Your web site and the internet in general is an extension of your efforts to promote and brand yourself locally. Don’t look at your Internet marketing campaigns as being separate from local marketing efforts. It will connect your customers to your business and enhance it.
In case you haven’t checked, your local print advertising space and media time slots are very costly. If you are like the rest of us, you don’t have time to give complete descriptions of everything you do or every product that you decide to sell. However, if you can use that media to drive valuable traffic to your site, then you can provide your visitors with a wealth of information. When you have a professional designed site coupled with strong sales copy, you have a great chance at closing a sale. I know that it’s hard but, you need to think of your web site as your sales staff, who takes orders 24 hours a day…as well and working for nothing.
The Internet is like the ‘new’ Yellow Pages, it’s increasingly becoming the way that people find what they are looking for. Additionally, paying customers conduct research on local businesses with the companies that they are considering doing business with. Your company needs an advocate, if you don’t get busy online and take steps to capture web traffic that is searching for your product or service, your competition will.
Get motivated! Set up a web site, but then take it a step further. Create geo coordinate meta tags on your web site. This will enable people to generate directions and maps to your business. This works extraordinarily well, I can personally attest to doing business at particular retail locations just because they happened to be the only local business that had this feature.
It’s a no-brainer that you should optimize your site for the search engines. In an ideal world you should discuss search engine optimization issues with an SEO consultant before your site is built. However you decide to move forward, get your site optimized to ensure that you get the ‘right traffic’ for your business.
On great way to promote your local business is to write articles. I’m sure that you’ve heard all this before - but that’s because classic self-promotion techniques such as authoring articles and books works to establish credibility in your field. Unfortunately, most business owners are just too unmotivated or too unorganized to do follow this simple advice. This gives your business a tactical advantage! You can stand out in your local niche, and use your writing skills to create online promotional material. One great example is; you could publish a newsletter for your clients and prospective customers. From there you can then re-publish these newsletter articles to internet article directories which will drive traffic to your site.
Take a good hard look at your business and think of more ways to marry your online and offline marketing efforts.
**Todays Tip- Give your local customers a reason to leave their email address! Encourage them to visit your web site and join your newsletter list. Sell it as though this free resource is worth a million dollars! This will ensure that your site receives as much local internet traffic as possible.
