How distributed brands can raise brand awareness, sales, and brand advocacy using an effective local store marketing strategy.
A common misconception is that local store marketing is only for single location companies. Your tailors, spas or restaurants. Though in reality local store marketing serves to benefit any business, whether it employ 50 or 5,000. In fact, local store marketing tactics are necessary in order to effectively win over and retain consumers. Customers are unlikely to visit your website, visit your location, and purchase your product without knowing who you are, where you’re located, and what you sell.
So we’ve established your company needs a local marketing strategy, but what do you do from here? Fear not, noble marketer.
Here is what you need to know about creating an effective local store marketing strategy:
First and foremost, you’ll need a clear definition of your ideal buyer persona and the market in which you occupy.
Start by asking yourself the following questions:
- Who is the target customer?
- What consumer problem does my product solve for?
- What differentiates my product from its competitors?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of my competitors?
Great. Now that you’ve got that all figured out, you’re starting to get an understanding of how you need to position your product in order to sell it to your demographic as effectively as possible. Then, you’ll need to figure out what marketing efforts make sense for your organization, and which ones you can afford.
Remember: It is imperative to have your budget set before you begin your local store marketing strategy. Having a set budget will help prioritize your efforts as well as prevent your business from overspending.
Both direct and online marketing can contribute greatly to your business' local marketing campaign. Being the least expensive option, small business tend to utilize direct marketing to target local consumers quite often.
Here are a few direct local store marketing tactics that you may want to consider for your business:
- Sponsoring local charities or sports events
- Inexpensive flyers and business cards
- Traditional media (newspaper, radio station)
- Speak at company-sponsored events
No matter the size of the company, having an online presence is important if you plan on attracting customers. With SEO (search engine optimization) rankings becoming increasingly important, local SEO is a concept that marketers should get themselves acquainted with. When a consumer conducts a local search on google (for example, “pizza near me” or “best hot dog in NYC”), your company is only competing with competitors in the same location as yourself, making it easier to gain the visibility you want and reach your target audience.
Here are a couple more online marketing tactics you may want to consider for your business:
- Segmentation and personalization of website content
- Optimize your website for mobile use
- Social media
- Internet display ads (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
- Send messaging/mailers to local customers
- List your business in online local directories
You’re doing great! You’ve figured out who you are and who your customer is, as well as what tactics you’ll use and how much you’ll spend on them.
The final step to optimize local store marketing strategy is to test your strategy and evaluate the results. Set up A/B testing with different website content on your homepage, or compare the click-through rate of email-messaging with difference in tone. It is critical that you test and tweak your local marketing strategy, in order to ensure your doing what works best for your business.
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CampaignDrive by Pica9 is a local marketing solution that helps distributed organizations successfully scale their brand across every location. Our SaaS brand management tool, powers some of the best muli-located brands successfully distribute marketing materials and leverage the power of dynamic brand templates.
Want to learn more about implementing local store marketing strategies for your business? Speak with a local marketing expert today.
