Are you selling to customers locally around your town or your county? If so, here are 6 digital marketing tactics to help get your business found and noticed by locals, in order to increase your sales
1. Get your Google My Business listing found in Google’s 3 local map results:
When people search on Google using a local search term eg. Restaurants in Ennis, Plumbers in Killarney, a map result will appear at the top of Google with 3 businesses listed on the map. These 3 are Google My Business listings, not websites. Ensure you have a Google my Business listing, set the local geographic distance that you are relevant for and then optimise it to get found high up for relevant local searches..
2. Get your website found for local searches:
When people search using the name of a town or county, eg. Solicitors in Kerry, Yoga classes in Dooradoyle, Google will list 10 web pages below the 3 map results. In order to get your web page appearing high up you need to optimise your pages eg. include the location in your page meta title and in your page content. Also, embed a Google map on your site (location or contact Us page) which indicates to Google that you are genuinely local and also try to get other local sites to link to you.
3. Aim to get found for local image search results: Studies show that around 27% of people go straight to image results when they are searching in Google. For example, “Hotels in Kerry”, “Golf courses Cork” “Hair salons in Galway”. In order to appear high up you need to tag your images and optimise the pages that the images are on.
4. Use Facebook & Instagram ads to target people who live within a few miles of your town or within your county:
The ads tool for Facebook and Instagram allows you to target people who live within a radius of 1 mile (or 5 miles or 15 etc) of your business or people who live within your county. You can then further filter by lots of variable such as age and gender, their interests , whether they are married or engaged, whether they have visited your website recently and lots more. You can then send your ad into their newsfeeds on Facebook and Instagram. It’s a low cost highly targeted alternative to local press ads or leafleting.
5. Use local hashtags on Instagram and Geotag your posts and stories:
If you use Instagram people are searching for posts to do with topics and the way Instagram works you search for hashtags. Ensure you use hashtags in your posts and stories that have a local geographic element eg. #WeddingPhotographersDublin #yogalimerick . This will qualify you to appear in the search results. Also, Geotag your posts and stories with either your local town or county – lot sof people check to see what popular posts or stories were posted locally.
6. Engage with large local social media accounts to get your account noticed . Are there some large local accounts that your potential customers would be following? It could be the local GAA page on Facebook or the account for the local festival on Instagram. Consider engaging with that page – comment as your business on some of their posts to add to the conversation (do not self promote – add value to their post) . Lots of locals will be reading the comments on posts and your account name will get noticed and it will attract clicks to your profile.
Hope these 6 tips are useful for growing your business locally
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