How to Think Locally When Marketing Online

by ​Nathan Sykes, Guest Contributor

Although there may be times when you want your online business strategies to appeal to national and international audiences, it’s important not to overlook having a localized focus. Below, we’ll take a close look at several ways you could reach out to people in the nearby community.

Digitally market your local business.

Team up With Local Bloggers
Have you ever looked to see if there is at least one blogger in the area that writes about a topic related to your business and has a large following? If there is, it’s a good idea to consider engaging in a partnership. Provided your business is truly a good fit for the blog content, these niche influencers could introduce your business to new and relevant audiences.

Purchase Local Online Advertising
Facebook makes it possible to show ads to people within a designated radius of your business. Similarly, Google provides localized promotional content that appears when individuals perform online searches.

When writing the content for those advertisements, pick words and phrases that speak to users’ needs based on the things they input into a search bar. For example, a person who searches for “food shop near me” is likely trying to pick up some grocery items. In that case, you could mention things like opening hours, the extent of the available selection and the lower-than-average prices.

Make Landing Pages and Blog Posts Applicable to Your Location
Your website’s copy can convey authority to visitors. Hopefully, you also have a blog that gets regularly updated with content people genuinely want to read. Whether you are making updates to a landing page, coming up with new blog topics or doing both, think about ways to tie your location into the content.

Is there a local festival happening in your area next month? In that case, you might add a section to a landing page that promotes a sale specifically geared towards people attending the celebration.

Or, consider including tips associated with your local climate in a blog post. If you own a clothing store, you could write about how appropriate attire helps maximize comfort in different kinds of weather common to your region, and if you manage a company that deals with landscaping and gardening, you might talk about how to cope with various seasonal factors.

Use Mapping Software to Visualize Your Marketing Territory
Data visualization strategies can help you make sense of statistics associated with your business. By depending on mapping software, you can see the nearby area and determine things about it, such as whether there is a greater concentration of customers in one area versus another. You could also look at how many potential leads exist in a particular segment of the map, then decide to maximize your online marketing efforts there.

Without a dedicated solution for seeing data that connects to online marketing, it’s far too easy to not give enough attention to a segment of your community that could become an untapped source of prosperity. Similarly, you might mistakenly devote too much of your time and energy to a portion of the market that does not require so many resources.

Offer Home Deliveries of Products Purchased Online
For the past several years, analysts have said localized digital marketing is of substantial importance to help businesses gain traction in the marketplace. One of the ways you can make online-based products more enticing for people nearby is to provide a service that delivers the items to consumers’ homes — ideally on the day of purchase.

This idea could help your business become more desirable to homebound elderly individuals, parents who have infants and feel it’s too inconvenient to take their little ones shopping or any other individuals who’d prefer to stay at home while buying things. People have already become accustomed to ordering pizzas and other foods online and getting them delivered, so if your company sells things online too, emphasize to customers how your service is similar.
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Even though a website theoretically gives you a global reach, these ideas prove how easy and effective it can be to have a local mindset for online marketing techniques. After trying some of them, you might notice impressive outcomes that forever change your preferred methods, and make you realize the worth of hyper-localization.

Author bio:

Nathan Sykes writes about business and technology in Pittsburgh, PA. He is the editor of Finding an Outlet, where he writes about the latest in business technology trends.