Growing a new business is hard. Until customers know your brand, refer their friends, and leave you tons of positive reviews all over the internet, getting new customers is no easy task. And even then, if you’re trying to grow or to fend off competitors, you can’t rest on your laurels or your existing customer base.
New business generally requires new effort, especially early on. It also usually requires some level of investment (time, money, etc), to create the early momentum that builds into a successful local business.
Customers won’t just “find you”. There’s too much noise and competition and too little trust. They have certain behaviors (search, social, entertainment) that create opportunities for you to insert your brand and promote your services.
Digital Marketing For Local Businesses
These days, everyone goes online to research solutions to their problems, connect with service providers, and validate their credentials. Sure there are still some forms of traditional marketing that can work in some cases (direct mail, door hangers), but the vast majority of your customers can be found more easily, and more cost-effectively, on the web.
Reaching the right folks in the digital world is accomplished two ways: outbound and inbound marketing.
Outbound refers to paid marketing channels like ads and sponsorships.
Inbound refers to organic marketing like social media, content, and email.
And you need both for any well-rounded marketing strategy. But the playing field is different for local businesses than for national or international brands, publications, ecommerce, or other niches, and the strategies that work for each are different.
Search results are different for local businesses. The customer lifecycle is very different. The way you target prospects is different. Local brands use very different strategies to drive business than non-local companies.
Combining Marketing Strategies For A Full-Funnel Approach
Check out the examples in the table below to see what I mean and how different strategies can work together:
| Channel | Best for | Best When |
| Google Ads | Driving leads fast | You need leads fast and consistently |
| Local SEO | Long-term visibility | You want to lower your cost of acquiring a customer |
| Retargeting | Improving conversion rate | Your site has too many visitors and not enough conversions |
| Social Media | Building brand recognition | You need to show your work and social proof |
Digital Marketing Strategies For Growing local service businesses
Great service without effective marketing fails every time, not for lack of talent or opportunity, but because the business wasn’t able to tap into the opportunity effectively.
The best practices below help you build a marketing funnel that brings in traffic, converts it into leads, and turns those leads into new business, consistently.
The Essential Local Marketing Checklist
Every local business should master these best practices before expanding into more experimental activities. These strategies have been proven to grow millions of local businesses.
If you are starting from scratch, do these steps first:
- Identify your market
Research your local market and pick your service area carefully. - Pick your brand name
Your name should be unique, but keywords are important. - Create your brand
Your business has to be memorable and it starts with branding. - Build a website
Create a mobile-first website optimized for search and conversion. - Create social profiles
Claim social profiles for your brand and build links to your site. - Build citations
Create listings in Yelp and other directories to influence local search. - Verify a Google Business Profile
Open an office, verify a GBP, rank in local search. - Drive regular positive reviews
Fresh positive reviews cause your rank to improve. - Launch Google Ads
Drive leads with search ads targeting ready to buy prospects. - Create retargeting audiences
Stay top of mind with prospects who’ve visited your site.
Now let’s dive into each of these steps in greater detail so you understand what’s involved generally, and how to get started with each.
Identify Your Market
This probably seems obvious, but bear with me…Targeting the right local market is essential to your success. Different parts of town have different economic levels, and their residents have different needs.
Your services are more in demand in some places than others and some places will have many more of your “right” customers than others.
When you’re deciding what area of your metro to focus on, don’t just pick your community because you live there. You can open an office almost anywhere you want to service.
It’s better to research the different areas nearby that you can service, and rank them by economic density and fit for your service.
If you’re a brick mason, you might want to focus on a residential area with a lot of large, aging brick homes. But if you’re an emergency plumber, the volume of homeowners is really the only metric to assess; because any of them might need your service some day.
The point is, the location where you base your business is central to your identity and the foundation for all the rest of your local marketing. When it comes to local marketing, location really matters.
Pick Your Brand Name
As a local business, you have the opportunity to pick a name that incorporates the location you want to target in your brand.
This will make it a little easier to rank for searches that include the location in the query. It sounds like a small thing, but if you focus on an area, you can gain an edge over competitors in the local search results.
Instead of naming your business Premium Plumbing, for example, you could name it Premium Plumbing Frisco, and be more likely to rank well in the city of Frisco, TX.
You can also do this with an assumed name certificate (dba: a “doing business as” name). If your corporate filing documents say Premium Plumbing, you can file an additional dba for each new location you open.
Create Your Brand
If you listen to small business influencers on YouTube, X, or Instagram, you might think that your company identity (logo, brand colors and fonts, etc.) isn’t that important.
The problem is that a boring brand is a forgettable brand and you’ll have to spend tens of thousands more dollars to drive attention to a forgettable brand.
You don’t need to overspend or obsess about these details, but you should invest a little money into a real logo and brand guide that ensures your business makes a strong impression.
Build A Website
Even though your Google Business Profile and your Facebook Page have more organic visibility than your website, your business still needs a website. You have more control, you can gather more data, and you can more effectively sell your services on your website than any platform.
You can keep it simple. A few pages for your services, your company details, and ways to contact you, optimized for search and for conversions, will allow people to find you, vet you, and engage you in business.
Your website needs to be fast, mobile-friendly, connected to your Google Business Profile, and optimized with localized content (which includes the names of recognized entities).
