Effective Tips for Marketing a Local Business Online

Every small business appears local as many small business owners are discovering. Google now presents the facts as nearly 50% of all searches on Google are looking for local information. People habitually search for businesses “near me” when they take to Google to purchase a product or hire a service. If you run a small business yourself, how well are you prepared for local searches? No doubt you are aware that a critical aspect of digital marketing is how well you share information about your business with both consumers and search engines particularly Google. If you share your business information well with Google, it will help you to promote your business to online searchers. That translates to the much needed organic traffic back to your business. These here tips are effective to help you market your local business online.

Make Sure Your Website is Secure

A secure website confers quality in the eyes of search engines. If your website isn't secure, all data therein is insecure and hugely vulnerable. It is easy to know a secure website with a locked padlock and an "s" sign on the left side of the URL, web address of the page when it opens. When searchers hit your site and they don’t see these signs, because of security concerns, they may not be willing to do business with the site. In addition, Google does not prioritize unsecured websites in search results. That means if your website is insecure, it will hurt your SEO. Be sure you are marketing out of a secure website if you want good results. To secure your website, the best option for you is to reach out to your website hosting providers for the service. Some hosting providers like Wix for instance do make website security part of their hosting services through their all-in-one solutions.

Enrich Your “About Us” Page

A good and well worded “About Us” page on your website is the first opportunity your business has to build trust with online searchers. Aside the landing page, it is the second most popular page of many business websites. It is a digital marketing fact that about eighty-five percent of consumers only buy from businesses they trust. These consumers often use the “About Us” page of a website to get and learn vital and essential information about any business when they hit the website. If you skillfully use this page to share your business values, experience, what you stand for and even your bragging rights, you can easily create a connection with people as they frantically evaluate which businesses to patronize.

Make Location Prominent on Your Website  
 
Never shy away from telling Google the location of your business and how local it is. That means your business location must be a prominent part of your website if you want your business to benefit from Google’s very popular local search results. Be sure to have your location in your website footer and also include it on your “Contact Us” page. If you have multiple locations, you can add a "locations" link to your main website navigation. Google as a major search engine has very sophisticated algorithms. It often uses a searcher's current location when providing search results. That makes provision of accurate location information on your website very crucial for SEO purposes. Your business location is not only important for your customers and potential customers, it is also important for your websites, social channels, and search engines that send online searchers to your business. The more specific your business location is the better for your SEO. The reason you must make sure it clearly identifies the street, the neighborhood, the town, the precinct, the county and even the region.

Create a GMB, Google My Business Account

For Google search engine, accuracy and consistency matter a lot. To present your business in that light, it is advisable to create a GMB account on Google. With a GMB account, you have the benefit of free listing for your business.  That allows you to promote your business on Google search and Maps. That is how online searchers particularly local searchers manage to get a first impression of your business. With a GMB account, you can easily modify your hours of operation, add contact information, and provide quick post-style updates where necessary. For best results, make sure your GMB account is always accurate, up-to-date and provides the most important information you want your customers and potential customers to see.

Add a CTA Button to Your Navigation

Anyone who hits on your website must have intentions. It is your duty to make them take some actions you prefer in relation to your business. That is where call-to-action, CTA button is hugely important. You can make it easy for your website visitors to take some action by placing a prominent CTA button in your navigation or main menu. The CTA is a compelling way to direct your website visitors to see “specials”, “shop” or “buy” products or to simply provide “directions” to some goodies on your website. The button text should be preferably one word that is easy to comprehend.

Make Your Employees Front-line Marketers

Your employees can be the real face of your business if they are well trained. Most employees are usually local people and the way and manner they interact with others in and outside your business promises can make them good marketers for your business. If you train them well, your employees can act as marketing channels to help consumers follow you on social media, explain your loyalty program, or promote an upcoming/special sales program. It is your employees who routinely communicate and even interact in persons with your customers. So, if your employees are likable to your customers, the business they promote for you is almost certainly likable to the customers. Good employee training helps that process a great deal. Great employees never miss any opportunity to tell others great things about your business. Making them front line marketers is therefore good for your local business.

Build a Customers’ Contacts Base

Effective communication usually leads to effective business. To make communication effective, every local business must build a credible and reliable contacts data base. This data base should include street contact addresses for possible home deliveries, email and phone numbers for making quick contacts and passing on urgent marketing info. Make sure that you have the proper consent of your website visitors before adding their personal contact info to your data base. In some climes, to be able to market by email or phone, you must obtain an individual's informed consent to receive communications from you. A simple sign-up form on your website can make visitors to voluntarily leave their contact info with you in exchange for some value, such as eBook, Newsletter or some token gift. A voluntary sign-up is enough consent but with an opt-out option if they no longer want to hear from you.

