How To Market Your Local Business Online

When it comes to marketing a local business online, there’s no shortage of information. We’re all faced with different opinions and methods that are too often shrouded in hype and misinformation. This video will cut through the noise by giving you a concise outline of the steps required for effective local marketing online.

Hello, my name is Doug Barra, and I’ve been working with entrepreneurs and business leaders for over 15 years, helping them make their businesses even better. Today, we’re going to look at something that has been on the minds of many of my clients.

How do we transition our marketing online? I’m assuming that you already have a website and email address using your business domain. If you don’t, you should take care of that right away. Never use a generic domain for your business email, reach out in the comments. If you want to ask more about these two things.

Effective marketing in today’s world is all about online techniques. Let’s see what it will take to market your local business effectively by first, looking at the advantages of going online. The internet is now the place where people go to find out about businesses of all types. Your customers are online and they’re looking for what you offer. It’s been proven that consumers who purchase local goods want more than a website for finding out those products or services. They also want information on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.

In other words, if you don’t have an online presence today, then not only does your business suffer, but so do potential buyers in your area. How do you take the marketing you used to do offline into the online world? Well, first off you need to think about your business and what it offers. That’s the first step in determining how marketing will work online. This comes from understanding your avatar or your ideal customer.

When you understand your avatar – again, if you’re unsure how to determine your avatar, please reach out to me in the comments – then you know where they are most likely to hang out online. This way, you know where to market your business. Once you know where they are, you need to decide on the type of marketing that will work best for this particular subset of people to get them into your store or onto your site. Because you know who you are targeting, you can determine what they want.

Of course, if you’ve been marketing offline, you probably already know this. So now we’re clear about who we are marketing to, where they hang out online and what they want. What we want to do now is define why would they want to buy it from you? Especially online, there are plenty of people that are offering what you have. So you need to create the reasons why they should buy it from you. This can be as simple as because they know you and social media provides a great way to create that.

Okay? So we’ve done our planning and we know where to find our people online. So we now have to put our message in front of them, but how do we know what the message should say? The first step is to be honest about your business, that could mean talking about where you are located, or it could just be that you’re really good at customer service. The key is to show them why they can’t get this from someone else. No matter if you use blog posts, videos of testimonials, pictures of happy customers on social media, make sure that all channels work together and focus on one thing, helping people solve their problem so they buy from you.

This helps build a following online so that people will look at your marketing. You can then use pretty much the same marketing pieces reformatted for online to attract them to your offers. A couple of extra pieces. First you can use paid advertising on social media or Google. Just be aware that these are pretty complicated to use effectively and the algorithms change on a regular basis. Unless you are willing to be constantly on top of the changes in the platform, it’s best to turn this kind of marketing over to the professionals that do. And since you have already done your homework, you can be much more effective with them.

Next, be very aware of S.O.S; shiny object syndrome. This is one of the biggest killers of business in general, and especially online, create a strategy and stick with it long enough to measure the results, decompose every aspect of the strategy and determine where it’s working and where it isn’t and tweak the areas that aren’t until you either are clear that the strategy doesn’t work or you get it working. Online marketing is not a golden bullet or the chicken that lays the golden eggs until you have figured it out for your business.

Finally, be sure that everything you are doing online is first and foremost, building your email list. Your email list is the one and the only asset you have online for generating additional income without additional cost or at very low cost, you do need an auto-responder – again, reach out in the comments if you want to know more about that.

To summarize, to bring your local business into online marketing, follow these three steps, find out where your target market hangs out online, create reasons for them to want to buy from you instead, and start to interact with them in an honest way, follow these steps and your marketing online will start to produce results. There is another piece to this puzzle. You have to make sure that your business foundation is solid to support the growth in business that will inevitably come from your effective online marketing.

This is why I created the Insider’s Guide to Success in Business. This guide gives you everything you need to understand what it takes to build a solid business foundation. You can download your copy completely free at insidersguidetosuccessinbusiness.com. You can use the link in the description of this video or in a comment, depending on where you’re watching to get that now.

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Feel free to share this with others. Again, I’m Doug Barra, and now it’s your turn. Follow the link, make a difference in your business and I’ll see you in our next video.