With 2 in 5 of us shopping locally at least every month, and most of those every week, local marketing is the best way to reach your business’ biggest potential fans – your local community.
Why Local Marketing Is Important
Whether you’re a bricks-and-mortar shop or café, a service or an online brand with a base in Bristol, tapping into local marketing will help you build relationships with people in your area. As 88% of customers who do a local search will call or visit you within a day, it’s also worth remembering that local marketing is now a blend of digital and offline.
As a Cardiff-based SEO agency, what we love about local marketing is that, no matter how large your company is, you’re always going to have more loyal customers in your local area. For example, Seattleites are more likely to visit a Starbucks. Scottish people will drink more IRN-BRU.
Even on a town or city basis, the phrase ‘choose local’ is used regularly to induce an emotional reward for purchasing. Even if the price tag is bigger, how many times have you thought, ‘at least I bought local’?
We’ve created this guide to help you understand how to market your business locally. Read on for eight tips to build connection with the people closest to you.
1. Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience is essential for local marketing. However, we recommend approaching it differently based on whether you are a pre-start or post-start business.
As a pre-start business, you have the opportunity to decide on your highest value market and position your business accordingly. Locally, this could mean literally choosing to open your luxury salon in a rich suburb close to premium boutiques.
As an existing business, understanding your local audience on an emotional and economic level is a tool you can use to deliver value to your target customers. The more value you deliver, the more loyalty you’ll build. Getting to know your people is always a good idea as it’ll help you design products, services and promotions that resonate and meet a genuine need.
How to target your audience
Once you know your audience and are ready to target them, we’d suggest smart, low-cost psychological tricks over big investments. If you run a local café, this could be as simple as putting your chairs and tables outside every day, rain or shine, to make it clear you’re open from a distance.
We’ve also seen a village shop offering a ‘postcode discount. The irony that everyone within a 10-mile radius of the shop will have that postcode doesn’t count as the customer will still feel a sense of exclusivity as a local using their code. This is the kind of creativity you can use in marketing your business locally that we’d always suggest for long-term success over high-spend ads.
2. Build a Local Following on Social Media
Even if you’re a bricks & mortar shop on the highstreet, 97% of people will learn more about your business online than anywhere else. From a local marketing perspective, social media can be the driver behind customer loyalty.
We’ve seen this particularly with local hospitality brands. If you’re serving up delicious cruffins or artisan sourdough, all it can take is a video tour of a new facility, a new dish or a feature to get your local customers flooding back in. Great social media also boosts your SEO.
London bakery Sourdough Sophia does this particularly well, sharing behind-the-scenes processes and new bakery openings, while bringing her followers along on the ride:
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As always with social media, how valuable it is for your brand will depend on what you put in. Our approach is to be consistently visible, but inconsistent in our content so that our audience never quite knows what to expect.
Below is a reel we posted in collaboration with Vibes Yoga Bar in Cardiff, which leads us on to our next step:
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3. Collaborate With Other Local Businesses
If there’s one common factor between businesses that grow fast, it’s that they know how to collaborate. There’s a reason after all that you’ll find drink stands next to salty food kiosks in theme parks – some businesses will grow each other’s demand. They’re symbiotic.
Collaborating with local brands is an essential part of a local marketing strategy. If you’re marketing a local business, we’d challenge you to make a list of all the other local businesses you could strike a ‘symbiotic relationship’ with. Ideally, these will be brands located nearby, but don’t underestimate the power of a social media campaign to bring brands together, even if they’re further away.
Once you have your partners lined up, seasonal demand and a competition can be a recipe for a great partnership. For example, a florist could partner with a local deli to offer a competition where customers can win a Valentine’s Day experience.
While collaborations can take some forethought and negotiation, incorporate them regularly into your marketing plan and you’ll see how seasonality, social media, and the joint power of two brands can create more local interest than you’ve ever seen.
Running Competitions and Giveaways
It’s worth noting that running competitions and giveaways can mean very little for your brand if you don’t make good use of your digital channels. Sharing a giveaway to your email marketing list and a social media account fuelled by local followers on the other hand can be a sure way to get your community engaged and excited.
Going back to easy psychological tricks that can increase the perception of value, we’d suggest having multiple prizes to increase engagement compared to a single ‘too good to believe’ prize. We’ve found that offering first, second and third prizes can lead to an increase in the number of entries. This way also means you’ll enjoy stronger word-of-mouth benefits following the competition, with more winners advocating for your now more generous brand.
Here’s a beautiful example of how a giveaway can capitalise on the strengths of each brand in this collaboration between Fable England and Peter Rabbit:
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4. Optimise Your Website for Mobile
Over £1 trillion of local sales are estimated to start on mobile. While having a mobile-friendly website varies in importance depending on your target audience, you can’t deny that it’s becoming increasingly important for all demographics. This is especially as users are becoming more confident making purchases and bookings online via their smartphones, often on the go.
You could also argue that the success of your social media, SEO and search marketing campaigns will all depend on the quality of your website’s mobile experience. If you’re not offering a great experience on mobile, the rest of your marketing may feel like skidding your wheels in the mud. You can generate hype, but your customers won’t be able to take action if your pages are slow to load or buttons and images are cut off on small screens.
