Have You Tried Local Digital Marketing For Your Small Brand?

Local digital marketing is actually for businesses that have a geographical territory limitation and therefore the customer base is not global but extremely local. The digital marketing you can do for such localized and geographically fenced territories, where you market your products, is now possible thanks to search options such as Google Local. You can now make local targeting a sharp and focused digital strategy, but the methods you apply to your content marketing, mobile targeting and SEO optimization have to be differently implemented. The most important thing to remember is to go local but not limit your options to spread your wings in the future. So any strategy has to be limited for immediate needs, but also scalable for future geo-diversification.

Make your website mobile-friendly through native-mobile design, not just adaptation

Making your website mobile-responsive and mobile-friendly is not just an attractive idea for any business, big or small, it’s also now an imperative ever since Google added mobile-friendliness to its list of ranking factors. But more than any other type of business, geographically limited localized businesses can gain tremendously by making their websites mobile-responsive.

Here, the cost factor has to be considered, because local business marketing may require that your site is “natively designed” for devices like mobiles and tablets, instead of being simply adapted from old site designs created for laptops. Customers, for example, who are looking for a restaurant, store, laundry or other local business are likely to do a search on their phones or mobile devices, while they are on the go. If your local business doesn’t have a mobile-native site, not only will it be difficult for them to interact with your company while they are on the move, but it will also be difficult for them to find your location in the first place, especially if you are not on the high street.

Understand the concept of hyper-local customers to target with geo-targeting

Hyper-local customers are those who are in very close proximity to a business. So if your business has an app, you could use it to send alerts or offers to your customers who are nearby. Remember also that your local business needs to be getting ready for the not too distant future when we may be entering the “post-search era” and geo-targeting of an intense and competitive kind is going to be the preferred style of marketing for local businesses. What exactly is this kind of geo-targeting? Here’s a sampler … from one of my earlier articles.

Can you imagine these few scenarios?

A consumer considering handing over his clothes for ironing at a new laundry may get a “Why have you forgotten us?” message from his old laundry with a discount coupon just as he is about to enter the competitor’s doorway.

Knowing a consumer is rummaging through a book store a local theatre may just pop two tickets at him via his phone saying their latest movie release may be a better way to spend the evening than reading books.

A wearable device – a shiny new Apple Watch – on a consumer’s wrist may anticipate expected pollution levels in the air for the week, monitor his breathing patterns and notice the first signs of an asthma attack, use a dataset to classify him as high risk for his genetic profile, and then from another dataset find a specialist based on location, age and cost for him – and within seconds it may book the doctor appointment at the earliest time based on his own and his doctor’s availability.

Does all this sounds far-fetched or surreal? Nope! All this technology is almost (or perhaps already?) at hand. The “post-search era” is almost here. Technology will soon begin to deliver “hot contextual information” before the user even has to search Google for anything. Mobile phones may start displaying ads to the nearest cafe, the menu, the route, and the time to get there, the moment a hungry man around lunch time pulls his phone out of his pocket.

So this is the future that’s almost here … and it’s the place where you need your small brand to score over competition!

Optimize your website for local search, factoring in the new challenges of local SEO

Small brands have to understand that local SEO is very different from your average SEO campaign, and the local search results are changing more rapidly than any other. Recently Moz.com published a chart showing a breakdown of the weighting of diverse ranking factors for local SEO campaigns. One of the things to note in this chart below is that while there are a few slightly different factors compared to the usual SEO campaign (for example, External Loc. Signals and My Business Signals), the importance of links and on-page SEO factors still play a huge part, as usual. The only difference is that the type of links you’ll want to focus on will be quite different.

Among the types of links you should go for are local NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) citations, local reviews and My Business signals. And you should make sure you claim your Google My Business page. It’s also important to get local reviews and local directory listings which will have a direct impact on local search rankings, so you’ll want to spend some effort in getting them from well-recognized local sources of authority. And don’t forget this one … embed a Google map with your business marker into your landing page.

Leverage local language or dialects by opting for language-based keyword focus on Google

A key aspect of local digital marketing is language adaptations of your site and information. If your local language is different or is a dialect, you may want to locate the appropriate search keywords as suited to the idiom of that language in your Google Local Search. For all of this, it would really be worth your while to get a certified Local Google Search SEO expert to help, since much of the new orientation of SEO may be difficult for you, as an entrepreneur, to get the full hang off straight off the bat!

