Local business owners are always asking me for tips for digital marketing that will actually get results like increasing leads and sales. In this post, we share the importance of creating a clear message or story that connects with your prospects problems.
Digital Marketing Tips for Local Businesses
A digital marketing strategy can help a local business grow, but like any other project of signifiant size you need to start with a plan.
Knowing your audience in your city, understanding their needs and keeping up with the latest marketing trends are all important components of a successful digital marketing plan.
Of all the tips for digital marketing out there, crafting a clear message or story that connects with your audience is the most important. In order to stand out in your local market, you’ll need to make sure that your digital marketing initiatives are tailored to your specific audience. As such, you should keep these digital marketing tips in mind as you develop your own digital marketing plan for success.
Know Your Audience
Before you start marketing your business, you must clearly define who you want to reach. Researching your target audience will help you better understand what they want from your brand and how to effectively reach them.
You can get started by creating a buyer personas. Buyer personas are semi-fictitious representations of your most likely customers based on your understanding of your customers problems. They can help you create marketing strategies and products that cater to your ideal customers.
Research Your Audience
Most business owners are tempted to dive right in and start marketing their business with a focus on features of the product or server. This is mistake because people are searching for solutions to their problem. You need to talk about their problem, and you need to be clear and succinct with your message.
Focus on Your Customers Problems
A customer’s problem is what drives them to search for a solution. Trust is also a key reason they’ll turn to your brand. Since you know your product inside and out, it’s easy for you to understand the problems your product solves. You can take your product’s benefits and apply them to the problems your customers are having.
For example, if your service is fighting a criminal charge, you can use the benefits of working with a criminal lawyer to help ease your customers’ problems, such as stress, fear, or confusion. You can then use your blog posts, social media posts, and other digital marketing channels to highlight the problems your customers are facing and how can guide them to a solution to solve their problem.
Understanding your online audience may also help you predict how your business will grow in the future. For example, if your research shows that your audience is primarily made up of millennials, you’ll need to use different marketing tactics than you would if your audience was made up of baby boomers. If you don’t research your audience, you won’t know what marketing tactics will work best for them. This will make it difficult to effectively market your brand.
Develop a Content Marketing Plan
Content marketing is almost always my first recommendation to businesses looking for tips for digital marketing.
Content marketing is not pitching your products or services. Rather, the focus of content marketing is providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their problems.
A content marketing plan is an outline of the types of content you will create for your business. It includes topics related to your business, your products or services, and your customers. You can use your content marketing plan to create blog posts, case studies, landing pages, social media posts, and more.
The searching habits of your target audience is an ever-changing landscape. New strategies, trends, and technologies are always emerging. As such, it’s important to stay on top of these changes and incorporate them into your content marketing plan.
Blogging is Essential to Your Messaging and SEO
Blogging is the process of publishing informal article on your website on a regular basis. It’s a great way to educate customers, provide tips or how-tos, and create more connections with your brand.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of increasing the visibility of a website or webpage in search engine results, i.e. increasing the chances that a reader will click on your website link when they search for something relevant to your business.
Blogging is a great way to optimize your website for SEO. Having a blog on your website that includes a mix of keyword-rich text and images will help you increase your page rank.
A blog can also help you establish yourself as an expert in your industry and establish your website as a resource for readers. You can also use social media to further promote your blog posts. This will help you increase your reach and let potential customers know about your business.
Conclusion
Of all the tips for digital marketing we can offer, the key tip is to create a clear message or story that connects with your prospects problems. Content marketing and blogging are two strategies that you can employ to make your digital marketing efforts more effective. From conducting research to creating a content marketing plan and blogging on your customers’ problems, there are many ways you can ensure that your digital marketing efforts are successful.
Allan Todd is CEO of Pagecafe Digital Marketing. In 2022, Allan teamed up with Infront Webworks to provide digital marketing, website design, content marketing, SEO and strategy and solutions to local businesses. Allan lives in Colorado Springs. More articles by Allan Todd