What is Local Marketing?
Local Marketing is a type of marketing strategy that consists of promoting products or services to people located within a range of distance from a company’s physical location.
Local Marketing is also known as “Local Store Marketing (LSM)” or “Neighborhood Marketing” and is used online or in-person and is directed to the local population to provide solutions to specific needs and not to a mass audience.
Why is Local Marketing important?
- It can create long-term commercial relationships; it is usual that a customer comes back again to buy from the same company.
- By being in a close radius, customers can approach easily, giving them more confidence and security to buy the products or services offered.
- It tends to foster customer loyalty towards the company due to the personalized treatment they receive.
- Investments to carry out a local marketing campaign are lower because you can use resources such as flyer delivery, mailing, or street marketing. Free publicity can even be gained when customers recommend the company to friends, neighbors, or relatives.
- It creates business relationships between companies where one can benefit from another or others in different ways, either to supply some input, get a special discount for a financial transaction, exchange useful business information. It is even possible to establish an alliance that drives mutual growth.
- Local Marketing helps companies to have continuous and sustained growth.
Related reading; 10 local business marketing strategies to fuel your growth.
Who uses Local Marketing?
This type of marketing is generally used by small businesses, restaurants, or local stores with a physical location or point of sale and seek to attract customers close to them.
Among other cases, it is also used by franchise owners, who, in addition to making use of regional or national brand campaigns, promote their products or services emphasizing their local location.
Local Marketing Strategies.
To make an effective local marketing campaign, different strategies can be used to help attract customers from nearby areas.
Among others are:
- Know who you will be directing all the effort to, what their demographic and psychographic information is.
- Because more than half of the people surfing the Internet do it through their mobile devices, you should make sure that your website is optimized or compatible to work quickly and without errors in this type of device.
- Place information on your website about your geographic location, not only in the address but also to create content associating it as “the best coffee in Spokane,” adding a satellite map, etc.
- Include your business in website listings, local directories, review sites, Google My Business, among others. This makes your company look legit online, and search engines will rank it better.
- An effective strategy in investing in local SEO to optimize your website and rank for relevant keywords in your location.
- Placing your location in your paid advertising snippets.
- Social networks provide several opportunities to highlight a company’s locality; it can be in the header, in the title of the post, in the comment, in the hashtags, etc.
- Actively participating in cultural, social, and news events that take place in the locality is a good way to promote and remember the brand of a company.
- Use of local media because people tend to access this type of media to stay informed of what is happening in their locality.
- You can also use e-commerce to approach consumers with different methods such as sending discount coupons and new product information, among others.
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