Marketing to a local audience may seem pretty straightforward – after all, you have a smaller audience to reach and you don’t have to spend too much money. However, local online marketing has become a lot more competitive with the need to evolve along with the changing times. Businesses have to keep up with the shift toward mobile search and voice search as well as AI-driven algorithms, adding to the challenge of staying ahead of the curve.
In this post, we take a deep dive into local online marketing strategies and provide you with some expert predictions on what you should expect in the coming year. Let’s get right into it.
Essential Local SEO Strategies for 2024
With 98% of consumers looking up information about local businesses online, one of the most vital steps is to improve your visibility in local searches. You need to make sure that your business shows up in the search results when someone looks for relevant local information.
1. Hyper-Local Content Creation
First things first, you need to create content that’s hyper-relevant to the local audience. This could be information specific to a particular neighborhood, community, or street. Consider the needs and pain points of people in that specific area and then aim to address them through your content. For example, a plumbing service targeting Denver locals would create content about whether tankless water works in cold climates.
Additionally, it’s important to use language and terminology that’s common in the target location. For example, perhaps a “hot dish” would be more appropriate than a “casserole” to target audiences in Minneapolis. Similarly, consider different variations in words and phrases that would more closely resonate with people in the area.
2. Advanced Structured Markup
Structured data is a standardized format of information to classify the page content and provide more detailed information about your business, products, and services. As such, it allows search engines to better understand your pages so they can deliver the right information to the right audience.
Implement schema markups so search engines can display relevant information about your business such as the areas you serve, ratings, reviews, and frequently asked questions right within the search results. You can work with an agency providing local SEO services to help you with the process.
3. Leveraging Google My Business (GMB) Features
It’s important to optimize your GMB listing so that it shows up prominently in local searches. Make sure to provide all the necessary details about your business and use all the relevant attributes provided by GMB. This includes attributes for accessibility, dining options, language, services, payment options, activity, crowd, and more depending on what’s relevant for your business.
For example, the following GMB profile for Green Grounds Landscape Services is well-optimized with all the basic business information such as the contact information, address, and service area.
Additionally, if you navigate to the “Services” tab, you’ll find a list of all the services provided by the business.
Leveraging Local Influencer Partnerships
Local influencers are individuals with influence over a local community. Whether they have expertise in a specific industry or they know the ins and outs of the area, people in the community look to them for advice, recommendations, and inspiration. With the popularity of micro-influencer marketing, partnering with these local influencers will help you boost your online visibility and get your business in front of a relevant local audience.
You can make use of influencer search tools that come with location-based filters so you can narrow your search for influencers located in specific cities. You can then partner with influencers based on the specific goals you have for your campaign. This may involve having them create sponsored content to promote your products and services through social media or inviting them to events so they can share the experience online.
For example, the Ritz-Carlton Philadelphia partnered with a local influencer to promote their Sparkling Pink for the Holidays cocktail bar. The influencer shared information about the experience including the cost and menu, and encouraged her followers to make a reservation.
The Impact of Voice Search on Local SEO
With the growing use of voice assistants and the increasing accuracy of voice search results, voice search is getting bigger. This will be particularly important for local SEO as more and more consumers use voice search to conveniently look up information about local businesses. In fact, approximately 58% of consumers use voice search to find a local business. Additionally, 49% of voice search users in the U.S. use it to look up information about local services.
As such, it’s crucial to optimize for voice search by making use of long, conversational keywords to optimize your content. Consider the questions that people might ask when conducting a voice search and use those questions in your copy.
Additionally, optimizing for local search questions is also crucial to preparing your website for local voice searches. This would require the use of location-specific keywords wherever applicable. For more detailed tips, check out our voice search optimization guide.
Local Online Marketing Analytics: Beyond the Basics
In local online marketing, your targeting needs to be very specific since you want to reach a highly relevant audience. As such, you need to constantly analyze and fine-tune your strategies for optimal results.
Make sure you’re measuring the effectiveness of your local online marketing campaigns for effectiveness. This will provide you with relevant insights on how to create campaigns that deliver a bigger impact at minimal cost. You can use insights from your Google Analytics and native advertising platforms to conduct your analysis.
Attribution modeling is an effective approach to analyzing various touchpoints and channels across the customer journey to see which ones are working for you. So you can understand how to properly allocate your resources and how you can make improvements to boost your ROI. Tools such as Attribution can simplify the process for you with automated data collection and customized multi-touch attribution models.
Additionally, a geotargeting analysis of your PPC campaigns is essential to understand the accuracy of your targeting efforts and adjust your campaigns. Geographical ads can be costly so it’s crucial to make essential bid adjustments to reduce your cost per action (CPA).
This would involve looking at the performance of your ads based on location so you can adjust your bids accordingly. For example, if you’re seeing a higher conversion volume for ads delivered to prospects in Oregon, you could make adjustments by adding a higher positive bid modifier to Oregon.
