10 Smart Moves for a Successful Local Marketing Campaign

local-marketing-success

Marketing for local businesses has come a long way. Just 20 years ago, “marketing” meant buying newspaper ads, yellowpage ads or perhaps billboard or radio advertisements. Marketing was costly and often ineffective.

Today, the game has changed. There are literally dozens of tools available to the smart entrepreneur for marketing his or her business. Many of these tools and techniques can drive hundreds of paying customers to your business, without costing you a single dime.

This checklist will help you get the most out of all the tools, technologies and techniques available today.

Step 1: Get on Facebook Places

Facebook places allows users to find you through their friends’ checkins. People who like your business can “like” your page or comment on your page and their friends can see that on their walls.

It’s a powerful way of spreading a great business virally. It uses the interconnectivity of Facebook to a local business’s advantage.

Make sure you claim your business so you have the ability to change its information, as well as merge the Facebook Place with the Facebook Page.

Step 2: Get on Google Places

There are many great reasons to get on Google Places.

First, your business will show up ahead of other non-local businesses in the search engines.

Second, people will be able to leave reviews for your physical business.

Third, people will be able to find your place on Google Maps. For example, a user with an iPhone might type in “Pizza” into Google Maps to find all the pizza joints near them. If you’re listed on Google Places, your restaurant will show up.

Step 3: Get on Yelp

Yelp is a user-driven review site with a very active community. People who visit local businesses use Yelp to leave reviews of their experience. Other people who are thinking of going there can use Yelp to see previous reviews.

Yelp is extremely popular in some cities, like San Francisco and New York, while virtually unnoticed in others.

If you’re in a city with a strong Yelp user base, getting to the first 3 or 5 results in Yelp can bring you a huge influx of customers. Many small businesses are packed every day purely from Yelp traffic.

Step 4: Give Incentive to Review

You’re much more likely to get a lot of reviews if you help the process along by providing a few incentives. That’s especially true if your business is relatively new.

Keep in mind that you can’t incentivize o1thers to post a good or positive review. You can only incentivize them to post a review. What they say is up to them; they get the reward either way. Naturally, if you provide a great service, most reviews you get will be positive.

What are some examples of ways to incentivize reviews?

First 10 Yelp reviews gets 50% off their next meal.
First 10 Google reviews gets a free coffee.
People who have posted a review for our service get 10% off all purchases.
Etc

Step 5: Host a Meetup

Meetup.com is designed to help bring people with similar interests together. It’s an online site with an offline focus.

One great way to bring more people to your venue is to host an event. The event can be related to what you do, or it can be one or two steps removed. Here are a few examples:

A co-working space – Monthly talks on marketing for small business.
Classy café – Monthly philosophy discussion group.
Dance studio – A free monthly “open floor” dance event.
Rock climbing gym – Free “intro to rock climbing” event.
Bookstore – Monthly book signings.

The list goes on and on. Talk to your customers and find out what they’re interested in. Then create a meetup to cater to that interest.

Step 6: Open Your Space to Other Organizers

If you browse through Craigslist events, Meetup events or other events sites, you’ll find that 5 to 10 event venues tend to be used over and over again in any given city.

You can bring in a lot of business by opening your space to other organizers.

For example, let’s say a restaurant makes its back room available to a Toastmasters meeting (a public speaking group.) They use the back room free of charge, and most members end up ordering food and drink anyway.

The restaurant profits from the food and drink and gets the benefit of being exposed to a whole new audience. The back room probably wouldn’t have been regularly booked out anyway, so there’s no real cost to the restaurant.

Another example might be a shared co-working office. It allows its members to use the conference space for educational events free of charge, provided that all its members can also attend free of charge.

The organizer gets the benefit of having a professional space for free. The shared office space gets the benefit of having more to offer its members. Furthermore, every person who attends that event is a potential customer.

It’s much more efficient to open your space up to many event organizers rather than try to organize many events yourself. Doing so can bring in a lot of new people to your business, as well as build general goodwill in your community.

Step 7: Market on Local Mailing Lists

In any moderate to large city, there will be dozens of mailing lists on a variety of different topics.

For example, in San Francisco, there are lists for hikers and runners to meetup, lists for announcements of art events, lists specifically for the yoga & meditation communities, lists specifically for the startup business community, so on and so forth.

Make an effort to ask the people in your target audience what kind of email lists they subscribe to. Write these down and do some research.

