Businesses, whether large or small, must go through the initial step of promoting themselves locally before further growth in the global market can follow. Establishing a strong local presence provides the base for businesses to expand their reach beyond local audiences. In the global market, people choose options that have a strong customer base as this determines the brand’s legitimacy and credibility. A key step to achieving success with a wider audience is strengthening your brand’s presence in the local community. Advertise your business locally to achieve a powerful brand identity that can be supported by many, and take advantage of your existing following for greater success. Check out some of the top advertising methods for promoting your business locally.
Google My Business
Google My Business is a powerful platform for businesses of all sizes, but holds greater potential for growth for small businesses. As the majority of location searches are made through Google Maps, acquiring a Google My Business page can validate your business while helping potential customers seek your business more easily. Google My Business also displays important business information such as the name, location, phone number and hours of operation in a clear, legible layout for audiences to quickly digest. Formatting your business information in such a way increases your business’ visibility so that people can find your business easily and follow through with your call-to-action. Moreover, an important advantage of Google My Business is the ability to allow customers to write Google reviews. Google reviews are extremely beneficial in that the public can form a specific image on a business through what others say. The greater the number of positive reviews, the greater your business will grow.
Facebook Ads
Facebook is one of the largest social media platforms in the world with over 2 billion users. Utilizing this popular platform to advertise your business can help increase your reach online. Facebook ads allow businesses to create ads that are focused by choosing specific audiences to target. Through this function, businesses can select audience traits, demographics and locations that can all help in maximizing the ad reach and conversion rate. Not only are these options beneficial in minimizing the possibility of targeting irrelevant audiences therefore increasing cost-efficiency, but by targeting specific audience groups, businesses can choose to show their ads to only local communities.
To provide more detail, Facebook ads allow businesses to select location and demographic targeting which encompass the location, age and gender of the audience you wish to target through your ads. Location targeting can be either selecting cities and postal codes, or choosing a radius from a selected location. Additional targeting options include adjusting the age and gender of your target group which can be highly beneficial depending on your business’ goals. Another important and useful feature offered on Facebook ads is interests. Selecting people’s interests on top of the location and demographics can be very effective when it comes to ad targeting. For example, a dog food business will most likely want to target people whose interests are dogs in order to maximize their ad spend.
Social Media
Social media is a great low-cost option to advertising businesses locally. With social media becoming one of the most popular forms of advertising today, utilizing this platform can generate high attraction. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, allow for users to identify their specific locations through two methods: location and hashtag. Location refers to selecting the area in which the post or story was taken. Area could refer to either city names or shop/restaurant names. Hashtags refer to the specific hashtags used in posts or stories that indicate again, the area in which the post was taken, but can also show the local neighbourhood. For example, hashtags like #yvr and #vancity display local Vancouver names that only people living in Vancouver would use. Through these two methods, businesses can take advantage of social media’s ability to differentiate local audiences by incorporating these local locations and hashtags into their own posts. By applying this strategy, businesses can have their posts and subsequently their business names appear on local feeds and therefore, advertise to local audiences.
Growing your business can seem like a challenge and you may be unsure of where to start. The first and most important step for business growth is to start locally. Once a local presence is established, it is much easier for businesses to further experience growth. If you are looking to expand your business for the long-term, contact us to find the right marketing strategy for your business!
