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Hi everyone, Sarah Giometti here. In today’s video, I want to talk about the best marketing strategies for a small business in 2019.
Whenever I meet with a prospective client to go over what their local marketing strategy should be, there’s some very specific tasks and activities that I always recommend. The very first one is a local SEO strategy. Now, this is really different than a traditional SEO strategy because for a local business, usually your target audience is within a certain number mile radius around your office and/or storefront. So you need to concentrate on your city, your county, and the other surrounding cities where you might draw clients from. This alters a local SEO strategy than a traditional one, where you’re going for kind of a generic keyword phrase or even a long-tail keyword phrase, but you don’t attach any geographical information to it. So the most important marketing or online marketing strategy for a local business is a local SEO strategy that is a local maps-focused strategy. That’s first and foremost.
Second is reviews. With over 90% of people believing online reviews as much as if it was a personal recommendation, you want to make sure that you are generating reviews or receiving reviews from your happy customers. There’s not much you can do about negative ones, but if you drown it out with a whole bunch of four and five star reviews, which is where you really need to be, to be honest, you need to be over four stars; the more you have, the more trustworthy and reliable people believe you are and the more likely they are to pick you, especially in a local search where they’re getting their local map 3-pack. If they see you and you have 25 four and a half, five star reviews and your next two competitors have maybe three stars or they have no reviews, you’re the one that’s going to get picked. It will make you stand out so much stronger than if you didn’t have reviews or only had one or two reviews. So that’s a really important piece of a digital marketing strategy for a local business.
The next thing I often talk about is video, something like this, where you’re educating your prospective customers and clients on your business, yourself, your strategies, why they should pick you, because if they’re learning from you about why they need you, they’re more likely to not only call you, but they’re closer to buying by the time they get to you. So video is a really great way to do a one-to-many, it’s a really versatile piece of content. You can use it on YouTube, on social media, on your website. You can use it a lot of ways to market your business and bring in prospective customers without any heavy selling.
The next thing we talk about is if they don’t want to do video, is content or blogs, writing out this education and teaching people, it adds authority to your website, which does tie back into your local SEO strategy. And same with the videos. You can utilize the videos as part of your local SEO strategy to make it stronger, but creating that added authority, it all just adds into all the little pieces and components that Google looks at in determining who to rank for different search results. Then if you want to get a little bit more technical or advanced, we start looking at Facebook advertising. The benefit of Facebook advertising, especially for a local business, is you can re-target existing customers, so if you have any email database, but you can also laser specific target who you’re looking for. So again, you can go back into that radius around your business and only target those people. You can target them with specific interests and things that maybe make them look more like your customers than other people. So you can kind of narrow it down, be very laser specific and draw in your prospective customers, and not spend your money accidentally advertising to people who are not a good fit.
And finally, lead generation. This works a lot better for a service business. Often, a lead generation for a storefront could be a coupon or a buy one get one free, but for a service business, it requires a lot more strategy behind it because you have to have something to give away that people would want, you have to drive traffic to that. There’s a lot more strategy to it. So it’s usually kind of at the bottom of the list of what I recommend for a local business.
So to recap some of the strategies that you should consider is, if you do nothing but one thing, do a local SEO Google Maps focused strategy. Second is reviews, which should be a part of that strategy. If you’re looking for local SEO companies, make sure the local SEO strategy also has a review generation component to it. Our services have that, and they really go hand-in-hand. Next, start looking at creating content, whether it be videos or blogs, and still have them as a local strategy or local SEO strategy as a component of what to create for your content. Next, you can start looking at Facebook advertising, but you want to be very specific and methodical about that and not just boost a post to random people. You want to be a lot more strategic. And then finally, start looking at some lead generation campaigns. Those can get a little bit pricey so most local businesses don’t end up doing that.
Those are the components, those are the best marketing strategies for small businesses that I recommend. If you’ve got any additional questions about any of this, feel free to leave it below and I will respond to you. If you like this video and want to get more, I would love for you to subscribe to my channel. And if you want to get an idea of what your business looks like online locally, use our free tool and you’ll get an assessment of your local SEO status, and it gives you a full report, and it gives you… It’s something tangible for you to start working off of and shows you kind of where you need to start. So I hope you found this video useful and I will see you in the next one.
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