The lowdown: Learn how to use digital tools in your local business with this Ultimate Guide To Local Business Marketing summary.
The world is changing quickly for a lot of local businesses.
While word of mouth and a few loyal local customers used to be enough to survive, now the game is changing and an online presence is needed.
- Marshall, Perry (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 220 Pages – 02/09/2016 (Publication Date) – Entrepreneur Press (Publisher)
The Ultimate Guide To Local Business Marketing will give the local business owner these three main takeaways.
- Utilize PPC ads in the local business
- Think about how you design your landing pages
- Make sure you track everything
Lesson one: Utilize PPC ads in the local business
There are over six billion searches on Google every day. There is no doubt that Google is the king of the internet.
Many of these searches are looking for local services and local businesses. Ensuring that your business’ web site is at the top of Google is key in attracting new customers.
You may read about a process called search engine optimization (SEO) which involves optimizing your website with the correct keywords and content to boost your ranking.
However, for the local business, SEO is nowhere near as effective as paying for ads using Google’s pay-per-click (PPC) ads.
A PPC ad is an ad that is placed on the top of Google results for a particular targeted search.
PPC ads have many advantages over SEO for local business owners including
- easily to track
- you only pay when someone clicks on your ad
- usually limited competition in local searches
- you can create hyper-local ads, targeting people who live close to your store
- SEO is a lengthy process, taking months to get results
- SEO is also quite expensive if you outsource
Lesson two: Think about how you design your landing pages
A landing page is the first thing someone clicks on when they go to your website.
Usually, if you’re looking to run ads to your business, you’ll create a landing page that will help guide prospects.
Seeing that you pay for every person to click onto your website, it makes sense that you want to capture as many leads with those clicks as possible.
Try to make the most of your landing pages and collect the most leads, you should look to do the following:
- give limited options
- don’t link to your homepage
- ask ‘yes’ question like “are you sick of back pain?”
- use a compelling headline
- include a simple call to action
- don’t try and make a sale straight away – it is more important to catch leads
By making sure your landing page is optimized to catch leads, you can work at nurturing those leads and keep top-of-mind.
From there, when those leads to look to purchase, you’ll be the obvious choice.
When is it okay to make sales straight away
I am going a bit off the company lines and giving a personal opinion here. If you have a service that requires immediate action, then you should be encouraging a prospects to call you.
For example, you’re probably not going to look for an emergency plumber in your city and read a free report. Odds are you want a plumber straight away.
So, it does depend on the service. While that plumber can direct prospects to call when advertising their 24-hour service, if they’re promoting hot water service installations, then they can use the strategy mentioned above.
Lesson three: Make sure you track everything
You wouldn’t invest in a stock if you had no data on
That means that you should be consistently monitoring the performance of your online advertising. This means looking for the ads that perform well and doubling-down on them.
While online marketing methods like PPC and Facebook have their own data, you can go a little deeper
For instance, it is said that between 60-70% of local business is initiated through a phone call. In fact, many will click to your landing page and go straight to your phone number.
To fully understand where your phone calls are coming from, you should implement a call-tracking system. For little cost, you can have multiple phone numbers that redirect to a phone number.
So, for example, if you’re deciding to try three Google ads and a Facebook ad, rather than listing your business number on every ad, you can have four different phone numbers which all redirect to your business phone.
Then, at the end of a month, you can see what ad is responsible for the majority of your calls. You may find that two of your ads are responsible for 80% of your incoming calls. In which case, you can delete the other ads and put more money into the ones that work.
Without tracking your calls, you won’t know which ads are generating the calls, you’ll just know that your phone is ringing.
My Personal Takeaway
Personally, I have a lot to do with local businesses and lead generation, so this didn’t teach me a hell of a lot. In fact, for most marketers who are used to online advertising, this is basic information.
Put it into action
If you rely on phone calls, you should look to bring call tracking into your marketing. With a small cost, you can accurately see where your advertising dollars are going.
You should consider buying this book if…
This book is perfect (and I would say essential) for the local business owner who is a novice in the online world and internet marketing.
a Swedish university student, marketing professional, and life-long learner. Here at BookSummaryClub I summarize my favorite non-fiction books into easily digested posts. Hope you like what you’re reading!
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