Reaching Essential Stakeholders through Local Marketing

When it comes to reaching customers, the most important thing is knowing who your customers are. Knowing who they are, also means knowing where they are. This is where local marketing enters. For brands with multiple physical locations or audiences spread over multiple regions, local marketing is an essential strategy in order to reach these (potential) customers. 

What is local marketing exactly?  

Local marketing is the act of targeting the audience within a certain range of the brand’s location(s). That’s why it’s often called local store marketing or neighborhood marketing. Many think local marketing is only for small, local businesses. This isn’t right: local marketing works for every brand. Especially for large brands with national or international reach, it’s essential to engage with the local community of your locations. This is the place where customers connect with your brand, so it’s very important that the customer’s touchpoints with the brand are localized and personalized. 

Top local marketing strategies

So what can you do to implement a successful local marketing strategy? The tactics below will help you in creating a strong strategy and reaching those essential, local customers. 

1. Local SEO

When was the last time you searched for a store or service because you wanted to know what the closest location in the area was? Exactly, probably no longer than a few days ago. Don't underestimate how many people search locally on the web: 46% of searches have a local intention. That’s why it’s important to invest in local SEO. Local SEO means optimizing your website in order to improve your local ranking on Google.

The first step in improving local SEO is creating a Google My Business account. Here you can verify your company’s locations and add all location-specific information. This ensures that your locations will be shown in all listings of Google products, like Google Search and Maps. 
Second, add localized content to your company’s website. It’s important for customers to be able to find information about the location(s) on your website. So, optimize your website for the different countries or regions you’re operating in; create a country, region, and/or city pages that provide contact details and add locations specific keywords to these pages. Of course, all content, URLs, headers, titles, and meta descriptions should be provided with the right geo-targeted keywords. When done right, search engines will rank your business as an industry authority in the specific regions and local customers will find your business faster.

Looking for jobs in SEO? Try here.

2. Use local media

Don’t only focus on the big, national media. Local news sources are still a very important medium and very effective in targeting local customers. Think about advertisements in regional newspapers or invest in local radio and television commercials. By being present in local media, brand visibility will increase in the local communities and will ultimately lead to new customers. 

3. Go local on social 

Social Media might be the quickest way to reach local customers. By managing their own Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter accounts, locations can easily engage with their own customers. Local social media accounts are the perfect place to promote special offers or local campaigns and are highly efficient in reaching the relevant audience. 

Besides having separate social media accounts for your businesses’ locations, social media offers many other localization options that can be used by your company’s main and local accounts. For example, adding location tags or local hashtags. These are quick wins in reaching local customers. You simply have to select the right social channel for your business and start promoting it there. 

4. Sponsor local events

Of course, sponsoring big, (inter)national events enables you to reach a broad audience. However, if you want to engage with customers, it’s a better idea to sponsor local events. When local customers feel that your company is integrated into their community, they are more likely to purchase. Document verification is significantly essential in this process. Supporting the community can be done in many different ways; from supporting the annual city festival to sponsoring the local soccer club. 

Ideas for local marketing campaigns

The local marketing tactics above will definitely ensure a strong local marketing strategy and help your company in reaching essential stakeholders. To see how these strategies can be put into action, check out these great examples of local marketing campaigns. These examples show how local marketing is done and will definitely give you some inspiration.

All in all, keep in mind that one size doesn’t fit all. When implementing these tactics, a key factor to success is to delve into the local market and create localized marketing campaigns that fulfill the needs of local customers.

Author Bio
Nienke Zijsling is marketing manager at Marvia. Marvia is a SaaS-based Local Marketing
Automation platform. Their software simplifies every aspect of local marketing and enables organizations
to centrally control their marketing materials while customizing and publishing them on a local level.