such as on Google. What it does is to charge a marketer for every click on a paid ad run on the search engine. It usually gets direct prequalified traffic and thus a very effective marketing arrangement. The reason it is, generally referred to as pay-per-click, PPC advertising. Because the right keywords in search queries trigger ads on search engines, marketing advertisers usually bid on such key search terms used by customers to get good traffic sent to them from search engines. This is why PPC ads tend to get very good results most of the time.

11. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one good way marketers earn commissions for helping to promote and market products/services for merchants online. This relationship comes about by way of affiliate marketers helping to post affiliate links on their social media accounts or blog articles on their business websites. Affiliate marketers earn commissions when internet users act on their marketing efforts through clicks or sales from the affiliate links they posted. Big e-commerce businesses like SFI, Amazon and Alibaba do act as affiliate marketing networks to manage this delicate relationship between merchants and affiliates and it becomes a win-win situation for all parties.

12. Email Marketing

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy of using emails to promote content, events, and direct traffic to business websites. When marketers use content marketing and sales funnels to generate leads, they rely on emails to nurture these leads to customers and make sales. Business emails are especially helpful when used as follow-up emails to potential purchasers and new customers, newsletters to inform subscribers of newly posted blogs or social media content, welcome emails to new subscribers, insider info, special promos, limited time offers, special coupons and or new discounts.

3 Practical Ways Digital Marketing Can Help Grow Your Business with Local SEO

As most digital marketers very well know, every business now appears local. That is why small business digital marketing activities that tend to ignore local peculiarities hardly become successful. Google now reports that over 90% of its users regularly search for local businesses. The reason is simple. With the growth of the internet coupled with changes in consumer behavior, most consumers now habitually search for products online to find out where nearest to them they can find such products. Now, that is one very vital information no serious marketer can afford to ignore. That is why smart digital marketers deliberately target local people, who are geographically around them. Local SEO tends to help such marketers out in that quest. Here are three ways local SEO can help grow your business.

                

01. Create a Google-My-Business, GMB Account

If you want to create visibility for your business in your local geographical environment, get   your business on Google-My-Business, GMB. Visibility is the first target before creating engagement in local SEO. If you have your business account on GMB that will help it to be visible on Google searches. Google-My-Business account enables your target audience to see your business when they search with keywords like “business near me, local barber shop, local grocery, local plumber, local lawn mower, and so on” on Google. Once your information on GMB is accurate and up to date, clicks and visits to your website by searchers leads them on to your business. With that, your local online marketing efforts tend to show results quickly. That is good for business.

02. Create Content Based on Local Events

Every digital marketer creates content for the singular purpose of attracting audience attention. When that content derives from local events, it tends to attract more of local audience attention. You can list all the local festivals, sporting events and social gatherings in the region you are active in and create your content from them. Many locals will identify with you and your brand simply because they see you as a “local boy” of their own. That’s one very good opportunity to create some love and patronage for your brand.

03. Encourage Reviews

Local audiences habitually like to associate with local businesses. Many like to show their concerns by sending some encouraging feedback to the business. When it comes to a local business, many people care and pay good attention to other users’ experiences before they decide to buy or pay for any product/service. Most potential customers care too. It is good for business if a marketer pointedly requests customers to leave feedback and review about any product/service. If positive and helpful and Search Engines such as Google get to pick such reviews up, they become extremely beneficial not only to your online reputation, but also for local SEO. That is because Search Engines consider reviews as useful content. The reason reviews show up in their search results. Because of this, if your local business reviews are positive ones, they help to increase the visibility of your brand on Google search results. Now, that tends to do overall good for your business in a very positive way.

 

How to Increase Focus on Google My Business Amid a Pandemic

As internet technology changes rapidly, so is digital marketing. Smart marketers learn to keep pace particularly in their marketing strategies. Google My Business, GMB is one business-marketing place many marketers find easy and convenient because they want to get noticed in the hugely competitive digital space. At the outset, GMB listing used to be something marketers could just set up and move on hoping for best results in perpetuity. Not anymore! These days, it is very important to see GMB as a constantly changing platform. Marketers need to keep up with these changes to make GMB a very viable channel in which they can easily communicate with customers and to give them more real-time information.