6 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Marketing a Small Business Online

Promoting your small business online is no tea party particularly if you are not innately familiar with digital marketing methods. With the advent of the internet, traditional forms of marketing and advertising are now grossly inadequate to promote your small business successfully. We are now in a digital age so, marketing and advertising are now done better with digital technology. If you want to market your small business well enough and get noticed online, you need digital marketing strategies to do so.

These six digital marketing strategies can help set your small business up for success even in the hugely competitive digital space.

1. Create High Quality Content

Creating high quality content online is one very potent way to build your brand. In the parlance of digital marketers, content is king. There is no substitute for good content if you want to effectively market your small business online. Online marketing is not just about how great your products or services are. It is much more than that. For instance, you must be able to offer information, education, entertainment, or some kind of solutions to the problems of your audience. You need to post relevant and consistent content marketing solutions to help out your audience. That content can be served through all kinds of video content, blog posts, social media content and guest blogging. You just need to have a good content marketing strategy in place to regularly create a compelling content to meet the needs of your customers.

2. Vigorously Promote Your Brand

Every small business owner who wants to get noticed online must be prepared to vigorously promote his business. The real essence of this promotion is to give your brand a respectable online presence. That is what makes your brand unique and trusted. Do not ignore any online marketing channel if you want to promote your brand. Email newsletters, social media, search engines, SEO and the like are all useful to help your small business build its brand. Be sure to let on at any and every opportunity what distinguishes your business from the competition. If you really know who you are, what your business is, what it offers and who your customers are, you can develop strategies that align with your values and your brand identity. With these strategies in place, you can effectively promote your brand vigorously online to establish your brand identity.
 
3. Market on Social Media

Social media appears to be where nearly everyone is at the moment. Small businesses need social media to connect with one another and to a great audience of customers and potential customers. Social media is now a crucial and hugely effective method for small businesses to grow their brand awareness, get leads and even make sales. Small businesses can market directly to specially identified segments of social media audience and the results are usually great. For this reason, it is simply not enough to just establish your social media presence. You must post good content regularly and consistently to provide the real value that helps to generate interest in your business. Since many social media users cherish interacting with valuable brands on the platforms, smart small business owners never miss the opportunities to make real connections and sales.

4. Don’t Ignore SEO, Search Engine Optimization

Small business owners cannot afford to ignore search engine optimization, SEO if they want to market successfully online. With good SEO techniques in your business website and your content, search engines get to rank your business in readiness for online searchers. That way, they send organic traffic to your website free of costs. Optimizing the content on your website and generating quality backlinks from other sites is a credible way to communicate to search engines particularly the largest of them all Google that your site actually provides relevancy and value. If search engines take up your offer because of your SEO, it helps to build your brand visibility and perception over time in an organic way. The better the SEO of your website, the more likely it is that your site will appear prominently in the SERPs of search engines. Without a good SEO, your website may never be noticed online. Marketing from such a website will be akin to marketing to yourself only. 

5. Use Paid Digital Ads

Digital marketing now resonates more with small businesses than traditional marketing methods. Digital ads are not only hugely convenient and effective, they help to save ads costs as well. For this reason, smart small business owners now have a preference for PPC, display ads, and even social media ads. Apart from the fact that these ads types are often more affordable, business owners have more and better control over how the ads are shown and through what marketing channels. Businesses can better target segmented audiences with digital ads than any other ads types. The reason they get good results in driving traffic to your website, generate leads and make sales.

6. Rev up Your Email Marketing

In this age and time, email marketing is still very effective as a digital marketing strategy. If you already have a credible email list, you can rev up your email marketing activities anytime. Once you are able to avoid sending spam mails, email marketing can be very effective if it is well conceived. That email marketing is often more effective than other marketing techniques is a digital marketing fact. In fact, marketers are more likely to get a click from a marketing email than social media posts despite the legendary popularity of social media platforms. When email messages/newsletters contain high quality content, videos, call-to-action, CTA buttons and social media buttons, they often have impressive click-through rates. If marketers make efforts to personalize their emails and actually provide something of real value customers really want, such emails rarely end up in the trash.