In the digital age, most retail businesses are ceasing to exist, but not for the reasons you may be thinking of. There are still many consumers who prefer buying what they need in person and being able to feel the products before purchasing them. However, they just need to see a digital counterpart beforehand.
This is where digital marketing comes in. As a business owner, you can no longer discount the benefits of having an active online presence because that’s how your customers will find you. Gone are the days when people would look for listings in newspapers or hope they would come across signs on the street to show them what they could buy.
You need to start meeting your customers where they frequent, which is mainly online. For instance, you run a furniture business that targets homeowners and families wanting to furnish their homes. And you’re currently about to release new designs for a bedroom set that you want to promote to the community.
But you won’t get anywhere just by sticking posters to your storefront and hoping that passersby will be encouraged to enter your shop to inquire. If you truly want to attract a bigger market, you need to start marketing digitally. Lucky for you, here are three digital marketing strategies that you can use to grow your local business:
Use Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms are powerful tools for digital marketing, especially if you know how to find your way around it. Older business owners often neglect the potential of social media because they’re not familiar with the platforms, and they don’t know how to actually use them for growing a business.
For starters, Facebook ads are easy to use because you can set them up by location, which means you can reach your target demographic by attracting the members of your local community. However, these ads cost money. Therefore, ensure that your advertisements will be the hook, line, and sinker because otherwise, you’ll be throwing your money away.
You can also dabble into Instagram and use influencer marketing to reach a wider audience demographic. To do this, you’ll need to find someone with a substantial following and an active online presence in your local community, so you can maximize their potential in growing your business.
Working with influencers is one of the most practical ways to market products or services in the digital age. All you need to do is offer them a free product or service as a way of saying thank you for promoting your business. Usually, this kind of promotion is done through a post or story on Instagram.
Join Local Business Groups
Online communities are perfect avenues to build connections and expand your network. You’ll be able to meet like-minded people who may share the same values and principles as you when it comes to entrepreneurship, which means it’s easier to find common ground to establish relationships.
By joining local business groups, you’ll have access to a much larger talent pool and source of knowledge that you can tap into. Of course, you’ll also have the opportunity to give back to your online community by sharing what you know and how you’re managing to keep your business afloat.
Arguably, the best thing about having a local business group is that you’ll have a channel to create collaborations and partnerships with other business owners should you want it in the future. You can refer customers, supply local products, or offer discounts and promos to one another.
Start Doing Local SEO
You might think that investing in SEO isn’t worthwhile because your small business won’t be able to compete against large corporations in the same niche, but that’s where you’re wrong. Even if you think that it isn’t worth a shot, neglecting to do SEO at all can hurt your branding and reputation.
This is because SEO is not all about ranking high on the search engine results page. Of course, that’s the primary goal, but doing SEO can also help you build your online presence and strengthen your credibility as a business. Plus, this would work even better if you started engaging in local SEO and its strategies.
Local SEO is beneficial for small businesses with a physical location. Google shows a map with listings on the top of the search engine when a user types in relevant keywords in specific geographical locations. This means that working on your local SEO will help you rank higher and appear more often on the local results page.
Another benefit of doing local SEO is that your potential customers will be able to find all your business information without much hassle, especially if you use services such as Google My Business. On this platform, they’ll find your address, contact details, and reviews left by other satisfied customers.
The world of digital marketing is complex because there are always new trends surfacing, and they sometimes leave other strategies to gather dust. But if you knew how to gauge which trends are worth following and can greatly benefit your local business, then you wouldn’t have to worry about a thing.
