Promoting Your Local Business

Too often, local businesses depend on passing traffic and word of mouth, rather than making a concerted effort to market their business.  While both of these are important and deliver some results, you can dramatically increase your customers and turnover using a combination of online and offline marketing techniques.

Website

To start with, any local business should really have a website.  According to some studies, approximately 97% of people who are looking for a local product or service turn to Google.  You want to make sure that you are at the top of the list when they do.  This is online marketing.

SEO Optimization

One way of making sure your website gets visibility is to put together an SEO optimization campaign.  The goal of this is to increase your rankings on Google when someone searches for a phrase such as “printing companies in Duluth”.  To do this, you need to use a combination of on-site and off-site optimization.

Madison Dillon marketing by LemonadeDay, on Flickr.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

You first need to find out what people are searching for, as in the printing company example above.  There are a number of tools that you can use to find this out, including Google’s Keyword Planner, which you can access if you open up a free Adwords account.  This will give you the number of people that are searching for different keywords, and will even give you recommendations on new ones to look at.

Blogs

Once you have this list, try to find ways to write high-quality content related to those terms on your website.  Starting a blog gives you a great way to publish content, without worrying about the design and structure of the page itself.

Then, think about getting other sites to link back to your site, since Google uses the number and quality of these back-links – along with several other factors – to determine how useful your site is.  One good way of doing this is to write high-quality articles and then offer them for free to other sites if they will include your link.  Just make sure the articles are relevant to the other site so that they are more likely to accept them.

terimakasih0 / Pixabay

Offline Advertising

However, just because you are doing online advertising, this doesn’t mean that you should abandon offline advertising.  There are many ways of making this more effective, and you should spend time on these methods as well.  For instance, you can raise the visibility of your business by putting a banner outside – it is easy and inexpensive to order a custom banner online for this purpose from someone like Banner Stand Pros.

Another good way of doing this is to support or sponsor a local charity or sports team – perhaps your local Little League team or a team in a kids’ soccer league.  Not only does this promote your business, it also increases your reputation in your local community.  Of course, the biggest reward of sponsoring something like this is the satisfaction you get from doing something good, but it doesn’t hurt to see more customers coming in the door.