Even with outside help, there are some areas of confusion that you have to beware of. There are two nomenclatures that sound similar but are not really the same thing. “Multilingual SEO” is the practice of offering optimized website content in a variety of languages … whereas, “Multiregional SEO” is the practice of creating optimized website content that is tailored specifically to multiple geographic regions. These two strategies often have overlap, or are not fully understood, but they have to be fathomed to get your content marketing and SEO right. Unless you are a brand in many different geographies, what you should be looking more closely at is “Multilingual SEO”. Here, again, remember that not just your locals may be seeking you out. People of other nationalities may be travelling through your geography and if you cater to tourists you may want to ensure people can search for your location in all the languages commonly used by your tourist audience!

One point most missed by small local brands … use plenty of visuals for easy recognition!

The part of local digital marketing for small brands that I have seen given short-shrift is the clever use of plenty of visuals and videos. Why do we need loads of visual content when people are already in the middle of the street and looking for nearby locations? Two reasons for this: One, visuals speak louder than text on small screens. A picture of your shop frontage will make it easier to locate than a postal address. Two, you may not know that using multimedia in your SEO optimization efforts can give you more opportunities to appear in search results — particularly since Google and other search engines prefer to display blended search results that often include images and videos in addition to the regular search results. These pieces of content can also provide other opportunities for your business to do a lot of pre-sale before a person reaches your premises!

In many cases, small local brands don’t do enough photo/video optimization, perhaps because you haven’t found the time to really exploit the idea. Even if your local product or local service isn’t very photogenic or exciting, what about photographing other major events and sights in your area that can act as “memory landmarks”?

I’d say the smartest thing you can do when you venture into local digital marketing for your small brand, is to start on a fresh slate. Forget what you used to do before for your marketing strategy, zero-in on a whole new set of local customers, get to know their behaviors inside out, and redesign your strategy to their peculiarities. The “shop-next-door” has a charm all its own, and you want to capture that sense of belonging in your customers, don’t you?

Some more voices that reinforce the idea of going local with your digital marketing!

Not only is it important for small businesses to cash in on the local digital marketing opportunity, it’s the big businesses too that are being told to mimic the small and local players now as a change of strategy. Read on …

Peter Lang in his article “How To Go Local With Your Digital Marketing” (in the UHRU Network website):

Many agencies encourage businesses to “market online” by using digital technology and the internet. These small businesses ultimately begin “global marketing” the moment they hit the web. Focusing on the broader approach to web, social, and mobile is detrimental to some businesses. These businesses end up competing against other companies that aren’t going after the same customer. This trend has thankfully been turned on its head due to the lack of financial impact. Local businesses who rely on foot traffic from their city’s footprint, or smaller, are realizing that they need to focus on local digital marketing. In today’s uncertain and changeable world, local businesses’ competitive advantage increasingly depends on their ability to maximize the local market.

James Challis in his article “New To Digital Marketing? Why Local Is The Only Place To Start” (in Koozai.com):

Local customers are also more likely to trust a company that has an address nearby usually easier to serve. For instance, if you sell a product that goes wrong, it is likely to cost less to service, repair or replace that product in your local area than for customers who may be on the other side of the country. Any new website that sells a product or service should start locally. This will help them to compete with more established websites as building the domain reputation and the number of good quality natural links to a site will take some time and without these it’s unlikely you’ll be able to rank competitively for relevant key terms. As with most start-ups, available capital will be in short supply so growing sales from the website to produce money that can be reinvested into the business is vital. When attracting a local audience to a website, it doesn’t need to exclude users from outside the local area. Also, the Technical SEO including Meta and the content produced as part of the strategy should always consider the future and help to build the foundations for a website that can compete nationally for future growth opportunities.

Adam Fridman in his article “3 Reasons Digital Marketing is Going Local” (in Inc.com):

In many cases, small businesses are pushed to the top of search queries due to location. To compete with these smaller businesses, national brands have to behave and think like a local business. Hyper-localizing your brand marketing enables businesses to strengthen their relevance to individual communities while providing insight into consumer behaviors that can benefit a brand’s national marketing efforts.

Thinking like a local business requires an understanding of local consumer needs. Marketers needs to deliver a best practice marketing solution to their local representatives in order to connect with that local marketing space. A brand’s local web presence becomes the central hub for a brand’s local efforts, a place where marketers can direct consumers to some type of call to action. The creation of strong, personalized content that is unique to a local business and their specific culture is what will differentiate a successful national brand with multiple branches from a national brand that focuses on crafting a single national campaign.