At Surefire Local, we want to help small business owners reach the same level of growth as big businesses with near-unlimited budgets. But doing that requires a certain degree of innovation because online marketing today is far more complex than it once was. Getting found online, building a high-quality pipeline, and managing customer relationships are key to growing your business profitably. It’s been our mission to help you simplify these things, by utilizing an all-in-one marketing intelligence platform.
But to understand how marketing software has adapted to meet today’s challenges and the benefits it can have on your business, let’s first look back at how marketing has evolved.
The Development of Modern Marketing
As the internet has developed over the last fifteen years, marketing has become much more dynamic than traditional print ads and other methods of direct marketing ever were. The added complexities of multiple digital channels have made successful marketing much more complicated and difficult to measure. However, it has also provided new opportunities for local, small businesses to reach specific audiences and narrow down geographical locations so that their marketing efforts become more effective.
With the rise of the internet and digital marketing, local business owners have been able to connect directly with their audiences rather than sending out print, TV, or radio ads and hoping it got in front of the right audiences. The rise of local online marketing also helped create opportunities to bring down overall marketing costs by using specific, localized targeting.
The Rise of Marketing Software to Help Small Businesses
Surefire Local realized there was a gap in the small business world when it came to support and tools available to help small business owners capitalize on their local marketing opportunities. Our all-in-one marketing platform helps build connections across channels to improve and run the functions of a small business’s marketing plan. Our technology stack is designed specifically to help you find new customers across a specific geographical region.
Local marketing is extremely targeted to a clearly defined geographical region. Without knowing how to do local marketing, you can be extending your PPC ads and other marketing efforts far beyond your region. That can lead to wasted dollars, low conversion rates, and unclear Google and search engine information about your business.
Common Local Marketing Mistakes
For businesses that are unfamiliar with geographical or local marketing, there are a few common mistakes that are made. As mentioned earlier, not defining your geographical parameters during an ad campaign can have your ads showing up across the country, which means that the wrong audiences are receiving your message. It also leads to wasted ad dollars and bloated marketing budgets.
Another common error is not updating or managing your Google My Business account. Google My Business is the foundation of local marketing and targeting. If you don’t have a Google My Business account, you’ll struggle to get found locally and be able to build up your pipeline. Once you create a structured data set within your account, it becomes easy for search algorithms to find your business. It also helps you build authority with search engines to help improve your search marketing rankings.
Businesses also need to make sure that their marketing content and copy match the message they want to send. The ways in which you frame what your company does help you target new customers within your geographical region. Getting the right message in front of the right customers at the right time is essential for generating revenue and profits efficiently and predictably.
How Surefire Local Helps You with Local Marketing
Far too often, businesses operate in silos that don’t share information and important data sets. For example, as a small business owner, you might have certain marketing functions that are completed in-house, some that are outsourced to an agency, and some that run only through a specific software program. What Surefire Local does is work to combine those different silos of information into a singular tool that can be accessed from any device and works in all the channels you operate within.
The Surefire Local platform helps you reduce the complexities of the digital marketing world by giving you clear benchmarks to meet in comparison to your competition, prioritizing upcoming tasks, and helping you notice different areas of your marketing strategy that might need improvement by leveraging artificial intelligence to identify where your business might be trending behind. For example, if your competitors typically get ten new reviews a month and you only get five, the platform will help you find ways to improve your approach to meet the industry standards.
The Surefire Local platform is meant to help simplify many of the processes involved in local marketing and geographical marketing. By bringing everything into a single location that can be accessed across different devices, you have much more control over your local marketing and can better manage your initiatives and campaigns.
Tips for Better Local Marketing
Local online marketing is a key component of successful small business growth, particularly for companies that only operate out of a specific local area like an optometrist, plastic surgeon, or home services contractor. Here are a few tips to help you know where to start with local marketing.
1. Reviews and Online Reputation
Your online reviews and the reputation you’ve built in the local community have a huge impact on the success of your local marketing campaigns. Think, for example, of the last time you were searching for a business on Google. One of the first things you look at is the reviews. People want to work with businesses that have a high number of positive reviews. If a business only has a handful of reviews or negative reviews that bring down its star rating, it’s much harder to convince people who are otherwise unfamiliar with your business to give you a chance.
2. Updating Your Google My Business Profile
As mentioned above, your Google My Business profile is a foundational building block of your local marketing efforts. By consistently updating your profile, you can build a better reputation with the Google search algorithm, which helps you rank higher for searches and be recommended more on search engine results pages. One tip that you can use is to add images of completed jobs or business updates to your profile. This helps keep your account fresh, lets Google know that you are still optimizing and improving, and allows potential prospective customers to see near real-time updates of your services.
3. Gain More Knowledge About Local Marketing
The truth is that marketing is a team sport. When you just hire an agency to run all of your marketing for you, it can create friction points when things get dropped, messages go unanswered, and back and forth conversions don’t bring about any resolution. When you have your hand in the process and have tools that help you simplify and understand local market efforts, you can quickly update your profiles and build your brand without unnecessary complications. You can take control of your business growth yourself, rather than wait around for someone else to respond to an email.
4. Work with Experts
We also work to help you understand the platform and get your business up and running on the Surefire Local platform the moment our onboarding process begins. After you sign on to work with us, we provide you with an Onboarding Manager whose sole job is to help you understand the platform. They’ll work with you to connect various aspects of your business into a single location and fill in the gaps where you might be missing. That helps you create the structured data you need to get a strong online presence quickly. Then you are connected with a Customer Success Manager who works with you on a monthly basis to develop the best marketing plan to achieve your business goals.
5. Learn Where You Fit in with the Competition
As a business owner, you have a sense of when your business is succeeding and where you can be doing better. Local marketing is often the missing link between where you want to be and where you currently are. When you understand how you are doing compared to those who look like you, work in your industry, and are your competition, you can see clear benchmarks for growth.
Get Local Online Marketing Tips for Small Business Growth
In order to succeed, you need to know the local online marketing tips for small businesses that will help you achieve your growth goals and target your geographical region. That means finding support and a platform that works for your business is key. Surefire Local has the capabilities to help you manage every aspect of your digital marketing program across multiple platforms and devices.
To learn more about Surefire Local and the opportunities that we offer your small business, attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo. There you’ll learn about the different capabilities that the platform offers and learn how you can apply the benefits to your business today to see results.