New Year, New Approach: Localized Marketing Strategies That Hit The Spot
Are you ready, small to mid-sized businesses? It’s time to invest more than 25% of your net revenue into marketing for 2025 to meet your growth goals! What’s that you say? It’s 2025 NOT 1925? My bad!
I kid! It’s not lost on anyone that with the rising costs of materials and services, businesses are feeling the squeeze and need to be scrappy to compete in the increasingly nuanced and complex world of marketing. Even more overwhelming, it’s hard to find the right partner for the right services – especially if you’re doing it all by yourself! When developing your marketing strategy, it’s best to go with what you know. And for small to mid-sized businesses, that’s likely targeted local marketing. It can have a range of cost-effective options for you, whether it’s B2B, B2C or D2C. If your dream is global reach, but without the budget, then take baby steps to figure out how to make your mark. Here’s a 4-step process on how to begin.
Step 1. Hit The Spot
Obviously, if you are catering to a local market, it’s best to target locally. If there aren’t any barriers to providing your services on a national or global scale, you can still focus on key locations to target that are not in your backyard rather than throwing out a larger, less-focused net. For example, investing your marketing spend for medical devices or services in a smaller, geographic area densely populated with hospitals is an effective way to get more bang for your buck. Use google search and analytics data to identify an area, then test your marketing message to find out what gets traction before blowing your budget on a nationwide campaign.
Step 2. Know Your Audience
What do you want your audience to do? Buy a product? Sign up for your newsletter? Laugh at your dad jokes? Once you identify this, you can begin to work backwards to map out your customer’s path to a decision and define the endpoint you want them to reach. It can be a tricky, but very insightful exercise. Grab your team, order a pizza, and have a customer mapping party! Interview your team on what customers ask them about the most, and why they would – or would not – choose your company’s products or services. Every customer is different, and not all of them enjoy dad jokes.
Step 3. Find Some Freebies
The best things in life and marketing are free – and they do exist. Here’s a few…
Google My Business Profiles
If you’re one of the 56% of retail businesses NOT setup on Google My Business, you’re missing out and need to do it now! If you are set up, make sure your profile is optimized. Complete listings get seven times more visits than those profiles left unfinished. Using images in your Google My Business Profile can increase revenue by 17% per visitor. Local businesses average 11 photos per listing, so at least match that. Don’t think you have anything to show? Sure, you do! Photos can be interior or exterior business shots, fun candids of the team, straight-on product shots or even show lab equipment in action. The more you can fill out your profile, the more your profile will work for you. For free!
Organic SEO
Anyone will tell you to hire a continual researching team of content writers and technical specialists to improve your organic SEO. Though this is the best way to provide content that matters to both scouring bots and humans who read, it’s expensive and time-consuming. As a small to mid-size business, you should take these small, simple steps until you’re ready to hire a team:
Log into the back end of your website and ensure all your meta and SEO content is populated
Ensure content is labeled for meta tags (copy) and alt tags (images and files)
Make sure you have header tags [H1, H2, H3] on each page. That will help search engines prioritize your content correctly.
Make sure you have clear and direct descriptions of what you are communicating on your webpage.
This is NOT the time to get clever with puns (or dad jokes). Just use straightforward keywords to help people (and bots) know what they are getting into when they click on your page. You can always seek assistance from a digital marketing specialist – like me – to help you identify which topics are relevant and trending in your industry. See below about quick consultations we offer. For free!
Word of Mouth
Small and mid-sized businesses have long depended on word-of-mouth marketing. When you post on LinkedIn, ask your team and coworkers to share and give it extra traction. Send an email to your customer list asking them for a review or make them an offer to refer a friend. If you want to sweeten the deal, you can incentivize them with something like free shipping, a discount on their next order, etc. as a token of thanks. In fact, email your customers regularly to keep them informed about your business. The average individual received 121 emails per day in 2023. Your email won’t overwhelm them. In fact, they’ll probably miss it the first time. So, start the convo again a second time. For free!
Robust CRM
If you’re self-conscious about the size of your email list after reading the above, have no fear – gated content is here! You can effectively grow your customer list into a robust one by rewarding them in exchange for their contact information. It could be an educational video, a thought-provoking article, a list of dad jokes or anything! This can also help improve the quality of your list and help establish you as a valuable thought leader in the industry. Additionally, consider any low-cost events or partnerships with local businesses that could help cross-promote your product or service, whether it’s in person or through their email list. Not entirely free, but a cost-effective solution!
Step 4: Make The Most Of The Money
So, you found some change between the couch cushions? Here’s a few ways to spend it with the most impact.
Local Media
Start with a digital media and/or print campaign targeted exclusively to your audience. Maybe you can find enough for a traditional paid media buy like local TV and terrestrial radio. Now is the time to get creative with your budget. Don’t have the postage money for mailers? Print door hangers and drop them off door to door instead. Don’t want to hire a voice actor for radio? Have someone on your team or your agency provide the free voice over talent.
Measure the Impact
Even with local or low-cost efforts, you always want to know what worked and what didn’t. Researching best practices, creating personal benchmarks, testing and iterating on campaigns will help you know if you are successful in the long run. It will also help determine if your campaign is ready to expand to additional geographies.
Have you had enough? No? More?
Myself and our VP of Strategy, Kristen Paladino, will be giving an hour-long presentation on marketing strategies for dental labs at this year’s LMT Lab Day in Chicago. Afterward, we’re offering free 1:1 consultations to attendees on how to improve their marketing! You can register for the event here.
Can’t go? No problem!
Email jboisseau@umbrellasonthebeach.com to setup a free 30-minute marketing consultation.
2. Ramuthi, Danesh. November 28, 2023. “25 Key Email Statistics Defining the Modern Email Landscape.” https://venngage.com/blog/email-stats/#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20a%20person%20receives%20about%20121%20emails%20per%20day.&text=Regarding%20the%20number%20of%20email,immediately%2C%20within%20a%20few%20seconds
