Help with local marketing

Make sure you do your best to get referrals from exiting clients!

If you haven't already, design a standard Customer Satisfaction survey and email it to all customers.  Include on your survey the question Are we a company you'd recommend to your family and friends?  'Phone up the people who responded positively to your survey and - without putting too much emphasis on it - thank them for saying they would give that recommendation.  Hopefully you'll jog their memories, making it more likely that the happy customers will actually make the referral!    

Great advice from Linda.

In the old days, people would happily spend thousands of pounds on Yellow pages advertising, knowing that big yellow book was in everyone's house, and it was good source of leads and great ROI.

With the internet, habits changed, Google took over the world and everything changed. Online directories have their place, from Yell, ThomsonLocal etc, as they are now used as reference points for Google, "citations" against your business, ie multiple sources say you are who you say you are so you must be all above board. Directories will also be a source of reviews, and everyone wants to read about other peoples experiences, as well as lead generation and hopefully targeted traffic.

Get reviews across as many review sites as you can. Then there is Google Local, ideal for local marketing, review generation and brand searches. Here's a post about setting up a Google Places for Business Listing if you haven't done it already.

Social media can be effective for getting your brand and message out there, but don't expect a flurry of leads from just social media activity.

A well structured web page as you have mentioned is definitely important, and there is no better traffic than free targeted organic traffic, so look at your onpage optimisation, and evaluate how any campaigns are doing.

For quick fix marketing with instant results, there is always PPC, but that's a different conversation!

Hope that's useful? Feel free to shout if you want to explore any avenue in particular in more depth.

You should also think of something that is vital for the local community, e.g. purchasing the ads on websites that are visited by the community, target the area with bespoke ads (e.g. using Facebook or Twitter.com/search) and invest in a good Google Business page that is localised.

There is a good topic. I have seen this local business solution. Business directory is depended a local business marketing. Dear Steve, has told Social media can be effective for business marketing. It is right I agree with you.

Hi OP are you looking for both domestic and commercial, ever thought of telemarketing?

Hello John,

You would want to start a Google My business for free

With the recent update Google just released i have been seeing a lot of odd rankings appear in my reports. A few things I have noticed with "Google local 7 pack" otherwise now known as Google my business. It is a lot more important now to have a website than before this recent update.

There are over 200 different algorithms that Google uses for Local Google my business.
It is unclear how much of an exact percentage reviews help. But, an associated guess would be around 7 - 10% of a ranking factor. So yes, reviews do help. But like said, i am trying to put it in a perspective of how much they really do help.

Citations are a very important thing when it comes to ranking. A citation is in simple terms, your name, Your address, your phone number.
It is very important to make sure your citations list all the same information in each directory you have posted.

Include at least one image in every citation. Another thing to remember, citation information must match your business website address information and phone number. Google doesn't like it when your directory information doesn't match your website when it is "Crawling"

Feel free to come into my new thread and ask any other questions you have or if you run into any problems. Google my business Questions

Thank you!

Skyler Jarman

Hi John,

It is frustrating when you've had a plan that was successful, and now everything has changed. I do SEO marketing, but I also work with brick and mortar. So it's my experience that listing yourself in the yellow pages is still not a bad move, it's just not nearly effective. You truly can't be in business, even locally, without at least a website presence.

YOu can keep it simple. Yes, you'll need a website. It doesn't have to be complex or overwhelming; keep it clean and easy to navigate and of course, search engine optimized being the true "power" of your website. Use words you would use normally if searching for your products and services. Start there and do some keyword research, check your competitors, make sure all your SEO stuff is where it's supposed to be, make an index of your page, submit URL and sitemap as well as robots.txt and then submit to other appropriate search engines. Next keep an  eye on your website. Make sure you are monitoring it and checking for maintenance type things like broken links, upload speed, add and update information. Make sure you added google analytics to your website, and visit them to look at your stats and see who is finding you and what words they are using to do so. Add keywords to your pages. Optimize and do the same for all your pages, making each count and each bringing in traffic. Consider-and it's great if you can keep up with it-a blog. It brings in fresh relevant content and if it's good stuff, you'll start getting more backlinks. You want good quality backlinks, and a good start is blog posts people want to link to. Also add share buttons if you've set up social media profiles. I strongly recommend if you are local, to list your site with Google Business Places and that covers maps too. Then I'd recommend at least creating a Google+ page and utilize it. Of course you can and should do FB and Twitter-again, if you are going to keep up with them. Then using the keyword lists you've created, and if particularly ambitious, do competitor analysis on where your competition is posting their profiles and/or ads. Use that information and create thorough, complete profiles on appropriate directories and industry sites. Make sure your information is consistent through all your online materials. Ask your customers for testimonials. Post them. Track everything and update and expand your network as you go. With just these things done correctly and consistently, you will build a solid, consistent website "brand" and you will see your business website move up in the page ranks and on SERP's (search engine results pages). And that's the way we do it. Good luck!

Diana

Hi John, has any of that helped? Or are you still looking for some inspiration?