When it comes to marketing yourself to a local audience, you might feel like a big fish in a small pond at first; however, once you dig into the details and learn more about your competitors and audience, you’ll likely soon realize there’s a lot more to make your way in the world than meets the eye. For small businesses that need to attract local customers, the challenge of garnering attention for revenue-making endeavors is quite different from the obstacles larger nationwide or global companies face. As such, it’s vital for local businesses to employ the right online marketing tools to facilitate growth and profitability.
Recently, Surefire Local’s founder and CEO Chris Marentis met with Adam Torres of Mission Matters to share how Surefire Local helps local small business owners utilize online marketing tools to lead them toward quicker conversions and better targeting. Here, we’ll walk through some of the tips Chris shared with Adam so you, too, can become a local company that outperforms your competition.
The Importance of Using the Right Resources Well
When you have the correct tools in your marketing arsenal, you’ll be better able to target the right customers who are most likely to be interested in your products and services. Ultimately, this should help you shorten your sales cycle because you’ll be speaking directly to the people who are already expressing an interest in the offerings you provide.
Surefire Local guides businesses toward quicker conversions by providing an all-in-one software solution that gives an honest, transparent insight into companies’ marketing efforts while simultaneously making it easy to post blogs, reply to reviews, and manage their entire digital footprint. If you’re the leader of a local company, you should know that Surefire Local’s platform was designed especially for you. As Marentis shares on the podcast, “Our technology stack and workflows are specifically built to generate new customers within a local geography.”
What does this mean for you, as the leader of a local business? “If you have structured data in Google My Business, and it’s pushed to all other places on the internet, the machines give you more authority as a business. Then, that authority translates to them trusting you more, so they’re more likely to serve you up in a search.”
In other words, you need to utilize tools like Google My Business to make sure the search engines know who you are and what your business is all about. When you utilize a platform like Surefire Local, you’ll be able to create content that’s channeled to numerous places all over the internet so you can let those search engines know more about your brand and the products and services you’re offering to potential customers, as well as the reputation you hold with existing customers.
The Importance of an Online Presence for Local Companies
A lot of smaller organizations are under the impression that running ads and building brand awareness doesn’t apply to them. This simply isn’t true. If you want to achieve a positive revenue on your books—no matter what industry you’re in or how small your company is—you need to be able to generate new customers within your specified geography. Pay-per-click marketing, for example, can be a great asset to your overall digital marketing strategy, but if you’re working with an agency that isn’t experienced in local marketing, you might find that they are buying ads across the country and spending money on every single click that’s far outside of your service region. This is why local geography parameters are so important when you’re purchasing digital ad space. In short, if this is happening to you, you’re wasting money, and you’re not converting those leads into customers because you’re nowhere near the area in which some of your ads’ visitors are located.
Be mindful that, for many local businesses, the biggest signal to search engines when they’re deciding which businesses to turn up in results is their physical addresses. For example, if someone searches for an HVAC repair company in the 80203 zip code of Denver, Google is going to look first at the physical address of related companies, then deliver results based on that address. However, you might be an HVAC repair company in the greater Denver area that does most of your work in the suburbs. You need to create signals for the search engines that let them know where you actually perform your work. Surefire Local’s GeoJuice product will let you create check-ins when you’re onsite at customers’ addresses so you can help Google know where you work.
How Surefire Local Can Help Your Local Business
Surefire Local helps businesses keep up with the changing marketing environment and identifies which channels you can trust when you need to reach your intended customers. As Marentis explains, “We help a business manage the way customers interact with them across all sorts of SEO channels, paid media channels like Google, and with tools, including email marketing and text messaging your customers.”
When it comes to creating online marketing tools for small business needs, we’re proud to say that we’ve done a lot of research, and we’ve got this game figured out! We can help you understand your target audience better by providing you with the data you need to get to know your consumers better, respond to their inquiries and reviews, and provide them (and the search engines) with information that’ll make their lives easier when they’re searching for the types of products and services you provide.
One thing is clear in the small business marketing realm: things aren’t like they used to be. No longer can you rely on a simple Yellow Pages ad or TV commercial to make your phones ring; you have to have a digital footprint that’s broad and wide, reaching numerous people who otherwise might not even have known about your company. However, this outreach takes time and effort, and it’s going to take a whole lot more effort than is necessary if you don’t have a platform that brings all of your information into a single place. The internet has changed the way things happen, bringing a dynamic relationship into the way businesses and consumers interact.
Benefits of Using an All-in-One Online Marketing Platform
An all-in-one online marketing platform can bring simplicity and clarity to your digital marketing efforts. When you work with Surefire Local, here are a few benefits you’ll enjoy through our partnership:
1. Reduced Marketing Expenses
When everything is in one place and housed on a single platform, you’ll cut back on fees because you won’t be paying for multiple tools that do pieces of what you need them to do to make a whole project complete. Instead, you’ll have everything you need in one unified place. This means you can stop worrying about multiple invoices and parsing together pieces that don’t always fit into the puzzle and focus on a single subscription that gives you access to everything you need to be more successful in your online space.
2. Measure Performance and ROI
With Surefire Local at the helm, you’ll be able to eliminate the guesswork and time spent staring at spreadsheets, trying to figure out what kind of results your marketing is giving you. With an all-in-one platform, data from all your marketing is pulled together in one place, and auto-generated reports are given to you, providing insights you might never have even noticed before.
3. Improve Your Marketing
With data in hand, you’ll be able to improve your marketing efforts by investing in the strongest channels. This will allow you to drive more high-value clients to your brand because you’ll know when to divert your marketing budget to the channels that make the most sense for the goals you’re trying to achieve. This means you can better target your ads, content, and other digital assets in ways that speak best to your audience. In doing so, you’ll build your online presence and consolidate all your marketing in one place, saving time, effort, and, ultimately, frustration, along the way.
4. Maintain an Active Online Presence
By utilizing Surefire Local’s online marketing tools for small business operations, you’ll be able to maintain an active online presence by creating and publishing content all in one place, including blogs, social media posts, business directories, Google My Business information, and more.
5. Streamline Communications
Our all-in-one marketing platform will help you streamline communications by giving you a space to manage email campaigns, website chat messages, and text messages all in one place that you can access from any device, desktop, and mobile.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
Here at Surefire Local, our mission is to help businesses succeed with their local marketing efforts. If you’re ready to learn how our all-in-one platform can benefit your brand, we’re ready to show you what we can do to get you on the right path! Request a demo today, and get ready to change the way you do business tomorrow!
