Photo From unsplash

Originally Posted On: https://designrr.io/local-inbound-marketing-ideas/

 

Before online marketing existed businesses needed to rely on other methods to get customers. If you wanted to market your local business, you were limited to face-to-face selling, telephone sales, direct mail advertising, trade shows and media advertising. Today, if you want your local business to stand out from the crowd, you must, among other things, know local inbound marketing.

So, what is local inbound marketing?

Local inbound marketing is an online strategy that brings customers within your community to your business. It is data-driven and focuses on the purchasing process, not the seller or the product itself.

In other words, local inbound marketing uses data to find the needs of a market and helps businesses develop ways that will address those needs to cater more effectively to their prospects. This strategy eliminates the impulse to continually come up with products or services that you think will suit your customers. Instead it focuses on nurturing the relationship you have with them instead.

But how do you get customers to come to you through local inbound marketing? Here are a few marketing ideas that can help grow your local business.

Local SEO

If you want your business to rank high on search engines, you need great SEO, but this does not happen overnight. You have to be patient for your efforts to pay off. Getting great local SEO is like planting a seed and waiting to harvest in the future, while doing everything else possible in between to support it.

To ensure your SEO efforts do pay off in the long run, you may want to develop content on your website and blog that focuses on targeted keywords. Other SEO tactics include:

• Optimizing landing pages
• Keyword research
• Utilizing inbound links and more

You can use some SEO audit tools to help you understand some issues and ways you can fix and optimize your site. If you want to learn more about SEO, you can check out this free SEO course by SiteGuru.

Ask for email addresses

Email marketing, when done right, goes a long way toward gaining new customers and keeping the existing ones happy. For example, you can do a monthly offer exclusively for your current local customers.

It’s important to understand that gaining new customers should never be at the cost of your existing clients. So figure out how to get new customers without hurting the existing ones. The good thing is that email marketing integrates well with other local inbound marketing strategies and can be automated. You can use a free ebook creator to create a lead magnet to help entice them to enter their email address. Here are a few lead magnet ideas that can help you capture those email list.

Create landing pages for each geographic area

If you have numerous local marketing keywords (each targeting a different town or location in your local area) you are targeting, it makes sense to have different landing pages. This way, it will be possible for your business to create marketing content relevant to potential clients in all the different areas.

Add videos to your My Business Listing

Google now allows small businesses to add videos to their listings. These videos show up in the photos right in the Google listing. You can use them to control what your clients see about your business. For example, add informative videos that tell buyers what your business specializes in and how you can help.

What type of videos works with Google my Business? Here’s an animated explainer video example by Top Explainer

 

Remodeling Explainer Video from Topexplainers on Vimeo.

Publish great content

No doubt that great content will go a long way in helping you acquire new customers and keeping the existing ones happy. If you can create engaging content yourself, all the better. However, if you struggle with content writing then consider hiring someone to create the content for you. Fortunately, today it is quite easy to find skilled content writers.

Create instructional videos

Today, video is king, and while you may have to spend some money to produce a professional quality video, it’s well worth giving it a shot to see whether it will work for you or not. If you do everything right, be assured video will take your local inbound marketing to the next level.

Infographics marketing

Images speak louder than words. Why not then leverage infographics and take your local marketing efforts to another level? If you have some understanding of Adobe Illustrator, creating engaging infographics will be an easy task. If not, get someone on UpWork or Freelancer to do it for you.

Want something even better? try video infographics:

Write an eBook

Want to show your authority and knowledge of a topic in your niche? Write a great eBook. If you are a good writer, you can have your eBook ready in no time.

Plus, there are tools like Designrr that help to speed up the process. Once you have finished writing the content make sure that it is proofread and edited. It’s easy to miss those small bits especially if you have been looking at the content for days. Next, import the content into Designrr, pick your template and publish. Try to do some pre-promotion to get reviews and hungry buyers in advance.

Team up with other businesses

Teaming up with neighboring businesses can double your reach by cross-promoting. This can be as simple as giving the other stores your flyers, business cards, or coupons to display and in return you do the same for them. In a nutshell, find out how you can team up with other local businesses to make a significant impact on your customers.

Join a referral network

Referral networks are a great medium for local businesses. You can join one or start your own referral program. The good thing about these networks is that they help you to leverage existing customer relationships and to broaden your reach by getting your business in front of new potential customers. Create word of mouth marketing using a referral program doesn’t take too much time. With the right tools, you can equip your existing customers to be brand advocates!

Repurpose old content

You don’t always have to create new content from scratch. Why not give some life to content you already have. For example, you can repurpose old articles into infographics, eBooks, tutorials, and more. Basically, there are many ways to repurpose existing content especially when your marketing budget may be tight.

Go through your blog and see what type of blog post can be turned into a video or infographics, etc. Here’s an example of how to clean your iPhone that seems to be a popular article, you can repurpose it so that your readers can also enjoy it in other forms. We wrote an article, listing 24 content repurpose ideas you can use to help with your local business marketing.

Conclusion

Marketing doesn’t have to be a constant headache. You do not need to hire a marketing team to help you get more sales. We’ve provided some inbound marketing ideas you can set up one time to help increase your conversions. Let us know if you used some of the strategies here, and what other strategies have you used to grow your leads?