At Lumen SEO, we can optimise your website for mobile and SEO, boosting your site speed and user experience. If you want to do this yourself, we also offer workshops for teams and can coach you in the skills you need to level up your digital presence.
5. Work On Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
With ‘near me’ and ‘close by’ searches growing by more than 900% over the last two years and 46% of all Google searches looking for local information, local SEO can be your friend for reaching local customers looking for your products or services right now.
As Google’s search results become more dynamic and customised to a searcher’s intent and location, there’s evidence to say that SEO is becoming more and more valuable when it comes to local marketing.
For example, a search for a local service or a search phrase including a location is more likely to display a map result with reviews and a telephone number present – this also bodes well for Google and ChatGPT results. If you’ve taken time over your website to provide a great user experience and booking system, as well as optimising for local keywords and collecting reviews, this is where you can really show up and win.
Learn more about the importance of local SEO in our guide and read about why Google My Business matters too.
Why Local Directories Don’t Matter as Much as You’d Think
As the world is increasingly digitised, we’re quickly advancing away from directories. Instead, we’re favouring tools such as Google Maps and ChatGPT which offer integrated options to find local services.
For example, you might ask Google Maps to ‘find the closest…’ With ChatGPT, users are increasingly having conversations about their specific needs. This might mean asking AI to find you a restaurant within walking distance that offers a gluten-free option. If you’re optimising your website for SEO, this is where your local business can show up.
The sheer potential and growth of digital search tools including AI is why we’d make the case for favouring these over traditional directories. Here’s our guide to how to appear in AI overviews.
Why We Don’t Recommend Paid Search Campaigns for Local Marketing
While a lot of articles on local marketing will tell you about the importance of search engine marketing campaigns, we don’t think it’s the best place for you to invest. If we zoom outwards, it’s because paid search is gradually shrinking in importance. This is because searchers of all generations are becoming more savvy, with at least 70% of searchers skipping the ad results when they make a search.
If you add to that the need for genuine reviews to be visible when looking for local services, we don’t think search engine marketing has much of a place in local campaigns. You also have to question how accurately a global marketing network can target a very specific niche location. If you’re a professional organiser in High Peak like our client For The Love Of Tidying, you’re likely to appear for those searches anyway!
6. Establish Yourself as an Authority
When thinking about how to market a local business, establishing yourself as an authority will vary in importance depending on the size of your local area. You can gain authority in hairdressing by being the only hairdresser in your area, and therefore can often waste time trying to win national awards instead of developing new services to offer to your regular customers to increase lifetime value.
However, in a large city, developing an authoritative brand is not only a positive driver for word of mouth, but we now know it is an essential element of good SEO. Google is only interested in ranking websites with demonstrable experience and knowledge in your industry. The benefit is two-fold and, therefore, potentially more important. Here are more tips on how to show authority on your website.
Where Collecting Reviews Counts
While many local marketing experts will focus on the importance of reviews, we’d say yes, they can be important, but how important they are will depend on your audience. For example, generating Google reviews will offer far more positive impact if you’re targeting a millennial audience than if you’re targeting a retired audience who may be more likely to check reviews in the local newspaper.
7. Getting Involved in Your Local Community
How you engage with your local community will vary in importance depending on the necessity of what you’re selling. Luxury ‘nice-to-have’ goods may require more community engagement to increase the brand’s perceived value, while shops selling essentials may win purely on proximity grounds.
When to Host and Sponsor Events
As a local business, you may have opportunities to host or sponsor events. When considering these, it’s worth keeping in mind the following:
- Hosting events: Low capital and high effort
- Sponsoring events: High capital and low effort
Either way, we’d say the importance of hosting and sponsoring events as an experiential advertising route depends on your industry and age. For example, a new independent café can engage local customers in a far more affordable and sustainable way by launching social media and media campaigns.
However, if you’re a multi-location chain café, local sponsorship is a sure way of winning over the local crowd by giving the sense that you care about local events and developments, especially if the announcement of your opening has caused a negative stir among locals.
8. Local PR
Last of all, local media is an interesting opportunity because it’s currently making a resurgence, even with younger demographics. This is because social networks like Instagram and TikTok are increasing the weight of local content creators in their algorithms. They understand that engagement will be higher and last longer if the location or people are recognisable.
Wherever you’re based, it’s worth making a list of your local media outlets and flipping through past editions to find the contact details of the editors if you can too. Follow them on social media and read past editions, getting a sense of what they publish and where you might fit in.
When your business has a story, whether a new store opening or an exciting collaboration, it’s always worth sending a press release to your local editors. At best, you might get a feature, helping with local awareness and potentially gaining you a valuable backlink for your SEO.
For example, here’s a feature we gained in Cardiff Life:
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How We Can Help
If you were struggling on how to market your business locally, we hope our guide has given you lots of ideas to get your brand known and loved in your community.
As you’ll have seen, SEO and having a user-friendly website are core elements of effective local marketing. At Lumen SEO, we can help you improve your business’ search rankings for the keywords that count and take your website’s user experience to the next level.
We also have plenty of experience supporting local businesses from garden designers to shops and removal companies. Take a look at some of our case studies here. Whether you want to optimise your slow website or compete for service searches in your area, we can help.
