Drive Local Traffic Without Draining Your Budget
Small businesses run a large spectrum of industries, but one thing they all have in common is smaller budgets and fewer employees for operations and marketing than larger competitors.
One important equalizer among small businesses is the ability to set up a website and drive traffic to that website for little to no costs.
How to Drive Local Traffic to Your Website
Reputation Marketing
With reputation marketing, you want to build a positive online reputation and use that stellar reputation to get consumers to trust and buy from your business. Reviews, business listings, and even your blog posts are all part of your online reputation.
Review sites have a huge impact on sales because they give consumers the information they are looking for when researching the right place to buy something or comparing similar providers of services and goods. In a consumer’s mind, a business with no reviews is a bad sign and a five-star reputation is all the reason they need to choose one business over another.
Reputation Marketing Quick Tips:
1. Use reputation management services to save precious time, gather more five-star reviews, and have the peace of mind that comes with knowing that your reputation marketing is automated and handled at every level.
2. Manage your business listings and advertise in local classifieds websites to create backlinks to your website. Local classifieds and business listings (such as Chambers of Commerce) not only attract new customers who use local listings, they also provide more websites for customers to write reviews and put more social proof online for your business.
3. If you want people to visit your website, then that URL should be everywhere you are:
- Business cards, brochures, letterhead
- All channels of advertisement
- Email signature lines for all employees
- Social media profiles
- Business listings that allow website listings
- Review site business listings
- Part of the conversation when networking
- Online forums and commenting on other blogs
- Press releases and sponsorship listings
4. Verify and optimize your Google My Business listing to make sure your business website, location, and phone number are displayed in search results and on the map when customers Google search.
Email Marketing
Stay in front of your customers with email marketing to drive local traffic to your website. Have an email opt-in on every page of your website or use a pop-up capture email addresses you can use for your email campaigns.
Invest the time to actually learning all the features of your email provider, and you’ll be able to automate most of the email marketing process. Fully automated email campaigns can be set up to send a specific email for every action by the customer from sign-up to purchase.
Social Media
Social media allows businesses of all sizes to interact, educate, and advertise to current and future customers and clients. There are hundreds of free social media networks and websites, but the most important thing to remember is to be where your customers are.
BE ACTIVE, make connections, and engage your followers with posts they find useful or entertaining while sprinkling in some self-promotion.
Social Media Quick Tips:
- Create a Facebook Page for each location to build a platform where you can post updates on your products, offers, the latest events, and happenings about your business.
- Customize your posts with offers, previews, and images for your different audiences to get viewers to click to see more.
- Provide social media customer support by monitoring what is being said and responding to customers.
Blogging (Content Marketing)
Customers need a reason to visit your website, and blogging is one of the top ways to drive local traffic to your website. Quality content that answers their questions and solves their problems gives them not only a way to find your business in search but also a reason to click through.
Grow your business’s web presence by showing you’re a knowledgeable leader in your industry. Build relationships with similar or complementary websites where you can post content to each other’s website and link back to drive local traffic back to your website.
Drive Local Traffic to Your Small Business Website
Connecting with someone who specializes in SEO (search engine optimization) will help you create a web presence that attracts customers and gets you faster results. But, you don’t need to be an SEO expert to use these tips and tools to drive local traffic to your website.
