4 Easy steps will make you success with your local marketing strategy

How do you think that your local customer will reach your store or purchase from your business? Answer is obvious – your local marketing strategy will lead them to your store to make a purchase. Some hard fact: 88% of user call or visit the business within 24 hours after finding local businesses on a mobile device (Source: Nectafy). As per Chat Meter there has been 900% growth in “Near me” or “close by” type searches over recent years.

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Ever thought of why do you need local marketing strategy

“Think Global, Act Local” is a buzz word that impacts everyone conscious. To act local a business need to do local marketing. By and large local marketing or local marketing strategy is essential elements of small business. Local marketing strategy has the power to get your brand to a broader local audience. So, what small businesses owner should be doing to improve reach with a local audience. Here senitih business consulting is out lining some essential steps for business owner for local marketing strategy.

To be in control, a business need to create local marketing strategy before starting a campaign or applying marketing tactics. Thus, to get a top throughput out of precious marketing investment, a business need to deploy sound local marketing strategy. Also, a market research based data driven local marketing strategy will help in implementing right ROI-boasting tactics. This would help business to have a sound stable and consistent growth.

“Once you come up with a premise, you have to work out how it all happened. It’s a bit like coming up with a spectacular roof design first. Before you can get it up there, you need to build a solid foundation and supporting structure. – Linwood Barclay”

Let’s get some clarity on Strategy Vs. Tactics

We all love cricket. So let get some clarity on Strategy Vs. Tactics with analogy to Cricket. The Cricket couch is the strategist. He selects the starting 11 player based on opponent, playing geography, pitch condition and other outcome influencing factors. He provides starting action plan based on expected situation but he tests all other action plan in between the wickets. Therefore, the player are the tactics, each bowler has different duties and responsibilities while bowling in different position. Similarly, while batting each batman role and responsibilities may change based on batting order to get a winning outcome. Those players are supposed to execute the strategy given by the couch.

This means a coach important in getting the team ready so that the player can execute the plan when play start with umpire signal.

Likewise, a business would be interested in investing upfront in conducting research, consulting data. This way a business can prevent waste money trying dozens of tactics that may or may not be effective? Also, this will set the business up for massive wins and long-term growth with a robust local marketing strategy. This means strategy is first and next come tactics.

How do you develop winning local marketing strategy? 4 Easy steps will make you success with your local marketing strategy. This is not exhaustive but essential steps. These essential step will create the right foundation for creating a winning local marketing strategy.

Step1: Get to know who is your target audience

Essential basic step for every business for creating local marketing strategy to research their target audience. Every business should have market research and data on its target audience. Researching business target audience is critical for both short and long term goal of business growth. Knowing your target audience would help in putting correct emphasis on local marketing strategy. Consequently, help in putting right campaign or tactics that can maximize throughput of marketing budget.

What is target audience research?

Target audience research build the foundation of every growth oriented marketing strategy. A growth focus business will not rely on guesswork but on market research data to shape the marketing strategy. Applying marketing tactics without conducting market research is a bit like coming up with a spectacular roof design first. Before you can get it up there, you need to build a solid foundation and supporting structure. Similarly, growth focus business would need a winning market strategy build on a solid target market data on real time.

To get started, a business can start asking some simple question to know about its target audience. Business can do market research on who their buyer persona is by discovering their demographic, psychographic traits. What is their purchasing behaviors? What are their interest and habits? A business will need to apply necessary due diligence to discover about target customer information.

How target audience research applies to your local marketing strategy?

A good market research data can reveal much many buyers of your product or services are there with in 10 km or 25 km radius of your business location. How many direct or indirect competitor are there? How the competitor presents themselves to customers? What do they do differently? What is their promotion model? Knowing all these answer can give better result in marketing spent.

In addition, with insight from market research data a business can do targeted messaging. Market research data usually revel customer deep desires, problem they are facing with a product or what passion they have on using the product. This understanding can help a business to set communication tone, style and copy to deeply connect with the customer. This result in closer connection and loyal customer.

Moreover, another benefit of market research is in increase ROI. A market research data can easily reveal customer buying behaviour. This information (data) help in making right marketing decision boasting ROI for the business.

Likewise, with insight from market research data a business can provide personalized experience based on customer interest and behaviour.

Step2: Map your customer journey

If it is not essential product, it just does not happen that you just awoke up one morning, walk to a store and exchange money with it. A customer walks through many define stages before they do first buy with a store. Customer are exposed many time to a brand many times before they even set foot in the store. They may not buy anything in the first visit. But that does not mean that customer will not buy anything on next day or even a few months later.

Mapping of customer journey give a visual story of your customer’s interaction with the brand. It allows business to see the brand on customer’s perspective, to understand customer pain points, and how to improve those.

Every buyer journey is different. A simple customer journey may be like this. While going to work customer see a new store opening. While coming back in the evening the customer sees some roadside board and mobile van promotion. Some day later the customer gets some pamphlet of the same store along with newspaper. One day while walking around went into the store but because of some reason walk out of store without buying anything. While walking out customer #socialmedia window sign and prompted the customer to follow the store in meta. Sometime later customer see a post in social media and share it with a friend who also wanted to visit the store. Time passed and they both forgot about this interaction. After a while they receive a discount promotion on their mobile. They take a call to visit the store to make a purchase.

Connecting Touchpoint

A customer experience the brand at a multiple touchpoint before making a purchase. A customer journey map of brand is represented by customer experience at each touchpoint. This is just one dozens of journeys a customer might take to arrive at the brand store. It may not be necessary that your local promotion will convert at first touch point. But the more the brand connect with the consumer at different touch point the closer they get to purchasing. And becoming a loyal customer. To have a most successful local marketing strategy is to be recognize all potential customer touchpoint and to target them along their journey.

Step3: Set your local marketing strategy goal

A local marketing strategy for a brand should be clear, specific and measurable goal to reach at against each resources that spent on marketing. Some business may do marketing without specific goal. Will that work? This may get success but it is not going to work all the time. Having a definitive goal will give a definition for success for the brand. It will be specific and measurable in terms of some milestone. Goal like – getting new product into the market successfully, boasting sale, grow product line, lead generation, etc. Once goal is identified for the brand, it need to insure that they are specific enough to measure.

A very specific measurable goal would be something like this. Brand will have 100% increase in sale in Q4 then in Q3. This can be measured from sale log on a daily basis and specific tweaking on action prompted on real time.

Step4: Set a budget

A brand with insight from targeted customer data would help it in allowing a budget for local marketing strategy. A brand will have to have clarity on its tactics to be able to set up a marketing campaign. And this will be feasible only when brand is able to map out strategy and set goals.

Some brand use “zero based budgeting” – that means it start with a zero assumptions about brand future. Everything that happen there on the brand is analyzed for its needs and costs.

A brand should consider its recent active operation tactics in forming new strategy. This will help in acknowledging past learning in creating new budget, to set up new goal with specific measure. Moreover, it would help in out lining new market research, understand new market positioning. How they have change and necessary tweaking to move forward.

Summary

Finally, to recap a solid winning local marketing strategy need to cover nuisances of market research, target audience research, competitor research, customer journey, marketing goal and budgeting driven by marketing data. You are welcome to contact senitih business consulting services for any queries in developing your rock solid local marketing strategy for your business. Let your entrepreneurial journey be Mangalmay (मंगलमय).