How To Grow Your Business With Local Marketing Strategy Tips

A Chicago marketing strategy consultant has many tips for using different marketing strategies. Local marketing is designed for a local business like yours because your target market lives in your area of operation. You can support it with multiple strategies for better results.

Study the seven tips below to get started with your own successful local marketing strategy:

1. Know your customers.

2. Fill in business profiles.

3. Run limited promotions.

4. Send marketing emails.

5. Start a PPC campaign.

6. Trend on social media.

7. Do some PR outreach.

There’s a lot to discuss, so get ready to take notes.

Let’s go!

Watch this video to find out more about how Digital Authority Partners can create a great marketing strategy for you!

7 Local Marketing Strategy Tips To Grow Your Business

Some people worry about reviving a business with local marketing, while others are more interested in learning how to grow their business through the wider campaigns. There is a large overlap between these two, but how you apply your local marketing strategy differs for the two goals.

For this guide, we focus on expanding the reach and improving appeal to a broader target market. While you can use most of these ideas independently, the more challenging ones may require tools you do not have. For these, consider hiring a Chicago marketing strategy consultant.

     1. Know Your Customers

Your target market is not a monolith; their preferences, wants, and needs always change. Just think about how the past few years have forced people to adapt their lifestyles to a new normal. Most of all, on-demand apps have become far more popular and widely used across all demographics. 

For local businesses, keeping up with changes meant staying on top of what people were allowed to do and acting in response. That has not changed today, because your best bet for growth is learning as much as possible about your audience so you can offer custom and personal services that people love.

     2. Fill in Business Profiles

If your business is not growing as expected, you might want to look into all possible reasons, such as whether yout business appears in the same places as your target market. Maybe your business profiles are aimed at the wrong market or lack any helpful information for people.

It could be that even though your profiles have helpful information, you have not kept them updated in a long time. When that happens, people will struggle and feel frustrated with your business. That can hold back any growth and keep you stuck instead of progressing.

     3. Run Limited Promotions

One strategy that works well for local marketing is running promotional offers such as discounts and freebies to get people talking about your business. Joining local events where you put up a booth and show people your products and services could be a good segue to visiting your website.

You could stick to the digital format and offer coupons people can use to save at your store. Companies such as Uber Eats do this all the time to encourage people to try local restaurants and small businesses. The great point here is knowing that you can promote yourself through partner platforms, too.

     4. Send Marketing Emails

Email marketing, as simple as it is, has the potential to do everything that a Chicago marketing strategy consultant says local SEO should do. It broadens your reach, allows you to send new offers, and maintains customer relationships. You do need to send the right message, though.

Follow simple email marketing tips, such as writing a clear message with a simple call-to-action and clever use of images. Other, more direct advice for email marketing includes getting addresses with the person’s consent to avoid spam filters and ensure timely delivery. 

     5. Start a PPC Campaign

Local marketing combines both organic and paid strategies. For example, pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is a way that anyone can reach more people at a low cost. However, success with this method depends on many variables and factors, including the quality and scope of the keywords and your industry.

This is where local marketing can get tricky, especially if you have only a small budget for ads. You can contact a Chicago marketing strategy consultant for their services or take the time to study the process. Free tools are widely available for running PPC ads yourself, too.

     6. Trend in Social Media

Social media allows small businesses to easily drum up sales by bringing unique offerings to their local community. One example is that although milk tea arrived in the US in the 1990s, people believe it only took off around 2013, when the Fung Brothers wrote a viral song about it.

Since then, many small businesses have cropped up everywhere and capitalized on the milk tea trend, keeping the obsession alive and well in the US today. Using local SEO to start a social media trend of that scale takes some creativity, but by keeping it local you can avoid larger competitors. This makes your ad spending far more effective when carefully planned.

     7. Do Some PR Outreach

Your business booms when you trend on social media, but that only covers a small portion of your target market. Most people, especially those who are not tech-savvy, get their information from traditional media outlets. For that reason, a PR outreach strategy is just as necessary.

These two cover each other’s weak points to deliver the best results for your local marketing strategy. The viral song in the previous example was paired with media coverage.  The two together fueled the milk tea phenomenon. Both elements contributed to the success of the product.

Summing Up

Survival is never enough for a business, especially a local one; there has to be a plan leading to future growth. Local marketing is the first and most important step in that direction. You can do it right by following a Chicago marketing strategy consultant’s expert advice.

For example, revisit and improve your market data to create more effective local marketing plans or reach new customers through business profiles and social media.

Need help making a local marketing strategy to grow your Chicago business? Contact Digital Authority Partners to learn how we can help.