Local Marketing Cheat Sheet
by STU LEVENTHAL
- 1. Make your offers, websites, blogs, and emails more personal. Lose the stiff professional attitude when you are conversing on the internet. Add a few personal photographs of you at work and after work. Clients and customers want to know who they are doing business with. People are also very visual minded especially when surfing the net. Photos grab their attention. Personal photos put prospects at ease. Relaxed people are easier to market to.
- 2. Blog and interact with potential customers. You are the expert in your field, help others by answering their questions and you’ll earn their trust. Look for related posts around the web about your industry, products or services and leave good valuable comments. Where ever possible leave links back to your offers and websites. Participate on not just the popular social media accounts; Pintrest, Facebook, Twitter…But also, find the forums, blogs and social media sites that specialize in just your niche and make sure you are positively represented their too.
- 3. Ask your best customers for referrals, you can even give them an incentive for bringing a friend in. Offer, a Special Discount for both your loyal referring customer and your new potential prospect who they bring in, follow up by sending both of them special coupons that are not available to the rest of your customers. The key to getting referrals is making the people who participate, feel very appreciated and special. Believe me word of mouth will get out; soon enough, to the rest of your customers and they all will quickly be bringing in friends too.
- 4. Ask for testimonials that you can post and publish. Again incentives work very well for gaining both referrals as well as testimonials. Special deals have to be set up for giving you a good testimonial that regular customers can’t receive. Remember these customers are going out of their way, taking extra time, they should be rewarded. The key for this is making the process easy to do. Creating a quick, four or five question survey that the customer can just fill in the blanks is a great way to ask for testimonials. You can do multiple things with their answers at your own convenience. For example, reform their answers into an attractive promotional message for your future prospects to read. Something titled; Read what are loyal customers had to say…You can also take just the very best answers and interject them into your advertisement copy for example: Justin C. Blando, who has been using our services for three years said. “Smitty and Sons is so reliable, I wouldn’t ever think of go anywhere else!’
- 5. As you can see we are high on pushing ‘word of mouth’ advertising. Word of mouth has always been the best promotional method. But you can’t just sit around waiting for customers to be so dazzled by your company’s products and service that they just run all over town yelling your company slogan. The key is for you to boost your ‘word of mouth’ praise by making it worth their while to help you build your business. There are all kinds of local business review blogs popping up all over the web. Make it your business to find out all the reviewing blogs and reviewing services that relate to your business; yelp, trip advisor, Angie’s list, are just the tip of the ice burg. Each local and every niche of business has their own special authority reviewer. A shout-out on one of these mediums can bring in droves of customers. Aggressively start a campaign to court all the positive reviews you can get. And remember, it all starts with making it convenient and offering a nice reward.
- 6. Optimize your online presence with relating keyword density in all of your textual content and add relevant videos which are very important when trying to rank better in online search engine information searches. You have to make it easy for the search engines to know what your blogs and websites are about. Learning at least a little bit about SEO, search engine optimization will increase your visitors and online activity by a very lot.
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