6 Hyperlocal Marketing Tactics to Drive Growth

Many local businesses fighting for a competitive edge are turning towards hyperlocal marketing. Intuitively, it makes perfect sense—if you have a brick and mortar store, your biggest pool of potential customers in your immediate area.

Consider that 76% of people who make a local search on their phones visit a business within 24 hours.

That’s the potential of hyperlocal marketing strategies that can reach your local audience and convince them to choose you.

What Is Hyperlocal Marketing?

Hyperlocal marketing is when you focus on targeting nearby customers who are actively looking for a business like yours. They are a very close proximity to your location, and they are shopping around for products or services like yours.

It uses highly-targeted marketing tactics based on people’s locations and behaviour to find potential customers that are highly qualified. As a marketing strategy it does not have a very wide-spread reach, and usually has very specific goals in mind.

Benefits of Hyperlocal Marketing

If you’re a small business owner, you’ll need to carefully determine how to spend your resources on marketing. Hyperlocal marketing has some great benefits for you to try, especially if you have a tight budget to work with:

• Lower costs—being highly targeted means you spend less money in total
• Higher conversion rate—you are specifically targeting people who are the most likely to become customers
• Increase foot traffic—for brick and mortar store that don’t sell online, it can significantly increase people visiting your location
• Highly flexible—you can set different and highly specific targeting, timing, goals, budgets and strategies

In truth, any sized business can benefit from hyperlocal marketing. Small and medium sized businesses, however, can benefit greatly since their focus would already be on their local market.

6 Hyperlocal Marketing Tactics

Convinced of the benefits? Let’s talk hyperlocal marketing strategies so you can launch a successful hyperlocal campaign.

#1 Google My Business

Google My Business (GMB) should be front and center of any local marketing campaign. Google local searches has huge potential for reaching people searching for a local business like yours. As a platform, GMB offers a few ways to engage with your local market:

• Generate and show online reviews
• Get phone calls, emails and website visits from it
• Generate direct messages by turning on Messenger
• Answer customer questions about your business as well as your products and services
• Create posts that advertises your sales, promotions, coupons, events, and so on

It is also very easy-to-use platform, and is completely free. The only people who will see your GMB listing are people who are in your local area that actively search for your type of business. It has huge potential for every hyperlocal campaign.

#2 On-Site Local Keyword Optimization

Whenever you are preparing to launch a hyperlocal campaign, you should optimize your website. It can help your business rank higher in local searches so you get more exposure, traffic, and conversions.

The best way to optimize your website is by adding local keywords to your service, product and business pages. It’s also a good idea to add them to your local landing pages. Add the name of your city, town, county, region, state/province, and any nearby locations.

If your store is in a plaza, mall, or larger building then add that to your business information. Add directions and name the nearby major intersections. You can then use local schema markup and structured data. It helps send a stronger signal to search engines about your local focus.

#3 Narrow Geographic Ad Targeting

You can create ads through Google, Bing, Facebook, and other platforms that can create local marketing campaigns. They will all give you options to set the geographic targeting in different ways.

For your hyperlocal marketing ads, you should set your geographic targeting to have a smaller radius around you. A smaller radius might seem counter-intuitive, because you will not be reaching as many people.

The point of being hyperlocal is to be highly targeted, and your ads will have a much better conversion rate. You will spend less money to run the ads. If done correctly, the ROI of the ads will be higher.

#4 Local Flyers & Deal Websites

There are many websites and apps that allow businesses to create digital flyers, coupons, and other types of “deals”. Groupon and Flipp are two examples. You can take advantage of them in your hyperlocal campaign.

You can take the main offer, sale, or promotion of your campaign and create ads or flyers on these platforms. Research which platforms are more popular in your area and what you have to do to sign up as a business. They can be a great tool to drive foot traffic to your stores.

#5 Geofencing Advertising for Mobile Users

There are a few online marketing platforms that give you the ability to ping local users with advertising. Geofencing refers to when you set a geographic radius or location, and will target someone whenever they enter the “fenced” area.

So when someone with a mobile phone enters the radius or your store, they will receive a text or see your ad. Yelp can do this when someone with their app checks-in to your location. Google can show banner ads on the websites and apps that are part of their display network.

This creates highly targeted ads for people who are in your immediate local area, maybe even your store. You can also set geofencing at your competitor’s locations to show an ad that convinces them to go to you.

#6 Online Reviews

If you want a successful local ad campaign, you need online reviews. Specifically, you need to generate more positive reviews and you need to show your reviews on your local landing pages.

Consider that 97% of people admit that reviews influence their buying decisions. Another study showed a 270% increase in conversions by showing reviews on their website. Online reviews are a major ranking factors in local searches, and have a big impact on your conversion rate.

If you need to get more reviews, you can sign up with tools that make it easier to solicit reviews from your customers. It will more than pay off for you in the short and long term.

Summary

Hyperlocal marketing campaigns are a great way for small and medium sized businesses to get more foot traffic and sales. The highly targeted nature allows you to connect with highly qualified potential customers who are in your local area.

They are also very affordable, flexible, and can drive a lot of success for any local business. It will help get more people to attend your events, visit your store, buy your products or book appointments.

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