5 Top Marketing Strategies for Chicago Businesses (Tip List)

How do you win in business? Having exceptional marketing strategies is essential. If you are in Illinois, you can be sure a Chicago marketing strategy consultant does not rely on a piecemeal or cookie-cutter approach. Instead, they create a comprehensive, customized, flexible, and sustainable plan.

Such a plan usually includes these top five strategies:

• Know your business inside and out.
• Be specific about your target market.
• Write helpful content.
• Do not skip technical SEO.
• Strengthen your local marketing strategies.

Give your Chicago business the best chance to compete, attract the right audience, and grow. Learn how to use these five marketing tactics by reading below. Let’s go!

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

1. Know Your Business Inside Out

Many Chicago businesses and marketers become so focused on landing on the first page of the search results or controlling their pay-per-click budget that they can lose sight of the foundations of business management. These include knowing your organization inside out. Ask yourself:

• Why did you build it in the first place?
• What corporate and personal values do you hold dear? How do you translate these into your mission and vision?
• What are your short-, medium-, and long-term goals?
• Who are your employees? Why did you choose them?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses? How do you plan to maximize the former and downplay the latter?

The answers to these questions can influence all, if not most, of your marketing aspects. These can range from your branding to online advertising campaigns and small details such as color schemes.

2. Be Specific about Your Target Market

One of the easiest ways to improve your Chicago marketing strategy is to learn more about your target market. You can do this by:

• The better you know your target market, the better you can define your sales funnel. For instance, is the consideration phase longer than that of your competitors?
• Once you have more ideas about the customer journey, write ad copies that resonate with or address their challenges, needs, and pain points at every sales stage.
• Use your resources more efficiently, potentially reducing operations costs and increasing cash flow and returns.

However, if you are promoting an urgent care clinic, for example, it is not enough to say that you want to serve patients nearby. The key is to be more specific through hyper-segmentation. Are you targeting senior citizens, busy parents with young children, or people with chronic illnesses?

A straightforward way to remember your ideal leads is by creating a persona based on updated, reliable data (preferably first-party).

3. Write Helpful Content

The changes in search algorithm updates point to one central message: users come first, particularly when crafting content. It should:

• Speak about their aspirations and motivations.
• Address their needs.
• Solve their problems.
• Provide them with timely, accurate information to help them make smart buying decisions.
• Encourage your market to trust your brand.

What, then, makes an article helpful? Google has laid out extensive guidelines. For example:

• Does your content provide the right or sufficient answer, or does it compel your readers to look for more?
• Is your copy original and informative? Are the data true and the sources authoritative?
• Does it contribute to the overall page experience? In other words, how will the users feel afterward? Are they going to be satisfied or moved to share it with others?
• Are you writing for quality and not quantity?
• Are you trying to manipulate the search engines by creating several articles with rehashed data?
• Do you write from a place of authority or experience?

4. Do Not Skip Technical SEO

If your online marketing goal is to appear in the search results, you should perform search engine optimization (SEO). However, it does not work out well if you do not include one of its primary elements: technical SEO.

Consider this optimization type as the backbone that holds on-page (such as content marketing) and off-page (such as link building) together. It ensures that your website is:

• Crawlable and indexable
• Mobile-friendly
• Easy to navigate and understand
• Secure
• Fit to become a featured snippet or part of a local map pack
• Exceptional in user experience

Digital Authority Partners (DAP) has previously discussed the best practices in technical SEO. You can start optimizing your pages and fixing critical errors based on the ideas in the article.

5. Strengthen Your Local Marketing Strategies

It does not matter if you are a single business or a franchise with various US locations. Your brand should be visible and accessible if someone in Chicago looks for you. Improve your local marketing plan with a Chicago marketing consultant.

The best action includes maximizing multiple channel points and combining online and offline tactics. These include hyper-local commerce. It is a fast-growing industry that can reach a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.9% from 2021 to 2027. By the end of the forecast period, its market size could be over $3.5 trillion.

This business model helps fill the gap between supply and demand, especially in underserved communities, by building a strong network of local vendors and suppliers. In turn, you are not obligated to follow a complicated (and sometimes delayed) logistics process. In addition, optimize the cost of goods sold and increase customer loyalty by strengthening your community ties.

Other local marketing strategies include:

• Adding local schema markup to trigger a local map pack or rich snippet
• Ensuring your NAP (name, address, and phone number) is consistent on social media and local directories
• Completing your Google My Business (GMB) profile
• Engaging with local influencers
• Analyzing your competitor’s performance in multiple marketing channels
• Optimizing your website for voice search and using location-based keywords
• Creating unique local-specific content, especially on the product or service pages

Summing Up

Building and growing a Chicago company relies on a carefully designed and executed business plan. It includes a strong marketing strategy leveraging digital and traditional outlets that puts your customers first.

These five tips already point you in the right direction. However, you need an experienced Chicago marketing consultant to customize them and sustain superior results.

Digital Authority Partners (DAP) is a trusted marketing partner for dozens of Midwest businesses. We help you build a Chicago brand that lasts. Contact us today to learn how we can help.