Online Marketing Tips to Drive Local Traffic

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to online marketing. Regardless, it pays to develop an online marketing strategy that encompasses local audiences. That way, a business can use its strategy to promote its products and services within its community. At the same time, a company can drive local foot traffic to its brick-and-mortar locations.

Now, let's look at five tips to help your business use online marketing to drive local traffic.

1. Perform Online Market Research

Learn as much as you can about local audiences. Find out what they want from your business' products and services. And figure out why they may choose your brand's products and services over others or vice versa.

Leverage a combination of aided and unaided awareness online market research. If consumers have aided awareness of your brand, they will only talk about it if they are given a visual cue or are prompted to do so. Comparatively, when consumers have unaided awareness, they are willing to discuss your brand without any prompts.

As part of your market research, you can show consumers brand logos and other images and listen to their thoughts and opinions on them. Meanwhile, you can ask open-ended questions to learn about consumers' real-world preferences. With this research, you can gain insights into your brand's total awareness among local audiences. From here, you can explore ways to use online tools to bolster your brand awareness.

2. Leverage Social Media

Use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to engage with local audiences. These social media platforms make it simple to share updates regarding your business' local events and activities.

Facebook and Twitter let you target audience members based on their geography. With Facebook, you can advertise in the cities, towns, and communities you want to do business. And with Twitter, you can utilize geo-location targeting to launch social media marketing campaigns within specific geographies.

Unlike other social media platforms, Instagram has a location tool that can help your business level up its social media game. The tool lets Instagram users check out local attractions and destinations. You use this Instagram tool and many others to promote your business to local audiences.

With social media, review all content to verify its quality and accuracy before you publish it. Leverage hashtags to help local audiences find your social media pages. Take time to engage with social media followers and respond to their concerns, questions, and feedback. Develop and maintain a social media publishing calendar, too.

3. Use SEO

Conduct an SEO audit to see how well your business' website is performing. The audit can be completed every few months and lets you identify any website strengths and weaknesses. Upon completion, you can use your audit results to explore ways to transform any site weaknesses into strengths.

Review your website's structure and content during your audit. Ensure your audit provides insights into your site's server errors, metadata, and other technical factors. Your audit should also cover your site's accessibility and optimization.

Use the results of your SEO audit to enhance your website and find ways to use it to connect with local audiences. If necessary, take steps to make your site more accessible to local audiences than ever before. Or, you may want to incorporate relevant keywords into different site pages, so these pages will start to rank high in local searches.

4. Maintain Your Website

Take a look at your website and look for ways to improve it. In many instances, it can be beneficial to examine your rivals' websites. This can give you a good idea about how your site stacks up against the competition. It can help you brainstorm ideas on how to enhance your site and ensure it hits the mark with local audiences.

Provide outstanding website content consistently. Your content can include blog posts, infographics, and videos. It should be tailored to local audiences and easy to share with them.

Verify your website looks and performs great on desktop and laptop computers and mobile devices. Generally, it helps to partner with a professional web developer who can assess and update your site as needed. This developer can even offer tips and recommendations to keep your site running at peak levels.

5. Create Local Listings

Put together a Google business listing. Include your business' address, operating hours, and contact information in your listing. Then, consumers can use a Google search to quickly find your business and learn about it. 

In addition to setting up a Google business listing, craft a Yelp listing. This can provide you with convenient access to Yelp customer reviews of your business. And you can learn from these reviews and use them to discover new ways to meet customers' expectations.

Keep your Google and Yelp listings up to date. If your company relocates or changes its contact information, revise these listings accordingly. It won't take long to create or update these listings, either. Thus, ensure your listings are accurate, so local consumers will have no trouble locating your business when they search for it online.

Use Online Marketing to Drive Local Foot Traffic

An online marketing strategy offers no guarantees. To get the best results out of your online marketing strategy, you must monitor your results. In doing so, you can find the best ways to build relationships with local audiences.

Don't wait to use online marketing to engage with local audiences. Get started today, and you can develop and maintain an online marketing strategy to maximize local foot traffic.