Hiring an agency to build you an effective, reliable website is something every new business should anticipate doing before they can really get started with digital marketing.
Create Social Profiles
People can find your business just as easily from social media as from search now, which means it’s important for every local business to build a local following and build rapport with potential future clients.
But more than that, social networks are some of the most popular sites on the web and Google knows that most real brands are engaging on these platforms. So publishing content on social media has become something of a trust signal for that reason.
Creating profiles on popular sites also adds “authority” to a brand, in search engine algorithms. Authority is an industry term referring to the ability of a website to rank in searches, but it largely comes from links, brand mentions, and a collection of other trust signals.
In any case, setting up social profiles helps to reinforce the legitimacy of your brand to Google and other search engines.
Build Citations
Citations are listings of your business’ name, address, phone number, and URL on relevant directories across the Internet. The best directories are the ones that already show up in the first couple of pages of local search results, like Yelp, Foursquare, and others.
The list of potential directories is enormous but the only ones that will have value for ranking in local search are the most popular ones, or any that are specific to your niche or service area.
If you service the Dallas-Fort Worth area, look for directories like VisitDallas.com or the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, which provide a directory of businesses (who are typically paying for membership).
The key is that your citations should all feature the exact same name, address, and phone number, to reduce the potential for confusing Google and reducing the effectiveness of this technique.
Verify A Google Business Profile
After launching your brand, creating profiles for it, and building references across the web, it’s time to set up a Google Business Profile and get it verified so you can appear in local search results.
Technically you can do this without a commercial office location but the reality is that it will never rank as effectively. Adding an address to your Google Business Profile will significantly increase your visibility in local search. Not adding one makes you effectively invisible in any competitive market.
You can lease a small commercial space, put up some signage, set up the basic necessities of an office (furniture, equipment, and a phone), and then verify your Google Business Profile at that location. It costs between $500-$1,000 USD in most US markets to lease a suitable space.
This will give you a major boost in search ranks in the 5 miles around your location, and potentially farther as you build your website authority, generate reviews, and add other trust signals for that location.
The verification process is fairly complicated and unforgiving, so you’ll want to research the process thoroughly before adding your address (or hire us to do it for you).
Drive Regular Positive Reviews
Positive reviews are the lifeblood of a local business. They demonstrate that other people have worked with you and are happy with the results. These days everyone looks at reviews before they try a new service provider and make their decision based on how many, and how recently, positive reviews have been added for your brand.
And, when it comes to ranking, consistently getting fresh reviews from new customers is a better ranking signal than a bunch of reviews you got a few years back. How recent your reviews are matters as much as how many you receive to the algorithm.
Launch Google Ads Campaigns
To create the momentum you need for growth, you will almost certainly need to spend some money advertising. And there is no better paid channel for local services than Google Ads.
Launching a few campaigns around your most profitable services will drive traffic to your site that gets better and better over time.
With search ads, you target the specific searches that should drive qualified prospects that convert on your website. Targeting people who search for “powerwashing companies in allen tx” delivers prospects with the right needs, in the right location, into your sales funnel.
Most Google Ads campaigns charge you by the click and appear in the search results, but Google also offers Local Service Ads which appear in the Local Pack map listings that appear in local search results. With these, you pay by the lead / conversion rather than by the click.
Create Retargeting Audiences
When you drive traffic to your site from ads, you get a big boost in visibility and a decent lift in lead volume. But some of this traffic doesn’t convert right away and you’ve only got two options:
- Hope they remember you later
- Keep reminding them until they’re ready to convert
The second option drives a lot more conversions. It just requires investing a little money into retargeting campaigns.
You have your direct marketing campaigns running through Google Ads. You’re getting traffic but you want more of those visits to generate new business. Implementing retargeting ads, which are only shown to people who’ve already visited your site (or seen your ads, depending) is the best way to accomplish this.
Track, Monitor, And Assess Every Marketing Channel
No marketing channel can be truly effective unless it’s measured and assessed regularly. Every strategy needs to be tweaked and optimized.
The best way to do this is to measure everything you can, at every step of the process, and record this information in a CRM so that you can analyze and report on it easily.
Track each of these KPIs to assess your marketing progress:
- Ad clicks
- Site visits
- Form fills
- Phone calls
- Qualified leads
- Disqualified leads
- Quotes / appointments
- Closed won/lost deals
Track these and anything else relevant to your sale process to gather data to inform better decisions, budget allocation, and campaign optimization.
Multi-channel, Full-Funnel Marketing
Marketing is a cumulative game. You need to reach your audience with the right message over and over and in as many different ways as possible.
This is what you’re building towards, as you implement these best practices in your local marketing efforts. Gradually stacking marketing channels one after the other in a way where each builds upon the last, is how you go from hunting leads to fishing in a barrel.
People need to trust your brand to do business with you. The first step is that they recognize you. The next is that they hear from your other customers and see your results. Finally, after they’ve gotten to know you and your message, they need some reason to take action.
Different marketing channels are effective at different parts of this process, that we refer to as the customer journey.
With a full-funnel approach, your business covers all the bases and is set up for success from every vector of opportunity. And that’s what the practices described above are designed to accomplish.
Marketing is cumulative. Successful businesses stack channel after channel, adding momentum until their marketing consistently delivers the new business they need to grow.
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