Local Marketing Strategies for 2016

For a business owner, marketing can be a daunting task. Fragmentation of your customers and audience is spread through countless search engines, apps, media, and much more. While there is a lot of ground to cover, 2016 can be a year to capitalize on all of these things. Technology is always changing, and should be utilized to keep your brand competitive. For small businesses simplifying your current marketing ways, and utilizing a few key factors can prove very successful for marketing. Large businesses can incorporate many, if not all new technological advances.

The following are three strategies to simplify your marketing, and help focus your search and marketing to improve your results.

Social Media

Social media can give anyone instant and free access to a massive audience, but there is still no a guarantee for helping customers in finding new local businesses. Pinterest and Instagram are two platforms that are graphically geared, and very helpful in finding and seeing new retail and food products. Besides these two examples, social media is relatively useful for engaging with potential clients, updating on brand news, and also gives you the ability to grab attention with potential deals or offers.

While these are the upsides of using social media, it might not be useful for everyone. Social media information that is outdated or incorrect can cause customer abandonment, and can reflect poorly on your brand and business. If this is the case, not utilizing social media may be a better option for you.

At the end of the day, the number of ‘likes’ on your Facebook page does not equal more buys for your business. Amazing content, customer experience and customer retention is what should be most important.

Mobile-Friendly Site Design

Mobile leads in both Google search, and also local search when compared to desktop. Rather than having multiple sites, go with a site that is designed for mobile devices.

Mobile sites are fully functional when used on desktops – there will be increased white space, but that will be about the only difference. Ensure you upload quality and high resolution images to ensure there will be no grainy or pixelated images when viewed from a bigger screen.

You can copy this strategy for such things as listings, e-mails, and display ads.

Identify Your Target Audience

The better you can understand your customer, the easier it makes it to provide advertising and pertinent search results.

Such tools as paid search ads can take advantage of not only keywords, but can utilize things like geography, previous search history, demographics, and more information regarding the user. Google analytics is a free, and is a great tool to find and narrow your target audience; it can also identify certain marketing mistakes you are making that could be corrected or improved.