Even before the global pandemic occasioned by the advent of covid-19, it was important to keep up with the changes in GMB. It is even now more important to do so because of the general restrictions affecting most businesses. It now appears that GMB development team is responding well to these restrictions. Marketers cannot afford to ignore these changes at this material time. We notice that the team has been working to add still more great features to GMB. These features include a new post type that allows you to communicate any big product or service updates to customers. 

With covid-19 pandemic still ravaging the world, the team has also added the following health- and safety-related listing attributes. Marketers must take note and adapt quickly in the best interest of the businesses they have listed on GMB. Just look out for these new features.

•    More hours feature. Marketers who operate out of self-storage sites should take note of this one very important new feature. Previously, marketers could only list one set of hours. What that meant is that they often had to choose between showing their gates or office hours. Now they can set these separately.

Other new features in direct response to covid-19 are:

•    Staff undergoes temperature checks
•    Staff wears masks
•    Temperature check required
•    Appointment required
•    Mask required

These new features no doubt will help your business to address the huge concerns of customers who may be eager to do business with you from Google My Business mart. It is smart marketing to adapt these features into your listed business on GMB very quickly.

Evolving Digital Marketing Trends from New Technologies

Digital marketing relies very heavily on technology and this technology usually evolves very rapidly. For digital marketers to stay relevant, their digital marketing strategies must also evolve in tandem. It is only by so doing digital marketers can always manage to increase organic traffic to their business websites, increase brand visibility through Search Engine Optimization and lots more marketing expectations. With rapid advancement in digital technology, most especially Social Media and Search Engines algorithms that change from time to time, digital marketers can only remain relevant in their marketing activities if they manage to keep pace with these evolving new technologies as they evolve. It takes such changes in digital marketing strategies to remain relevant in the hugely competitive digital marketing space. These, here digital marketing trends deserve real attention.

Visual Searches

Hitherto, all everyone needed to do when searching the internet is to simply type a search query into search engines. Not anymore. These days, with advancement in technology, you can carry out visual searches with the use of Google Lens. With this technology, all you need do is to simply upload the image of what you want and Google will provide relevant information about the product. It is as easy and simple as that. The information you get can be detailed enough to help your buy decision. For instance, by uploading the photo of a product you are looking for, Google helps to give detailed information about the product. That information includes its price and, where you can get it to buy. That is very helpful information for buyers. To take advantage of visual search, it is imperative for digital marketers to upload high-quality photos with descriptive keywords in their online stores inventories. That helps search engines to easily direct searchers to their products.
 
No-Click Searches

New technologies now allow searchers to find products even without a click. Google now shows some search results info in a paragraph at the top of the search results pages. This is usually in form of easily noticeable snippets. These snippets are designed to provide key information and images that customers might be looking for right there on top of the search results. Well, some marketers do argue that such snippets do not help organic traffic. That’s alright. Marketers look for traffic with a view to getting better patronage, isn’t it? If snippets tend to bring the some patronage as well, all well and good. Your business website can still get organic traffic by some other means that complement the no-clicks searches which snippets tend to engender. What matters most is results and no-click searches help digital marketers to get good results.

Marketing with Artificial Intelligence, AI

These days, Artificial intelligence, AI is increasingly becoming a very popular trend with digital marketers. Digital marketers now leverage AI to maximize their marketing reach, efficiency and abilities. They use AI to evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing strategies since they can now effectively analyze customer data, track leads and sales accurately. AI also comes in very handy for marketers to predict market behaviors and ease complex marketing tasks like email automation, blog scheduling, auto-responding and the like. AI helps marketers to save time and other vital marketing resources in their marketing efforts, the reason the use of AI is on the rise among digital marketers.

Google-My-Business Listing

There is a new cliché among digital marketers. “If you want your business location to be found easily, get it on Google-My-Business, GMB.” Registering with GMB listings helps establish your operational location and shows searches near your area. When local searchers hit on GMB with your business keywords, at just a glance, they can easily identify your exact location, business hours, telephones, contact address, ratings, reviews and such vital business information they really need to do business with you. Since GMB is very helpful for local organic searches, it tends to be hugely beneficial to small businesses. Such businesses derive over 90% of their patronage from local consumers.