Local Marketing: Creating a Complementary Base with Storefronts & Websites
If you are marketing locally, chances are you have a business storefront to which you would like to draw new and returning clientele. It is equally important these days to draw new and returning customers to your digital real estate as well. In fact, three out of four shoppers who find local information in search results helpful are more likely to visit stores. Which means, in order to get the most out of your localized marketing campaigns, your end goal should be to continually invite potential customers to your business’s bases, which should complement one another, in the real world and online.
Draw Attention to Your Strongest Features – Website & Storefront
One of the most important calls to action in any marketing strategy is to get interested parties in touch with you. Regardless of your platform – In-person, TV, Radio, Google+, Facebook, blogs – or medium – online content, digital ads, email campaigns, print marketing, mail offers, mall advertising, events, coupons – all roads need to point back to your website and your business location. You need a stable and visible location of operations that ties all of your advertising elements back to your home-bases so your clients know where to find you – and where to send referrals!
Draw Attention to Your Signature Look
Establishing an impactful storefront and website is an integral part of competing in today’s saturated market. If a customer has a good experience in one environment, it can perpetuate further interactions with them in the alternate environment. Customers are even using their smartphones to search for more information online from the business while standing in the business’s store. Which means, when marketing locally, even though common sense says to put the focus on the physical business location, incorporating the same attention to detail and good service on your website can improve your storefront attendance and the customer’s level of satisfaction. Even the minutia matter – having your website compliment your storefront’s themes and decor is an efficient means of establishing a professional and recognizable brand. (Read up on the ins and outs of using your website to heighten the strengths of your storefront, with our article Your Business Storefront: The Physical Frontline for Business Marketing.)
Draw Attention to Your Location
In order to attract local buyers to your business, the public must have the ability to transport themselves to your location. Any mediums used for advertising should include a section that helps the public recognize your location online and on the street – include your physical address and website address on everything! The more interactive you can make your business’s storefront online (and the more representative your website is of your physical address), the more likely you are to entice customers, help them recognize your location, and engage them with your services. On all platforms, especially on your website, you need to include this basic information for locals to track you down:
• Contact information – address, website address, email address, phone number
• Maps to your location
• Hours of operation
With this foundational data, a local looking to visit your location has the answers to their most elementary questions: How can I get in touch with this business? Where in the city are they located? Will they be open when I arrive?
Draw Attention to Your Assets
Increase awareness of your services and interactions with the local community by also adding more detailed elements of your storefront on your website. For those doing searches online, offer a taste of your real world business attributes:
• Add menus and customer ratings
• Display product lists or items available in stock, online and at the store location
• Showcase photos of your storefront’s interior and exterior
• Post videos of your space and of your employees
• Provide testimonials from locals and satisfied customers
If you have events or deals happening in store, use your website to market them. More people will be able to view your offers more quickly online, and it will increase the number of people that think about visiting your location to reap the rewards. If you have events and deals happening online, use your storefront to perpetuate interest locally. In this way, customers who wish to have greater access to your services can learn about your online home, and customers who wish to have more personal interactions with your business can learn about your physical storefront.
Draw the Attention of Local Consumers
Sharing elements of your operations between your online and real world bases is not only a savvy way of playing your locations off of one another, it’s the foundation for creating a results-based online space for your business while increasing your real-world reach with “locals”. (Learn more about building Results-Based Websites for Small Businesses on the CM2 Media blog.) Once you have integrated your online and physical environments to compliment each other and cater to a local market, you can build content that feeds into the effectiveness of localized marketing tools – like: search engine optimization, Google adwords, Facebook Insights, lead generation software, directories.
Knowing which platforms to utilize and knowing how to create content details that put your business on local radar are the next steps in engaging your surrounding community with your services. CM2 Media excels at this form of localized marketing for small businesses. Contact us to see how we can help welcome a large local market to your business’s locations.