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How to create a strong online presence for a local business – 7 fundamentals
How to create a strong online presence for a local business – 7 fundamentals
For any small business in 2021 having a strong online presence for your local business is vital.
In fact, 97% of people learn more about local businesses online than anywhere else and a great place to start is with a Google My Business listing. (link)
For local businesses, it’s also essential to keep all of your business information up to date. Even more so as the way we do business keeps changing with the differing restrictions on the way we can conduct our business.
If you’re a small business owner with little experience in online marketing, then being online, and optimising your digital presence may seem way too complicated and fill you with dread. But it doesn’t have to be so. It is easier than you think!
So how can you build and optimize your marketing using online, or as it is sometimes called – inbound marketing – to attract new customers and grow your business?
Local Business Marketing
As a small business you may often feel that a lack of budget, and time, will make it difficult to raise your profile and build a steady flow of leads. However, there are key strategies you can use to help scale your marketing efforts:
Small Business Marketing Strategies
These fundamentals are central to you generating awareness and revenue for your business:
Know your audience.
And it isn’t everyone! Larger companies may be able to appeal to a broad audience with brand awareness, but there is a great phrase – “the riches are in the niches”. So what is a niche? A niche is a focused, targeted area that you serve particularly well. It is small (and the smaller the better). A niche is how you’ll get the best results as a small business. To flesh out a niche and appeal to customers within the niche, you have to understand what their pains, problems, and priorities are.
What is pushing them to make a purchasing decision? What does it look like if their problem is solved? Knowing these things will help you create messaging that relates to them and makes a compelling case for your solution.
Start by thinking about your existing customers, who do you work really well with and who would you like to work with. Then try and understand everything about them.
Emphasize your value and what makes you different.
If there’s no difference between you and your competition, why should someone choose you? And you don’t want that answer to be the price! Otherwise, you are just in a race to be the cheapest and that’s no way to run a business. What do you do better, or differently to anyone else who does what you do? Putting this in your marketing makes a very convincing case for you. Learn how to create your category of one.
Focus on singular goals and objectives.
There are so many options to choose from with marketing at the moment. It’s tempting to try lots of things all at the same time – with your fingers crossed that you’ll cover all bases. The danger is that you may take on too much.
Try to discover what will make the biggest impact to start with. Maybe look at what you’re not doing now that you should. Start by defining a key goal based on one main area and then focus your energy and resources on that one goal. Your first goal could be set by looking at your weakest area – is it at the getting leads stage, is it in customer conversion stage, is it at the last stage of your customer journey with them being your advocates – your biggest fans? Once you have achieved that goal, then move on to improve other areas and develop new initiatives.
Start with short-term tactics.
Start small. See what works, and then scale it up. Small activity will still yield results and revenue, so once you start seeing a return on investment, use that revenue to scale. This will give you the momentum and cash flow to put toward larger projects.
Optimize what works.
Once you have your marketing up and running it’s now really important to pay to monitor the numbers. This will tell you what’s working, or maybe what isn’t. Now you can look to scale by increasing spend on the things that work, and reducing spend on those performing less well.
Don’t forget your existing customers.
It costs, on average, five times more to get a new customer than to sell to an existing customer. This means you need to continue to nurture and engage your existing customers even after they have made a purchase.
Your existing customers already know, like, and trust you. If you looked after them well, they now have a reason to do business with you again when they need to. You now need to discover the opportunities for repeat purchases or upselling and cross-selling. Here are six ways to get more sales from existing customers.
Even if yours is a one-off purchase, you should still delight your customers. Word of mouth is an incredibly powerful (and free) marketing tool.
- Use free marketing tools.
Talking of free marketing tools… use free marketing tools where possible, and only use paid tools if you know they will drastically improve results. Here’s a helpful list of marketing tools
If you’d like some more help with boosting your online presence then book a call