Bid adjustments help you to adjust your original keyword bid based on how much value each location is generating. This not only allows you to improve your chances of winning a bid for high-value locations, but it also helps you to avoid costly clicks from areas that don’t have much scope. Consider working with a marketing analytics agency to help you perform a thorough analysis of your local marketing campaigns.
Programmatic Advertising for Local Markets
Programmatic advertising involves the use of advanced algorithms to buy digital ad space. This comes with a number of benefits to simplify digital advertising for local businesses.
Automated Ad Placement
For starters, programmatic advertising allows you to automate the process of placing bids on relevant ad space and keywords. This helps you save plenty of time so you can focus on other aspects of managing your business while running more ads at scale.
Moreover, with AI-driven programmatic advertising tools, you can automatically track ad performance, which allows you to take a data-driven approach to optimize your ad placements in real-time. This means that you can target local audiences across various channels with high precision. You’ll be able to quickly adjust placements, channels, and messaging to optimize performance.
Dynamic Ad Personalization
Another valuable benefit of programmatic advertising is the ability to deliver more personalized dynamic ads according to factors such as user behavior, location, and preferences. This means that you can target local audiences with the most relevant messages and incentives for higher conversions.
Tools such as Optimove and GumGum make use of data on transactional history and predictive analytics as well as behavioral components to reach the right people with the right ads and at the right time.
GumGum’s proprietary targeting capabilities helped Jeep Compass to find highly relevant audiences in Japan. The platform’s computer vision technology then allowed the brand to serve up ads in relevant contexts. In addition to achieving 1.9 million impressions, the brand’s landing page saw 7,800 targeted visitors with a 1.25x longer average stay.
Local Digital Marketing for Small Businesses
Small businesses targeting a local market may experience some challenges as they need to reach a highly targeted audience. This can be particularly challenging when you’re on a limited budget as it means your targeting needs to be extremely precise. Below are a few local digital marketing strategies that small businesses can use to effectively market to a local audience.
Customer Behavior Analysis with AI
A solid understanding of customer behavior is vital to ensure that you’re targeting them with the right messages at the right time. For example, you could track customer behavior to identify repeat customers and reward them with an incentive to come back for another purchase the same week. Or you could send them reminders to purchase a product that they regularly buy around the time that it’s likely to run out.
You can make use of behavioral analytics software tools that use artificial intelligence (AI) to provide you with insights that can help you tailor your messages and offers to match local preferences and trends. Platforms like CleverTap come with AI-based segmentation capabilities that automatically segment your audiences based on real-time user actions and interests. This can then be used to deliver personalized messages and recommendations that are highly relevant to the specific needs and preferences of each customer.
Predictive Modeling for Local Market Trends
Small businesses need to stay ahead of the curve by adjusting their strategies in anticipation of future demands. Otherwise, they could easily find themselves falling behind as their competitors quickly adapt to demand changes and new trends.
This is where predictive modeling comes in, enabling you to predict future events based on historical data and statistical techniques. Modeling techniques such as behavioral clustering makes predictions about how the local market will behave while purchasing, while product-based clustering helps you predict which products or services will resonate with specific segments.
These predictions then give you enough time to plan and prepare for local market trends and changes in demand. For instance, you might be able to predict a growth in the popularity of camping as a hobby as you notice an upward trend in customers buying camping gear. This could be an indicator that you need to start promoting and stocking up on your camping equipment. The prediction will give you enough time to avoid stockouts while getting ahead of the competition to capture a majority of the local market share.
Integration of IoT Data for Real-Time Marketing Adjustments
The growing use of IoT devices empowers businesses to collect valuable real-time data that can be integrated into their marketing strategies. For small businesses, this data can be leveraged to make real-time adjustments based on local consumer behaviors and environmental factors.
For instance, data from a WiFi-connected thermostat could inform a heating and air conditioning business to offer a discounted service to optimize the customer’s thermostat setting. Meanwhile, sweat readings from a wearable device and location data could be used to send location-triggered offers for a cold drink.
Utilizing Sentiment Analysis for Local Brand Reputation Management
When it comes to local markets, factors such as word-of-mouth and customer recommendations play a strong role in influencing business reputation. A few complaints could easily snowball into a serious reputational risk, which could even be irreparable for small businesses. So it’s crucial to track online conversations and conduct a sentiment analysis so you can stay on top of these risks before they turn into a serious problem.
You can use leading sentiment analysis tools such as Mention to see what people are saying about your business and the sentiment behind those conversations. These tools let you track the sentiment behind specific terms so you can get an idea of people’s attitudes toward certain topics in addition to your business. You can even set up alerts for negative mentions and develop timely responses to protect your brand reputation.
Take Your Local Online Marketing to the Next Level
Local online marketing can be extremely challenging with a higher competition and a smaller target audience. It’s important to stay on top of the latest trends and marketing predictions to get ahead of the curve and beat the competition. Make the most of the steps and predictions we shared above to adapt with the evolution of local online marketing.
