Local businesses have a lot to offer their communities.
And building a business in your local community offers rewards beyond the obvious, allowing you to develop deeper relationships with your customers.
But how do you find those customers exactly?
As a local business owner, discovering ways to identify prospects, expand your local customer base, grow your business, and increase sales continue to be necessary concerns and are central to your success.
For these reasons, local lead generation strategies need to be included in your inbound marketing strategy.
Do you want to know more? This is what we will cover in this blog post:
What is Local Lead Generation?
Local lead generation is the strategic process of attracting and guiding local prospects through a marketing funnel, converting them first into high-quality leads and eventually into paying customers.
While you may be familiar with lead generation in general, when it comes to local leads, different strategies are needed.
The key to success in local lead generation is to focus your digital marketing efforts on your local community and surrounding geographic areas.
For this, you’ll need to develop rapport with other local businesses and the community and also create a beneficial content marketing strategy.
Various types of content can serve as lead magnets and often include blog posts, digital coupons, special offers, videos, live event sign-ups, and even job applications.
Whether you are a lawyer, dentist, real estate agent, building contractor, retailer, or another local provider, finding qualified local leads and converting them into customers is the guiding objective of all your marketing efforts.
How Can Local Lead Generation Help Your Business?
Local lead generation tactics can help your business in a number of ways, including allowing for a more targeted marketing approach, increasing brand awareness and ROI, and helping to break through the noise crowding the internet these days.
Allows for a More Targeted Approach
It’s likely your customer base resides in your community, or nearby, so local lead generation gives you the opportunity to develop more targeted approaches and reach more qualified prospects.
Such local approaches allow you to become a recognizable part of your community and, in turn, build trust in your brand and the products or services you offer.
Locally targeted approaches are also cost-effective, helping you make the best use of your marketing budget.
Increases Brand Awareness
While connecting with potential customers online is common these days, consumers also want to connect on a more personal level.
And what better way is there to do so than by connecting with local businesses? For this, you’ll need to increase your exposure and your brand awareness.
You can increase the awareness of your local brand by becoming active in the community, sponsoring a team, or serving on the board of a local charity.
You can also partner with other businesses in some way to promote each other.
By connecting with your customers directly or through local familiarity, they will automatically recognize your brand and associate your services or products with you personally.
This way, they will come to you instead of you having to seek them out.
Leads to Higher ROI
Taking actions to become a trusted community member can result in word-of-mouth marketing in ways not possible in the global environment.
This word-of-mouth marketing helps your business grow at no cost to you.
As a result, conversion rates go up, marketing expenses go down, and ROI increases.
The Best Strategies to Improve Your Local Lead Generation
If your business primarily offers products or services to local customers, a focus on generating local leads is essential.
No longer can you rely only on ads in the newspaper or flyers distributed in the mail or at local events.
Today the goal is to drive traffic to your website and generate leads that you can potentially turn into paying customers.
Here are the six best strategies to get you started on generating more local leads.
1. Master Localized SEO
Let’s face it: people go online to answer their questions and to locate what they need.
So, your goal is to attract them to a local source — YOU.
The most important thing you can do to get their attention and generate new leads online is to master local Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics, including for your website and blog posts.
Start with your keywords.
There is less competition for localized keywords, so you can rank higher up in search results if you choose the right ones.
For example, “law firm Boston” narrows the search results down significantly, potentially positioning you at the top or close to the top of Google search results.
In other words, you are helping local consumers find you quickly. Additional components of your localized SEO may include:
- Claiming and setting up your Google My Business profile to include business categories, compelling description, contact information, customer reviews, and hours of operation.
- Creating landing page tags, meta descriptions, localized URLs, and headings.
- Embedding a Google Map showing your exact location on your landing page.
2. Enhance Your Website
While you may be right around the corner, a few streets away, or all the way across town, customers often find you online first.
It’s no wonder then that your website is imperative to your success.
Focus on enhancing your website, making it simple to navigate. Provide information on what you offer up front, so viewers don’t have to search for it.
You’ll also need to optimize your website for computers, tablets, and especially mobile devices to maximize your reach.
Consumers are often on the move, using their mobile devices to answer questions and locate products and services.
Create localized landing pages, tailoring each one to particular locales. For example, if you are a small law firm but maintain offices in two different cities, create two different landing pages.
3. Utilize Internet Ads (localized paid advertising)
Your local lead generation measures can be further enhanced by utilizing internet ads, also known as localized paid advertising.
These internet ads are beneficial to your business because they allow you to target people in your particular area.
You will also be using more of your marketing dollars on the most qualified leads, meaning customers who can realistically buy from you based on their location.
Consider both Google Ads and Facebook paid ads.
Google Ads will reach local searchers for your product or services or ones relating to them in some way.
With Facebook paid ads, you’ll be able to target your local market, capturing those consumers on that particular social media platform.
4. Leverage Localized Social Media
Social media continues to expand and capture the attention of consumers and increasingly provides them with information to make decisions.
Local businesses often fail to optimize and leverage these social media platforms to their advantage and lose out on the massive potential to build local leads.
Start by optimizing your social media platform profiles.
Create consistency across all the social media platforms you choose to be on, and only use as many as you can realistically maintain.
Establish a posting schedule and include both local and global posts. Share posts of other local businesses, influencers, and trusted resources.
5. Develop Local Business Partnerships or Collaborations
The advantage to being a local business is that you have other local businesses that also need exposure and have the need to generate leads.
Collaborating or building strategic business partnerships can enhance your local lead generation in both the short and long term.
Start building rapport with other businesses in your community, particularly ones who offer products or services relating to yours in some way.
For example, if you are a neighborhood realtor, you may have opportunities to build partnerships with a real estate attorney in the area. If you own a bakery, partner with the local coffee shop so you can promote each other.
6. Create a Localized Content Marketing Strategy
Even local businesses need a smart content marketing strategy these days.
The key to that strategy is to make your content relevant in some way to your particular community and surrounding area.
Tailor content to location-specific topics.
Vary the content type, including blog posts, videos, guest podcasting, and interactive content such as polls.
Comment and share posts of other businesses in your community, local residents, or even influencers who offer some tie-in with what you offer and your particular location.
Run contests or create free offers.
You may also want to create local seminars or webinars that require capturing the contact information of your leads.
Think about your ideal customers and create valuable, high-quality content that informs, educates, and even entertains for the best effect.
These six strategies to improve your local lead generation can make all the difference in how you are perceived by your community and how potential customers find you and eventually become paying customers.
Wrap Up: Focus on Local Lead Generation to Increase Conversions
The way consumers find businesses and interact is increasingly online these days.
If you are a local business, then that’s where you need to be also, but in a more locally strategic way.
Master local SEO, enhance your website, buy internet ads, leverage the various social media platforms, and create locally-themed content to boost your lead generation and improve your overall conversion rates.
To find out more ways to increase conversions, check out our free lead generation eBook!
