No doubt you’ve heard a lot about local marketing lately, especially local SEO and how you can better target customers.

Maybe you’ve tried these already with some success, but you can still do more. Local social marketing is the next step.

In fact, you can enhance your business by just doing local social marketing alone. All marketing analysts say it’s one of the best techniques in terms of cost and convenience.

When budget is a major concern, marketing on social media is low cost. This differs from having to buy PPC ads as part of your local SEO efforts.

The key to successful local social marketing is in the platform you use. Which ones work the best for your type of business?

Reaching people locally

Building a local brand is essential rather than competing on a national scale, after all, if you’re a beauty salon in Kew you’d be wasting your efforts reaching audiences in Perth. While SEO can help you rise to the top of SERPs on a national (and international) level, going local helps bring more loyal customers.

Chances are, you have competitors within just a few kilometers from you. Local customers are going to go online to search for businesses or services they can find in their local area. Most of those people are going to start researching who you are and what you do.

Some common things customers do when they start researching:

  • Looking at online reviews, both positive and negative
  • Price comparisons based on your competitors
  • Visiting your social media account to learn more information about your products

For the latter, you have an opportunity to capture a valuable demographic and address their pain points.

The great thing about social media is that it gives you one place where you can post your content to address pain points of those you want to attract.

To improve lead quality, all social media marketing experts note addressing customer pains is a significant element to success.

However, one pain point you might overlook is business location. Sometimes this is more important to a prospect than price or any perceived product risks. This gives you a stronger incentive to address local aspects to your marketing, including localised issues people care about.

Finding the right social media channel is going to help find the right demographics for this marketing element.

Which Social Media Channels Work for Your Business Style?

With everything from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn to SnapChat, the opportunities for local social marketing are enormous.

Don’t think this means you should necessarily use every social channel you can find as quite often one or two will provide the most significant impact. In cases where you use multiple channels, it’s essential to alter the content for each platform and adjust to optimise layouts for each.

All marketing experts note that Facebook is one of the best social platforms for reaching out locally. Facebook already provides many tools for small local businesses to advertise in particular geographic regions, but it is easy to waste money if you don’t know how to monitor and optimise your campaigns and end up seeing no returns for your time and money.

Some other top social media choices:

  • Online reviews are always taken seriously, so monitoring them forms an integral part of your online strategy
  • Google My Business is still active and provides excellent Google tools for small businesses to market locally
  • Twitter is continually relevant thanks to the potential of content going viral and use of localized hashtags
  • LinkedIn is ideal if you want to talk about your business’s local history as well as your core objectives and skills
  • Instagram would work great if you have visual products and showcase local events
  • Snapchat to reach millennials

What is SnapChat?

To reach most younger audiences, you’ll want to consider SnapChat seriously. SnapChat have 10 billion daily video views, opening a lot of doors to capture people on a local level. SnapChat makes local marketing easier thanks to their geofilters and ability to stream live video. The site brings stronger urgency through their marketing tools, including many Snaps expiring after a short time. During times when you’re holding a time-sensitive event, SnapChat can bring locals to you within minutes through a geofilter showing them how to find you.

Contact us at qubeSocial to learn more about local marketing and other digital strategies we can help implement for your business.

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