Internet Marketing For Local Business | What Is Your Strategy?

Internet marketing for local business is a strategy just like you do in every other area of your business. Local business marketing on the Internet can benefit your business in many ways. This should be the focus of all of the Internet marketing you do.

New Customers

A new customer can be precious to a local business way beyond the initial sale. Have you been able to put a lifetime value on every customer you have?

When you approach your local business Internet marketing with this in mind, you are more willing to do paid advertising. More specifically, one of the top forms of Internet marketing that local businesses do is Google Adwords.

1. Pay per click. This is a pay-per-click advertising model built around targeting specific keyword phrases your customer is typing into their Google search box.

Obviously, you cannot effectively market online using the PPC model without having an accurate list of targeted keyword phrases.

The great thing about pay-per-click advertising is your ability to monitor exactly how much money you spend to generate a new customer. When you combine that with understanding the lifetime value of your customer, you have a pretty good idea of what a reasonable monthly budget for PPC advertising would be.

2. Landing page. Many local businesses prefer to send their traffic to a landing page before passing them through to their website.

This is another way to capitalize on the value of a new customer. Your goal very simply is to create a prospect you can follow up with in the future.

Your landing page is just a way to get their contact information. You can then begin to pre-sell your prospects before you try to sell them anything.

3. Follow up via autoresponder. This is a fantastic sales tool that’s used to do email marketing to your prospects.

An autoresponder is an automatic way to send an email. This is excellent for local businesses because of the time you will save maintaining contact with your prospects.

Local businesses like building an email list because it’s another asset for their business. It becomes treasured because you never know when a customer will be ready to buy your products, so you must stay in front of them until that time arrives.

Branding A Local Business

Another thing you can and should do is use your local business Internet marketing to brand your business all over the Internet.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish with your branding?

Consider the advertising phrase “TOMA,” which is short for Top Of Mind awareness advertising. Simply put, you want to be in as many places as possible to increase the awareness of your business online.

1. Social networking. This will be one of your primary strategies when branding your business.

Your company should have a Facebook page, Google Plus account, and Twitter account. You can also work on other social networks if you like, but these are the three most important ones you want to be active in regularly.

Social networking lets you interact with your prospects and serve as an excellent way to drive free traffic to your company website. This is a passive strategy that only works if you are active regularly in these accounts.

Because of the time involved, many local businesses choose to outsource this task by hiring a social media manager. This is often a better approach than adding another task to a current employee.

2. Start a blog. Search engines love blogs, and so do readers in the niche your business is all about.

Blogs are an excellent way to educate your prospects, as well as keep everybody updated on what’s going on in your business. Using targeted keyword phrases in every article you post is an excellent way to rank your local business for keywords people are searching for on the Internet.

You can also use your blog to build your email list by having a sign-up form on the right-hand sidebar above the fold. Again this is part of the branding strategy and helps you build your list while adding unique blog articles.

3. YouTube videos. YouTube is the third most-visited website on the Internet behind Google and Facebook.

Many people use YouTube as a search engine, especially in the local business arena. It would be best to use this to your advantage by creating videos around the targeted keyword phrases that people are searching for online.

You can also use the videos as a traffic generation method by linking to your business website in the description area of the video. All people have to do is click on your link, and they are on your website.

Another important aspect of local business Internet marketing using videos is to add videos to your blog. You can do this by copying the embed code and adding it to an existing post or creating a new page specifically around the video.

Google owns YouTube, and they spider it nonstop. Having videos on YouTube and your blog is a good way to get Google going back and forth between your YouTube account and your company blog.

Final thoughts.

Local business Internet marketing is not something that’s up for debate anymore. The most successful businesses are the ones that compete in their local market, combining both offline and online marketing.

Your potential customers are using the Internet to research the products that you are offering. You cannot expect to effectively compete with other businesses in your market if they have a local business presence online and you did not.

Don’t let it overwhelm you. Do the basic things we’ve listed in this article, and if necessary, outsource the work to a qualified Internet marketer.

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