Switching to Digital: How Your Business Can Reach Local Customers Online

For businesses that cater to a specific area or customers in a particular region, the switch to digital marketing is often more challenging. Unfortunately, offline marketing is not the best instrument for promoting your business in the current market, and a shift to digital marketing is more of a necessity rather than an option.

The switch to digital doesn’t mean you cannot target a specific audience segment or customers in a predetermined location. In fact, digital marketing offers a lot of tools to help you stay in touch with local customers. These next few tips will help you get started with your own shift to digital marketing in order to reach local customers online.

Build a Feedback Loop

The first thing you want to do if you are making the transition to digital marketing is build a feedback loop. A feedback loop is a cycle of data acquisition, usually from social media, your website, and other outlets, and processing for the purpose of retargeting and remarketing.

Sounds complicated? It is actually very simple. Whenever you post content on social media, place ads on different networks, and gain visitors, you get to know a bit more about your audience. The data collected by multiple analytics tools can then be processed to further refine your targeting.

There are certain data that you want to collect and process since early in the process. Demographics, user engagement, and user behavior are the three most common metrics that you can integrate early.

 

Do Manual Targeting

That actually brings us to our next tip, which is to always set your target audience manually. A lot of digital marketing tools now offer some degree of automation in targeting. Facebook Ads, for instance, let you simply select Automatic when defining the target audience.

There is nothing wrong with going the easy way and using automatic targeting, but you will not always end up with the audience segment that matches your business needs. This usually results in high engagement, but low conversion. That’s definitely not what you want.

Don’t hesitate to get your hands dirty. Use the data you have collected earlier to fine-tune your target audience settings. If you know that you get better conversion from Facebook by targeting certain demographics, for example, you can gain better returns by retargeting that segment.

 

Use Location Pointers

Last but certainly not least, make sure your content is also produced for a local audience. Mentioning location information or using other elements that signify your target area will help your campaigns be more effective. You will also get a local audience from organic sources such as search engines this way.

Don’t forget that you can rely on tools and services to make the transition to digital marketing even smoother. Smartboost, a leading name in marketing intelligence, is now utilizing an AI-powered intelligence tool that can help you build a much stronger feedback loop targeting a local audience.

Combined with the other tips we have covered in this article, nothing should stop you from reaching the right audience segment as a local business. After all, digital marketing can be tailored to your specific needs and budget.

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