“Hyperlocal Marketing: What You Need to Know” is a guest post written by Marvellous Aham-adi, a freelancer and content marketer who teaches entrepreneurs and startups on how to grow their brands using actionable marketing strategies at TheZeroed.
Are you looking for efficient ways to promote your business and services locally?
If your answer is yes, then this article is for you.
One of the best strategies for boosting a business locally is called hyperlocal marketing.
In this article, you’ll discover what this term means and how you can use it to increase your business growth and sales.
Let’s get started.
Hyperlocal marketing focuses on targeting prospective customers within a restricted local area. This “local area” is usually a few blocks or streets around your business.
The main goal is to increase foot traffic to a store’s physical location by targeting people who conduct “near me” searches on their mobile devices.
For example, if I wanted to buy house paint, I would Google “house paint stores near me”. This search query is called a ” hyperlocal search”. By adding “near me” to the query, I am telling Google that I don’t want to go far to buy the paint. Any paint stores that have optimized their business for hyperlocal searches will pop up in the results.
Unlike other forms of traditional marketing, hyperlocal marketing is extremely targeted. Businesses (especially retail businesses) do not have to spend a ton of money on huge marketing campaigns (that might generate little ROI).
Customers who perform hyperlocal searches have a high purchase intent. When a prospective customer types “coffee shops near me”, it’s most likely that they are ready to make a purchase. Reports also show that 78% of hyperlocal mobile searches result in an offline purchase.
Near me searches have increased in popularity in recent years. According to Google, mobile queries for “near me” and “where to buy” grew by 200% between 2016 and 2019 alone. It shows that the majority of searchers expect Google to consider their location when serving search results.
Here are some effective hyperlocal marketing strategies to help you attract local customers and grow your business.
If your business has a physical location, it is important that you create and optimize your Google My Business listing as it increases your chances of showing up in local searches.
Not only that, but data shows that 16% of businesses receive more than 100 calls each month from GMB? Let’s say 50% of these calls translate into purchases, that is extra sales you wouldn’t have gotten if you hadn’t listed your business.
After you have created your GMB listing, here are some tips to help you optimize it for better performance:
Tip 1: Ensure that your business information is accurate and up to date. Your Google My Business information needs to be consistent with what you have on your website and social media platforms. The core information you should update includes business name, address, phone number, website, business category, company attributes, and description.
Tip 2: It is better to put a local number as opposed to an international number in your contact information. Most customers might not want to call an international number. To be on the safe side, use a local number.
If you have businesses in different locations, you can add these locations to your GMB listing and use separate contact numbers for each one. The most important thing is that your main business location must be verified before you start adding the new ones to the listing.
Tip 3: There are over 2,300 business categories to choose from. Make sure you choose the exact one that fits your business. Don’t pick “Auto Repair Shop” when you run an “Auto Parts Shop”. Choosing the right category will increase your search visibility.
Tip 4: Upload as many as possible high-quality photos showcasing your business and services. According to reports from Search Engine Land, adding multiple images to your GMB listing increases the chances of people calling or visiting your store.
Tip 5: Ask for reviews from your customers. They add credibility to your GMB listing. In fact, 56% of customers read up to 4 reviews before deciding to make a purchase.
Even though your contact info is on your GMB listing, also add it to your company website for a smooth user experience. The user should not have to go back to your listing before they can contact you. In fact, 44% of website visitors will leave a company’s website if there’s no contact information or phone number.
Many businesses make the mistake of hiding their contact information at the bottom of their website. The easier it is for customers to contact you, the more sales you are likely to make.
The best practice is to add your contact information above the fold.
What is above the fold?
According to Tech Target, “above the fold is the portion of a web page that is visible in a browser window when the page first loads”. According to a 2011 eye-tracking study from Jakob Nielsen, website visitors spend 80% of their time above the fold.
When a visitor lands on your website, you don’t want them to spend minutes searching for your contact info. You can add a click-to-call feature so that customers can easily contact you.
Creating locally-relevant content can help you target and convert customers who are making local searches within your geographical location.
You can create different kinds of content, such as blog articles, images, videos, testimonials, case studies, and infographics. The key is to create such content your target audience is searching for.
Find out the kind of content your audience will love by running surveys and quizzes on your current customers. To effectively run the survey, reach out to customers on the platforms they are most active on. This could be social media, your company website, or email newsletter. You can also run short face-to-face surveys for willing customers that visit your business location.
It is also important that you perform keyword research to find out what your customers are searching for. Creating content around these keywords and phrases increases the chances of local customers finding your business. For example, a coffee shop can create content titled “best coffee shops in Chicago” – and add their coffee shop to the list. A law firm in Georgia can create localized content titled “Texting and Driving Laws In Georgia”.
Using a keyword research tool will also make your job easier. You will be able to see how much organic search traffic a keyword has. For example, “coffee shops in Chicago” receives over 5000 organic search queries monthly.
Tip: You should also add a live Google Map on your website to direct the customers to your business. It will also help increase your visibility in local Google searches. (Source)
Schema markup is a code that you put on your website to help search engines understand what your website is about. And, adding the right markup code to your website is crucial to avoid any errors.
Here is a good example of schema markup on the event page of a local hotel.
You can add different information to your schema markup. Some of the key information you should add includes:
The best part is that you don’t need to learn code to get started. Use schema.org to find the right markup for your business type. If your business website is built using WordPress, you can use a free Schema – WordPress Plugin.
You can use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to test your code.
Hyperlocal ads help you target an audience based on their specific location using location-based technologies like GPS.
Some of the targeting options available here include:
In this targeting option, you will set your ad campaign to target only searchers inside a specific area. For example, you can set up a campaign where the ads are shown only to searchers within a particular zip code. You can also create an x-mile perimeter around your location and set the ads to target customers within that radius.
According to Hubspot, “retargeting ads are a form of online targeting advertising and are served to people who have already visited your website or are a contact in your database (like a lead or customer).”
How do you perform retargeting with hyperlocal marketing?
You can set your ad campaign to target people who have visited your store in the past or have gone to a location near your store recently.
In this ad option, ads are shown based on the characteristics of the physical location of the mobile user. For example, you can set the ad to show based on the user’s location (school, neighborhood building, shopping mall) or user’s demographic (gender, education, ethnicity, age, etc).
Check out these 10 Google Ads optimization tips to help you get started with advertising your business on Google.
One of the fastest ways to penetrate the local market is by partnering with non-competing complementary local businesses around you.
This gives you access to their customers. The key is to partner with a business that complements the product or service you offer.
For example, if you run a coffee shop, you can partner with a doughnut shop. The two products complement each other without being direct competitors. You can also run events and ad campaigns together to promote your businesses.
If you have businesses in different locations, it’s best practice to create landing pages for each business location. This will ensure that your business ranks on search engines for every location it exists in.
Without a landing page for each business location, it will be difficult to rank online for location-based searches.
What happens when you have a lot of business locations?
If you have 100 business locations, you do not need to create 100 landing pages. The best practice is to choose the key locations you want to target. You can add a drop-down menu of each of the landing page locations you want to target.
Tip: If you want to go all out and create landing pages for all your locations, ensure that your website is lightweight and fast. Loading speed is one of Google’s ranking factors. If your website takes a lot of time to load, most customers will bounce.
Hyperlocal marketing is an effective way to increase your business online and offline presence, as well as significantly boost sales. The tips in this article will help you effectively reach out to customers within your local community.
Which of these strategies will you use to grow your business?
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