ESYB2 059 - Local Business Marketing Plan Example
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[00:00:00] In this video, let's look at the marketing strategies for a local business. If you're not clear, what's a local business, it's any business that does business in a local radio, see if it's a. Liquor store, it could be the local five block radius. And if it's a construction company, the construction company can probably travel out to around 20 mile radius or so.

That's typically reasonable. And it can be any business like gym, store, any kind of physical locations, even events at times. Those are all local businesses. Even doctor's office or restaurants or any kind of therapy offices. That's all local businesses. And the thing that unites these businesses is that they are proven much needed services so that when people need them, they search for them.

So people seek them out. These are common services people seek out. And you might think, okay, Google search. Sure. That's the first step in our strategy, but really it's local search because Google makes a distinction between [00:01:00] general search for maybe global items like shoes or clothing or something you can get from anywhere.

versus local search. And in addition to local search, I added local ads in there too. Let me actually show you an example of a local search so that you can see exactly what I'm talking about. Here's an example of a search that I made. I searched for a therapist near me. Because I live in New York, it can be also therapist in NYC.

And approximately the same things will come up. And think of this as a template. Look, there are four types of things in this template. The first ones are, these are local ads. So these you have to pay for to get into this. You can, you can see because there's a little ad right here. Then there's the Google map.

This is the code, the Google three pack notice. There's also an ad here that can appear sometimes. So it's even though it's three free organic results here. There's also one ad that's something you can also add yourself in. By going to google. com slash business and filling out a form, you don't have to [00:02:00] disclose your physical address, you can keep that private.

There's a setting in there. Obviously, you'd have to tell Google where you are, but it doesn't have to be listed online like this. But as you can see in all local searches, this map appears. And this map takes a lot of room on the results. And it's big and it comes up before all the websites. So really, this is a really important thing because a lot of people think Local search is about my website, but look, there's this thing, the map, also called the 3 pack.

It comes up before your site, so make sure you add yourself here so you can get discovered by people searching locally. After that, what you're going to have are directories. Because I searched for therapists I'm going to get therapist directories. So psychology today is a therapist directory. If I search for another kind of a service, I might get other directories like Yelp, or yellowpages.

com. Here I have ZogDoc. So every field has their own few directories. Usually [00:03:00] Yelp is one of them. If I keep going to the second page, likely Yelp is going to come up. You see right here. There's two listings of Yelp. Usually Yelp is on the first page. Just, it just depends on the kind of search. Now if I go back a little bit, what you'll see is that below the directories, there's other websites and, and then you'll see something like this, MyTherapyNYC.

This is an individual practitioner, like a small business owner, perhaps like yourself. And you see, it's actually really hard to rank the website in the Google top 10. Only one like that shows up among. Oh, the ads directories, the Google maps. So actually the SEO for your site is actually the hardest and the easiest is through the map.

This is free. And if you don't mind paying for ads, then the ads also work on day one. But depending on where you are and how competitive your niche is, it might be expensive. And to sum up, there are four types of things. The ads. The [00:04:00] map, the directories and small business owner sites. That's what I mean by local SEO, not any one of those things.

And it's not enough to just put yourself on the map or on Yelp. You have to. Make sure you keep getting reviews, keep doing the work to rank higher and higher. That's local SEO. So like I mentioned, in addition to local SEO, you gotta put your business on local directories like Yelp and whichever local directories target your niche.

Now also people ask, well what about social media and email marketing for this? It's really useful for client retention, reminding people about your business and doing customer support, but it's Much more rare than the hype would suggest a lot of hype around this suggests Oh, you can make a lot of sales on Instagram Facebook and this but really it's not that easy A lot of social media is for client retention and support and to run something like Facebook ads You have to become really good at Facebook ads It's it's not that easy also for a local business you can do business networking at events and building up your [00:05:00] referral network your professional referral network and of course the quality of All of your service or your product will give you customer retention so they can buy from you long term.

And of course, it's very important for a local business to set up your shop in a high foot traffic area. And with quality, in addition to a professional referral network will come your customer referral network, where customers begin to recommend you, but that is only after a lot of quality. So these are the most important marketing strategies for a local business.

