How to Get Local Customers – 9 Proven Strategies

Businesses need to keep customers coming to them if they want to survive and grow. The right customers can turn into loyal brand enthusiasts who keep coming back for more. They can also help spread the word about your business and the great services or products it offers.

It’s especially important to get local customers, especially if you live in a tight-knit community. If you need to attract more customers in your area, there are clear and proven strategies for how to get local customers.

Tips For How To Get Local Customers:

• Have a great local SEO strategy
• Utilize social media
• Start a YouTube channel and post local content
• Do paid advertising
• Plan events
• Plan an email marketing strategy
• Establish partnerships with other local organizations
• Get involved with your community
• Seek feedback

In this article, we’re going over each of these steps and how they’ll help you gain more customers in your area.

Have a Great Local SEO Strategy

Search engine optimization (SEO) plays an enormous role in brand awareness and local customer acquisition for businesses. SEO, in a nutshell, is the process of updating a website to make it more valuable to web visitors and, therefore, making it show up higher on search results. Local SEO is very similar, as you optimize your website for local search.

One pillar in your local SEO strategy to establish right away if you don’t have it already is your Google My Business page. Google My Business is a great tool businesses can use to manage their Google presence. Google is the most used search engine on the internet, so the better you rank on it for local searches, the more likely people will find your business.

Key things you must have on your Google My Business page include:

• Your business’ name
• Business hours
• Business phone number
• Photos of your business
• Customer reviews
• Special events or offers for your business

When done right, your Google My Business page can drive traffic to your website and get more people in your area to see your business.

Another important thing to know about how to get local customers is that getting positive reviews can be a complete game-changer for your business. One study shows that 79% of people trust online reviews as much as word-of-mouth recommendations from family and friends. Positive reviews of your business provide social proof that your business is worth checking out.

Ways to get positive reviews on your website include:

• Sending an email asking customers to leave a review (just don’t bombard email inboxes with this request).
• Encourage employees who have direct contact with customers to mention leaving a review
• Offer an incentive, such as a discount or free gift, in exchange for people leaving reviews

The more reviews you get, the more likely your business will be validated through social proof. You should also engage with these reviews. Leave a comment on the good ones, and if there are negative ones, issue a response to handle the situation.

Another valuable tool to utilize to get local customers is setting up business listings online. Setting business listings up will help people find your business easier since you’ll list out your business’ name, phone number, and other contact information.

Utilize Social Media

Another great thing to know about how to get local customers is that using social media can increase your brand’s reach. It’s estimated that more than 3.6 billion people across the world are using social media, and that number is expected to rise as time goes on. The more you use social media, the more likely you’ll gain a following and build a community of brand loyalists online.

The key to building a great social following of local customers is to post valuable and engaging content. You can post about local events or sales you have going on, tips from your industry that local people can use to make their lives easier, and post engaging local content that gets people talking.

Social media accounts to consider setting up include:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• TikTok

Once you have your accounts set up, come up with a social media content strategy. Decide what you’re going to post, when you’ll post it, and what type of content it will be (video, article, infographic, etc.) Once you get that narrowed down, you can start executing your strategy and tracking its results.

Start a YouTube Channel and Post Local Content

Another tactic to consider when coming up with a plan for how to get local customers is starting a YouTube channel. YouTube is a channel many businesses can find success on, as there are roughly 2.3 billion users on the video platform. You can create local content via video, put it on YouTube, and optimize it for local viewing. You can also share this video content on social media.

There’s a huge benefit to creating video content. Statistics show that video is the top source of information for a whopping 66% of people and that 93% of businesses gain new customers thanks to branded video content. Video is a key form of content that can drive incredible growth if done right.

Do Paid Advertising

A key thing to do when figuring out how to get local customers is to research paid advertising. While organic growth through SEO and content efforts is an important strategy to execute, it can take a bit for your efforts to pay off through conversions. If you want a faster local customer acquisition strategy, you can do paid advertising. You can do online paid advertising through search ads, display ads, and social ads.

