The need to prove the value and ROI of your local marketing efforts has never been greater. What’s also true is the fact that it’s never been more challenging to measure and prove return on investment. As the customer journey becomes more complex each day as new online channels emerge, local marketing software has become a saving grace for local businesses. Through technology and automating core business processes, they’re able to track and measure the complete customer journey for their business.
When you integrate software and digital tools into key areas of the business, it eliminates any guesswork. You’re no longer left questioning which online channels are generating the best cost-per-lead (CPL) or which channels are converting into the most customers. You’ll have the data you need to prove the ROI of each marketing activity and can use those insights to drive action.
Let’s discuss what local marketing ROI is and how you can fine-tune your local marketing strategy to get more ROI and increase profits.
How to Calculate Local Marketing ROI
When calculating the ROI of your local marketing strategy, you’ll want to consider the effect of your activities as it relates to the bottom line. Does the activity generate more profit for the business than it costs to perform the activity itself? Some things to take into consideration here are how many customers did that activity produce and the revenue each new customer brings in stacked against the costs associated with your employee’s time and any digital tools used to perform the activity.
The basic ROI calculation is: ROI = (Net Profit/Total Cost)*100
With this understanding in mind, now let’s look at a strategy that can help you improve your local marketing ROI. Some of the questions we’ll address are:
- How to track how many new customers came from any given marketing activity
- How to identify which online channels generate the greatest ROI in terms of cost-per-lead (CPL)
- Which local marketing tactics can help you improve your local marketing ROI
How to Improve Your Local Marketing ROI
Now we’re going to shift focus to discuss a strategy that can help you improve your local marketing ROI; ultimately helping you to generate more customers, at a lower cost, and bring in more revenue.
Start with Your Local Marketing Strategy
When looking at your local marketing strategy, you’ll want to weigh a few factors to determine whether or not your strategy is contributing to improving ROI, or only serving to create more obstacles.
A few key questions you’ll want your local marketing strategy to answer are:
- What are your objectives?
- Which key performance indicators will you track?
- Who is your ideal target audience?
The objectives and key performance indicators you set will give you an expected projection of what your ROI might look like. Some objectives will naturally take more time to produce an ROI than others. For example, local SEO and optimizing your website could take 6 months to a year to fully produce a good ROI. While getting more online reviews, posting replies, and managing your business information can yield an immediate ROI.
Only once you have the strategy in place, can you begin to make improvements in getting more ROI from your local marketing efforts.
Suggested Reading: 15 Local Marketing KPIs to Track
Find Local Marketing Tools That Create Synergy
While it’s easy to run a quick Google search to find local marketing tools to manage different aspects of your business, like reputation management, website, search engine marketing, for example, you’ll be better served to find an all-in-one solution.
The challenge that emerges when you use technology to create silos in your marketing toolbox, is that none of the tools “talk to one another”. You’re left with your data being disconnected and having no real way to create a complete picture on the effectiveness of your activities on the business as a whole.
Proper data collection is all about being able to collect and store data in a consistent and organized way about your leads, customers, content, paid ads, and overall online presence. When each tool is built to function differently, that makes it impossible to achieve.
Finding an all-in-one solution can mean the difference between running your business by the numbers and having easy to understand reports to then take action with and make decisions supported by data vs. throwing darts blindly at the board and hoping one hits the bullseye.
Suggested Reading: Find Out Where Your Leads and Customers Are Coming From
Local Marketing Tactics to Improve ROI
Knowing which local marketing tactics are worth your time and investment and which to avoid is half the battle. Then it’s a matter of executing on the tactics in a coordinated way so that you can build an online presence for your business to get found online by people searching for your services.
Here are five local marketing tactics that will improve your ROI.
- Get more online reviews – Start by focusing on Google, Yelp, and Facebook. Rotate between the three and when you get 20 reviews for one, move to the next and keep cycling through each. It’s critical that you send review requests within 48 hours of a completed project. Anything else and the chances of having that customer actually post a review drops significantly.
- Optimize your website – Add structured data and local schema to your website to signify your service area to Google and other major search engines. Structured data is a foundational element of your online presence and is a standardized format for businesses to provide information about the content that is on any given page of their website. By adding local schema and geo-tagging your content, you’re signaling to search engines that you are present in that location, and they can show your business in those online searches.
- Claim and optimize your Google My Business listing – Google My Business is the surest way of managing your business on Google, from dictating which information appears about your business in search results to engaging with potential customers directly on Google. You can upload photos of completed projects to the gallery and increase your odds of ranking both in traditional search and visual search.
- Launch search engine marketing campaigns on Google and Bing – With targeted Google Ads campaigns, you’re able to get found at the very top of Google’s local search results. Leverage ad extensions to optimize for location, message, and CTA to drive quality traffic to your website. Then, launch remarketing campaigns to retarget and keep your business top of mind among your prospects as they continue to research local businesses before deciding to contact one.
- Create new content on a consistent, ongoing basis – Content is another foundational element of your online presence. Content is what matches you to a search. Your content should answer search queries related to where you are, what you do, how you can help the person searching solve their problem, and/or answer their question.
Suggested Reading: 50 Local Marketing Ideas to Improve ROI
When to Seek Help with Your Local Marketing
How do you know it’s worth your time and investment to seek out help? You could likely benefit from local marketing software and a partner to help you execute your strategy if you:
- Don’t know which sources drive the most leads
- Don’t know which sources lead to the most closed deals
- Look at reports and still aren’t sure what matters or why
- Rely on memory and pencil and paper for tracking leads and customers
- Rely on personal intuition to assume which parts of your local marketing strategy are working
Now, more than ever, people rely on being able to find accurate, up-to-date information about local businesses online. When your business information isn’t managed, it could mean missing out on opportunities to reach more local customers. A big part of getting more ROI from your local marketing activities is being able to leverage software to adapt your business to the ever-evolving customer journey. When you place your focus on better serving your customers, you’ll be able to justify any activity, even when the ROI might not be there at the start.
Request your free demo to see how Surefire Local and an all-in-one local marketing software can help you make digital marketing easy and get more ROI from your local marketing.
