Maximize your reach: 3 local marketing strategies for national brands
Local marketing strategies help national brands effectively reach their target audience and grow their customer base in their local community. By implementing marketing campaigns that are custom to the local audience, brands can increase their visibility and connect with potential customers in a defined area. These strategies include investing in local listings, improving your position in local search results, and engaging on social media.
To help you decide which strategies are best for your brand, first you need to understand your target audience, including who they are and what they want. Defining local or regional buyer personas can help you understand how demographics and audience attributes may vary from location to location. Once you better understand your buyers, you can begin to focus your energy on local marketing strategies that work best for your brand and your buyers. Here are the top three to consider:
1. Invest in local listings
Local listings are a must-have in any local marketing strategy and are critical for being discoverable in local searches. They’re also a cost-effective and fairly straightforward tactic to start with. A local listing is an online profile that includes information about a business, such as the name, address, phone number, website, hours of operation, images with captions, and customer reviews. These types of listings can be found on popular search engines, online directories, review sites, and social media platforms. To stay on top of your online presence and reputation, follow these steps:
- Claim your listings: The first step in capitalizing on local listings is to claim all your location listings on popular directories and review sites, including Yelp, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and Google. By claiming your listings, you can actively update and manage them so consumers always see correct information about each location, your listings appear accurately in search engine results, and, importantly, you can respond to customer reviews and inquiries.
- Optimize your listings: Once you’ve claimed your listings, it’s important to optimize them for local searches as well as for the customer experience. By adding localized information to local listings, you’re more likely to appear in searches and customers get a better feel for each individual location. Your listing should include your business name, address, phone number, website, and hours of operation. You should also add high-quality photos and videos that show off your location’s unique features, products, or services.
- Actively manage your listings: Monitoring your business’s online presence and responding to customer reviews and inquiries in a timely and professional manner helps build trust and credibility with your customers and improve your visibility in search engine results.
By claiming and optimizing your local listings, you’re effectively managing your online reputation and ensuring consistency across all your online profiles. It’s a low-lift, cost-effective way to get started with local marketing.
2. Improve your position in local search results
Local search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website and local directory listings to appear in the search results for relevant keywords particular to a specific city, state, or geographic region. These SEO tactics can increase your brand’s visibility in local search results so customers in a targeted location can find you when they’re looking for a business like yours.
Let’s say you have pizza restaurants nationwide but want to attract more customers to a particular branch. You could use local SEO tactics to increase your visibility in the search results, making it easier for potential customers to find that particular restaurant location when they search using keywords such as “pizza,” “pizza near me,” or “best pizza in [city/state].” Search engines typically serve up localized results based on online information that signifies the physical locations of the businesses in that area, so be sure all of your geo-specific details are correct. This way, your site has a chance of appearing, even if the searched keyword does not include a physical location in the request.
Whether it’s on your own site or a third-party platform, make sure your correct business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are easily visible. Search engines use multiple sources of information to verify accuracy. Being consistent and having matching names, addresses, and phone numbers for each of your locations across all sites builds trust with both the search engine and the customer. Your web team should localize your website with relevant title tags, keywords, meta descriptions, local business schema, and more to help search engines understand the locations and offerings of each business location to give your site the best possibility of ranking highly for relevant searches.
Another important factor in local SEO is creating locally relevant content that incorporates relevant keywords and attracts inbound links and traffic from other sites or is added from other parts of your own website or properties. For example, blog posts about local events or promotions can help establish your restaurant as a local authority and drive more traffic to your website.
Finally, it’s important to keep the information on your website up to date—if branch hours change in one location or your product offerings shift, you’ll want that to be reflected on your website and local listings.
3. Engage on social media
Creating and sharing content on social media platforms that are popular in your local area can help increase your brand awareness, build relationships with local customers, and drive traffic to your website. Social media remains one of the best ways to get customers and potential customers to engage with your brand. Social platforms often have features like location tags, local hashtags, and local groups. Below are a few ways to leverage social media for local marketing.
- Apply location tags and hashtags: Location tags help people find your business when they explore locations on social media. Topic hashtags help categorize your content, making it easier for people to find you when they’re searching for something you’re promoting. You can search for popular hashtags, use local hashtags, or create your own to join the conversation about local events and topics.
- Inspire user-generated content: User-generated content (UGC) is created by customers sharing their experience with your brand on social media. You can encourage locals to use certain hashtags or tag your brand when sharing content about their experience, or you can even run a contest to encourage users to post. Once your community starts posting about your brand, you can look to reshare that content on your social channels and even create local campaigns out of it—including targeted social ads. Just be sure to get permission to use the UGC content first.
- Work with local influencers: One of the most effective ways to promote your business on social media is through local influencers, ambassadors, and experts. Influencers tend to have a loyal following and deep community knowledge. Working with them to create content that showcases your products or services to their followers increases your reach and credibility. For example, if you’re a national coffee chain with a new holiday flavor, select key markets and look for popular local influencers who post about food and beverage trends.
For more local marketing strategies and tactics for national brands, download our free guide.