Search ads are ads that are displayed on the top of a search page. For instance, if you search “kitchen remodel”, you’ll likely see an ad at the top for a kitchen remodeling company. They paid to be in the first slot of the first page of a search engine result that targets a specific keyword. In fact, statistics show that traffic brought through PPC advertising yields 50% more conversions than organic advertising. When done right, online advertising can get you many new local customers.

You can also look into investing in display ads. Display ads are ads that show up on websites, ads, and videos that remind people to check out your services. This is a great retargeting strategy for local customers who left your website without taking action. You can set up display ads on websites and platforms such as Facebook, Google, and YouTube.

Another area of paid online advertising to explore is social ads. Social ads are advertisements you run on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. They’re meant to retarget people who didn’t buy from your website or attract new customers. The key is to figure out who you want to target and which social platform your advertisements would convert the most people from.

Plan Events

When figuring out how to get local customers, something that can come in handy is planning events. Events are a fun way to bring the community together and generate new leads. You can plan an event that centers around your business and what it offers. Examples include:

• A remodeling company hosting a home repair workshop
• A restaurant coordinating a cooking competition among local residents
• A boutique putting on a local fashion show

Events are great for numerous reasons. For starters, events are fun and get people talking, which helps boost brand awareness. The right event can also draw in a ton of people, and many of them may be local residents you can market to. If the event is large enough, you could even sell sponsorship packages to other businesses. The right event target to the right people can increase brand awareness and help you acquire new local customers.

Plan an Email Marketing Strategy

Another key thing to know about how to get local customers is that the right email marketing strategy can yield incredible results. Email marketing is a great channel to optimize for numerous reasons. It’s an owned channel, which means you control the messages you send to prospects. You also get direct access to your prospects through their inbox, which increases their chances of seeing your message. Instead of scrolling past a message on social media, people will see your message via email.

Since email is such a powerful tool that has direct access to existing customers and prospects, you have to use it wisely. Constantly sending emails to people that aren’t relevant to them or that they don’t want can lead to people unsubscribing from your email list and/or marking your email as spam, which can hurt your email deliverability. That’s why you should have an email marketing strategy based on segmentation so that you get the right message to the right people.

Establish Partnerships With Other Local Organizations

Another thing to consider when figuring out how to get local customers is to establish partnerships with other local businesses and organizations. You can reach out to complementary businesses in town and work on establishing relationships that benefit all involved. For instance, if you own a pet store, you can reach out to a local vet’s office and see if you can leave your business cards at the desk. Or, you could arrange an event together or plan a contest.

Establishing partnerships can be beneficial for numerous reasons. The biggest perk is that it can send a lot of new local prospects your way in a complimentary way. You and your partners’ customers share similar interests that you all can cater to, but you aren’t in direct competition with them. This means there can be a non-threatening free flow of local traffic between businesses.

Get Involved In Your Community

One of the best ways to get more local customers is to get involved in your community. The more your business has a positive brand presence in town, the more likely people will be willing to do business with you. Show you care about the community you do business in.

One way to get involved is to organize a volunteer day for your business. You and your employees can work together to help your community when it truly needs it. Another way is to sponsor a youth athletic team. You can help a team play their season and also get your brand out in the community. It’s a win-win for all involved.

Seek Feedback

While goal tracking and data analysis are essential for your local customer acquisition strategy, something else you should do is seek feedback from your customers. Ask them what they like about your business, what they would change, and how you can make your business better.

You can do this through physical and/or online surveys. The more feedback you get, the better you can make your business and attract more local customers.

There are many ways you can get local customers for your business. It’s important to find the strategy that works best for your business. Make sure the strategy stays on budget, meets or exceeds your goals, and is sustainable. See what works for your business and capitalize on it to achieve growth.

Conclusion

In order to get customers locally, you will need to employ all of the marketing strategies discussed above. To get more information and find out how to do it, contact Mediaboom now, and let’s prepare a tailor-made strategy for your business together