Some lists will have “open announcement” policies, meaning anyone can post to the list. Others are curated lists, where events are sent to a single curator who posts approved events all to the lists.

Some lists will have very stringent requirements on what it’s okay to post and what it’s not. Others will be rather lax.

Try to find as many large, active lists in your community as you can. Market to the lists anytime you have something significant to announce. Avoid burning out the list by over-emailing; but use the power of pre-existing communities to your advantage whenever you’re doing a special promotion or event.

Step 8: Get a Booth at Events

In person events allow you to market your products directly to your ideal audience, while building connection and rapport through face-to-face interactions.

An “event” can be as sophisticated as a trade show, conference or seminar. Or it could be as simple as a college fair or farmer’s market.

The specific events you choose depends on what market you’re in. If you run a temp agency, you’ll probably want a booth at college job fairs and at trade shows (to find employers.)

If you run a small, organic restaurant, you might want to get a booth at your local farmer’s market and appear at all the “for fun” fairs around. (E.g. The local renaissance fair.)

Step 9: Flyering and Other Local Marketing

Leaving flyers at local businesses, putting flyers on walls, putting door hangers and perhaps even mailing postcards all still work. Just because a tactic is old doesn’t mean it’s no longer effective.

When using these tactics, the most important thing is to make sure you’re reaching the right people. If you’re promoting a nightlife event, flyer outside nightlife venues. Don’t leave your flyers in restaurants.

Step 10: Negotiate with Groupon or LivingSocial

Groupon, LivingSocial and other group-buying organizations can bring you a lot of business. In fact, it can bring you hundreds of orders in a 48 hour period.

Generally these sites will want to only work with established businesses. They need to know that you can handle the sudden volume that they’ll send you.

They also need to know that you’ll be able to give their users a significant discount, while still paying them a percentage.

Let’s say you run a health and massage spa center. The standard price for a massage is $90, but for Groupon members you’re offering it for $55. In addition, you need to pay Groupon $5 per sale.

If you’re hiring your masseuses’ for $60 an hour, you’re essentially breaking even. If you’re paying them $65 an hour, you’re losing money. You need to know that even if you spend $5 to get someone through the door, you’ll still make money in the long run.

In other words, Groupon is such a high volume business that it takes experience, knowledge of your customer behavior and strong financial muscle before you can work with them.

All that said though, if you can get your business to meet their standards and criteria, the amount of sales you can get from Groupon or LivingSocial is simply astounding.
These are some of the most powerful methods available for marketing an offline business today. Try to apply as many of these tactics as possible, identity the ones that work best for your business, then rinse and repeat.

7 Steps to Use Google Places to its Full Potential

by Nicole Munoz

Creating a Google Places listing is just the beginning for local marketing. In this tutorial, you will learn how to add photos, offers and reviews to a Google Places page. (If you haven’t created a listing yet, then check this guide first – How to Claim Your Business on Google Places).

Step 1: Log into Google Places

Use your login to access the Google Places dashboard.

Step 2: Edit your page

When you signed up for Google Places, you had the opportunity to add photos to your page, if you didn’t include them at that point, you may add images by clicking on the edit button, above your business information, on the right.

Step 3: Collect photos for your page

If you have a brick and mortar business, you may want to add photos of your shop. Helpful photos may include the front of your shop, the parking area, specialty products, etc. Remember when adding photos, keep safety in mind. There are photos which you wouldn’t want to include such as the registers and security system components.

Step 4: Add photos to your page

Once you’ve collected or selected your photos, scroll down the page to the photo section. You may choose to upload photos from your computer or add a photo that is already online. Here we are uploading a photo from the computer.

Select add a photo from your computer. Click the browse button and then the add photo button to upload it to your page. Click the submit button at the bottom of the page when finished. You may upload up to 10 images.

Step 5: Create an offer

You can let your Google Places audience know when you are running a special or have a coupon. From your dashboard page, you should click on the “offers” tab.

You will be taken to the offers page that will give you a brief overview of offers. To begin creating your offer, click the “add an offer now” button at the bottom of the offers page.

Step 6: Add offer details

You will be taken to a page where you can add information about your offer or coupon. You can add headlines, offer details, coupon codes, expire dates, photos and more.

Begin by adding a headline, sub-heading, details, and an image. When you add an image, you will see a popup which allows you to choose and edit the image. This image is placed in the top left corner of your printable coupon.

Next you will insert or select the expiration date, offer code, distribution type, and redemption location.

