LOCAL MARKETING with SMS TEXT, EMAIL, MOBILE, LOCAL SEARCH
Local marketing includes several different Internet and mobile marketing tactics. This article summarizes the list of local marketing initiatives. People in general want to belong to something and want to be treated special. Local marketing gives that customer the idea that your brand is part of the community vs. being a “chain.” People today associate the word “chain” with national or the opposite of being local.
Text Messages to Your Customers
SMS text marketing to your customers is a great way to create instant coupons and/or events. If a particular location is slow you can send a text message to the customers around that location. The text message could be a special offer if they go to the location right now. You can use SMS text marketing to text local customers about local events. For instance, a location could send out a text saying “we just be our arch rival in _____, come by and show us this message for 15% off.” We can use SMS text messaging to send coupons, barcodes, offers, sweepstakes, polls, alerts, appointment reminders, etc.
Emails to Your Customers
Email is where you work on your brand as well as provide content that is very viral/social. We work with our clients to make sure the email content is engaging and the type of content that your customers will want to pass on. The more your customers feel engaged and apart of the brand the more likely they are to purchase and the more likely they are to tell others about your brand. If you can segment your email it’s even better. Even segmenting between males and females allows you to speak in a more relevant way. The more relevant the information is the more likely it will get the recipient to move in the direction you want.
Yelp, Urban Spoon, Google Maps, etc.
The closer someone is to a physical location the more likely they are to use their mobile device to find them. It’s important that your brand locations are properly represented in all the mobile search applications. These contain reviews and those reviews are what the majority of people use to make their buying decision. It’s important to have someone properly manage these mobile local search applications for your different brand locations. How much business are you loosing now because you’re not dialed into this area of mobile marketing.
Localized Search – SEO
There are a lot of things you can do to make sure your brand locations rank high when someone is performing a local search on Google, Bing or Yahoo. Local SEO is a fast moving environment and it’s important that you’re taking advantage of the local SEO search tactics. There are ways today where you can make sure your branded locations (franchises, etc.) are found in top of the organic search area.
Local Search – PPC
While you’re working on optimizing your SEO ranking for your branded locations (franchises, etc.) it’s important to start and maintain a local PPC search program. When we set these up for our clients we receive a list of addresses for each location. We use that list to setup a geo-targeted local search-marketing program that provides keyword advertising for those people who are close to one of your locations.
Local PPC search marketing should be done in addition to your local SEO program. SEO is limited in what it can optimize for. With search PPC we can add all the other keywords that people may search for when looking for your products/services.
Local Marketing is What We Do
Ontarget is an Internet and Mobile Marketing Company. One of the services we provide our national clients is local marketing for their distributed branded locations. We have a lot of experience helping brands communicate and market to their local customers. We’d love to help you if you’d like to start a local marketing program. Just email us atinfo@ontargetinteractive.com or call us at (816) 529-9000.