4 Ways to Win at Local Content Marketing Your best audience is right outside your door.
By Aaron Agius Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
When it comes to marketing content to local customers, you have to take a unique approach - the tactics that work for big businesses aren't going to resonate with the target audience in your town. So what do you need to do differently? Here, I'll discuss a new approach for marketing content to local customers.
Related: 7 Ways to Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy
1. Feature local experts in your content.
Most local marketers focus nearly all their content on their business alone, but there are a lot of benefits to also bringing in other local experts related to your niche. Incorporate quotes and interviews with local experts, or find other ways to feature them in your content through collaboration. As long as they're not your direct competitors, you can work with them to create a mutually beneficial relationship to expand your audience base. Besides, keeping all your content focused on your business alone sets you up for some limitations.
For one, you miss out on the fact that 92 percent of consumers trust third-party recommendations more than brand content. At the same time, sharing content through influencers can increase conversions by three to ten times.
If you've taken the time to feature others in your content, it won't be very difficult to encourage them to share it with their audiences as well.
2. Look for opportunities to boost your local prowess.
One of the most basic marketing tactics to find local customers is by hosting or participating in local events, which I definitely recommend as well. Some options include:
- Becoming an event sponsor
- Attending trade shows
- Donating goods or services to a good cause
These are not only good networking opportunities to build brand awareness, they're also great fodder for content creation. Take and share pictures from an event and create blog posts about the experience. Another important way to boost your local prowess through content is by taking advantage of trending news opportunities. Use Google Trends to research what people are talking about in your local area. If there's a relevant topic related to your niche, you can write about it on your blog. Google favors prominent news in SERPs, so you're likely to get a boost there for relevance. If you can be considered an expert on a topic, then you can also build local prowess by offering quotes to journalists for news stories. Just sign up for Help A Reporter Out (HARO). Journalists post queries on this platform that you can respond to; getting you and your brand in the news.
Related: The Five "Knows" To Public Relations Prowess
3. Focus heavily on encouraging reviews.
This is an important strategy for businesses of any size, but positive reviews are even more crucial for local business success. If you're working on building your local SEO, the first step is getting set up on Google My Business. This makes it possible for you to show up in Google's specialized local search results. Your reviews appear prominently within those results.
This user-generated content is going to have a major impact on whether people decide to visit your business's website from searches. Considering that 74 percent of people primarily use portals like Google to find local businesses, this is an area you can't ignore. Additonally, Google reviews arent' the only areas that you on which you should target your focus. Just as endorsements from influencers boost your credibility, reviews from happy customers on review sites - your website and search engines - will help draw in more customers.
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4. Take advantage of paid social media
When many small businesses plan their marketing budgets, they write off paid social media as a content distribution option that's out of their means. However, there are a few points that demonstrate how the strategy is actually completely essential for your business. For one - organic engagement on social media is falling. It has been on Facebook for a while, and not coincidentally, this began around the time the platform started offering paid content distribution options.
It's no mystery why Facebook, Twitter, and others want to encourage brands to use their paid options; they favor those over organic posts. Effective social media marketing is no longer free. Another important point is that paid social media is really quite affordable, even for small businesses. All the platforms have small minimum advertising investments and give you complete control over how much you're willing to spend for impressions, engagement, clicks, etc. These platforms have a plethora of super-specific demographic information. They put the most relevant promoted posts in front of the right audience. Just take a look at what Facebook Audience Insights can tell you about your target audience based on location, age, interests, Facebook behavior, purchasing behavior, and more. A lot of what makes content great doesn't have to do with business type. But if you want to be optimally effective at content marketing to local customers, there are some strategies you should follow that apply to your unique situation. Take advantage of the advice in this post to jumpstart your efforts to engage with local customers effectively.