As you add details, you can preview the offer at the right. There are two types of previews. You can see the printable view or the offer view as it will show on Google maps.

The printable preview looks like this:

Note: When adding a photo/image, it’s best to use a square image. Although the image looks skewed on the preview, it looks fine on the actual coupon. Be sure to check it when you’re finished.

The Google map preview looks like this:

Your actual map listing may look something like this:

Note: Here you see a link to the offer and a review. To see the offer, click on the link and you will see the previous image. Click the new link and you will see the printable coupon.

Step 7: Respond to reviews

Now that you’re curious about the review, let’s talk about replying to reviews when a customer adds a review to your page.

There are two ways you can get to the appropriate screen where you will add your reply. You may either click on the “view” link in the top of the sidebar or you may click on the “review” link, found in the section below.

You will be taken to a new page. On this page, scroll down to the review section. Click on the “Respond publicly as the owner” link to open the reply box.

Add your reply and click on the “publish” button.

This is how the review and reply will look from your “owner” screen after you publish.

Note: If you have and want to respond to “Reviews from around the web,” you must visit the respective website to do so.

Now that you know how to add photos, offers, and reviews , you can make your Google Places page more interactive and profitable.

How to Claim Your Business on Google Places

by Nicole Munoz

This tutorial will assist you with getting more exposure and traffic to your businesses. By adding or claiming your business on Google Places, you are increasing your opportunities to reach potential customers and clients.

When Google users make a search on Google for a certain type of business in your area, the “Places” results may appear. You want your business to be in that list. Here’s an example of what you might see. This is a search for “pizza New York.”

To get your business listed in Google Places, follow the instructions in this tutorial.

Step 1: Log into your Google account: http://google.com/lbc

Be sure to use an account associated with your business. If you don’t have an account, you can create one for free using the sign up link.

Step 2: Search/Edit a Business Listing

Select the country in which your business exists. Enter your business phone # & click “Find Business Information” button. This allows you see if Google Maps already has some of your business information in their records.

If you own 10 or more businesses and you are trying to claim all of them, you can save some time by using the “bulk upload” option.

If Google finds a listing, it will show up directly below the phone number search option. You can choose to edit the existing listing or add a new listing.

Step 3: Add your business information

If nothing shows up from the search in Step 2, you will be redirected to a page where you can add the business listing. Here you will have several areas in which to enter information about your business.

This section is for the basic business information, including:

Country: From the dropdown, select the country in which your business resides.
Company Name: Your business name
Street Address: The physical address of the business (no P.O. boxes allowed)
City, State, Zip: The city, state and zip code for the business.
Main Phone Number: The main number for the business. You can include additional phone numbers as well.
Email address: NOT your personal email. This would be the email address for customer support.
Website URL: Enter the website URL for the business. If they do not yet have a website, select the “no website” box.
Description: Enter a short description for the business (up to 200 characters).
Category (up to five): You might have to play with this a bit. Type the first word for the category you think would best fit. The dropdown will show related categories to that word.

You must choose at least one from the list of categories offered in the dropdown. I.E. If your business offers SEO services, you might start by typing “internet or online”. The dropdown categories will then give you an option of ‘internet marketing services” as well as others. Select the one that is closest to your business services.

Step 4: Your service area and hours of operation

Choose whether business is conducted at your office location or at the customer’s location. If you offer services at the customer’s location, you will be required to enter your service area by distance or by list of areas served.

Service Area by Distance: Enter your city & choose how many miles from the location you service.
Service Area by List: You can list the exact cities/states/providences you service.

Enter your hours of operation.

Step 5: Payment Options

Select the methods of payment you accept.

Step 6: Add photos and videos

You can add up to 10 photos & 5 videos to display on your Google page.

Click the “Browse” button to search for your images on your computer. Then click the “Add Photo” button to upload.

Videos have to be uploaded to a 3^rd party site such as YouTube. To add a video, enter the URL to the video and click the “Add Video” button.

Step 7: Additional Information

If you have additional information you’d like to add to your page such as parking, brands or types of products available, discounts, and so forth, you can add those here.

Double check your information & click the submit button to create your listing.

Step 8: Confirm your location

If your phone # is already in Google’s system, you may be able to confirm your submission by phone. Otherwise, you will have to wait for a postcard to arrive at your address (can take up to 6 weeks) and then follow the instructions on the card to confirm.

Make your selection and click the Finish button.

You will be presented with a thank you page that will look like this, only with your business information.

If you confirm by mail this is what the confirmation card will look like.