9 Local Advertising Tips to Promote Your Business Locally

If you have a small business, you know that the most valuable potential customers are the people who live in your local area. That’s why local advertising has become highly competitive. With new trends emerging every year it can be difficult to keep up.

Even if your business is in good shape, generating good quality leads and ranking ahead of your competitors, it’s important to be aware of the latest local marketing strategies.

Local Advertising Strategies to Know

Want to brush up on your local marketing skills? Just getting started and want to know how to promote your business locally? Or maybe you are just looking for places to advertise online. Either way, this guide can help.

Here are 9 of the best local advertising tips you can use to promote your business locally.

#1 Build Custom Local Landing Pages

For every ad campaign you launch online, you should build a custom landing page for each location. Dedicated landing pages can have a huge impact on the conversion rate and success of any campaign you’re running. That’s why it’s important to make sure you do them right.

Each landing page should contain the necessary keywords, benefits, calls to action, and other elements that help drive conversions. But you should also make sure to add all the important local elements…

• The address
• Local phone number
• A map to the location

#2 Promote Local Events & Sponsorships

Local events are a great way to promote your business locally. You can either host them yourself or sponsor other events in your community. You can write content about the event and your participation on your site. As a benefit, you’ll get awareness from any other site that promotes it.

Sponsorship marketing (aka paying to sponsor an event or local organization) is a great way to build local backlinks. Each one can improve your local SEO.

#3 Create Local Facebook Campaigns

Facebook is one of the better platforms for local advertising thanks to its audience targeting. You can set your geographic targeting to a highly-precise local area. Then, you can update settings to match your service area. You can even target a narrow area around your competitors to reach their closest customers.

You can also what ads are shown to specific neighbourhoods to better optimize what messages generate more conversions to different audiences. Make sure your ads and landing pages clearly indicate that you are local to the area.

#4 Use AdWords Geotargeting

Google AdWords also has Geotargeting options you can use when you are setting your audience. You can add or exclude areas in your community, as well as customize the radius or size of your targeting. You can drop a pin on a specific area or add specific postal codes.

Check your audience reports in Google Analytics and AdWords. You can see what local cities and towns generate the most traffic and the best conversion rate. Use that to modify your targeting and bidding for your geotargeting to improve the performance of your ads.

#5 Add Local Ad Extensions

One of the best and still underused ways to increase the click rate of your Google search ads are the ad extensions. If you are a local business, you should absolutely use the Display Location and phone number extensions. Don’t forget to add links to your local landing page!

These all give more local information and signals. Now, the user can clearly tell you are in their area. That increases the likelihood that they click on one of your links.

#6 Generate & Promote Online Reviews

Research has shown that displaying reviews on your website or landing pages can increase the conversion rate by as much as 270%. Lots of reviews and a good average review score will also help your business rank higher in local searches. Better places in search engine results will further increase your local awareness.

The reason why is because people think of visibility as a social proof. If you have little or no reviews, people may doubt you’re an active business. They may mistake your location for an old or closed one.

If you have a poor review score, they’ll think it’s for a reason and pick a competitor that has a better rating.
Make sure you have a section on your home page, location page(s) and all your landing pages that shows your review score. Highlighting your most recent 5 star reviews can also help. Use rich snippets to show valid reviews or ratings markups when your website appears in the search results.

#7 Build Localized Content

Having quality local content is a great way to increase awareness in your community. If you do it right, you will have other websites and people on social media linking to you and sharing your content. That is incredibly valuable exposure for your business among your local audience.

The best local content is relevant to the events, news and trends of your local area, as well as to your business identity. For instance, if there is an expo being held in your area that focuses on your industry, that’s a great source of content to write about. Attending it yourself is a great way to generate some content for the month.

#8 Write Guest Posts on Local Sites

Another tip for local content marketing is by finding guest posting opportunities on other local websites. It’s important that the websites are also in your local area, and that the content you write for them is also relevant to your business.

This is a great way to get valuable backlinks to local websites. Additionally, you will enjoy the awareness and potential traffic from people who find your business through the guest posts.

#9 Create Google My Business Posts

One under-utilized local marketing tool are posts on your Google My Business account. You can use them to promote any sale or special you have at your location. You can announce news, share new products or services, link to your custom local landing page or provide coupons.

It’s a great way to promote your business on local searches, so when people view your location on a Google Maps search they will see more about what you have to offer. It gives extra incentive for them to choose you when they’re looking for a business like yours.

Stay On Top of New Local Advertising Trends

The local marketing landscape is always changing, but these 9 tips will keep you competitive in your market. It’s always a good idea to brush up on the latest trends every few months. That way, you can jump on new tools and tips to gain a competitive edge.

For now, the key strategies rely on using and optimizing

• Landing pages
• Link building
• Content
• Geotargeting
• Reviews

Use all of them to generate more awareness and incentive to choose your business.