How to Leverage Digital Marketing to Grow a Local Store

Have you ever thought about how you can leverage the power of digital marketing to grow your local store? With the arrival of digital marketing in our lives, local businesses are not limited to geographical borders. Digital marketing allows you to reach new potential customers all over the world and even trade globally with only a small investment. Also, digital marketing helps you establish more interactive relationships with your target audience and win their trust over time. Still, digital marketing is much more than that. It is cost-effective, measurable, and more profitable. 

All these suffice to say that you should focus your efforts on digital marketing. But if you are not sure where to start, continue reading this post. This guide will teach you how to leverage digital marketing to grow your local store from scratch. So without further ado, let’s dive in. 

1. Build & Optimize Your Website

To get started, build a great website. A properly built e-commerce website is crucial to local digital marketing success and expanding your online presence. Today, most people search online as an entry step into the marketplace before purchasing. That is why having a professional website can help your local store grow and increase sales. However, after building a website, there is still more to improve its ranking on search engines and optimize it for higher conversion rates.  

• Focus on Local SEO 

Local SEO aims to rank your website higher when local customers search for the best local products or services online. Optimizing your website for local search is crucial, especially when your store offers products or services to the local client base. For example, it can be helpful to link your Google My Business listing to your website by embedding a Google Map of your listing. In this way, anyone who looks for your local business online will find all the information they need. Additionally, include your store’s name, address, and phone number in online local directories like Yelp, MapQuest, or Foursquare to improve your local SEO. 

• Increase Your Website’s Conversion Rate 

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is an essential metric for online retailers, enabling them to make the most of their already have traffic. In other words, if you are successful in driving tons of traffic toward your website but fail to convert that traffic into what you want, your efforts will be for nothing. 

Web visitor tracking tools help you increase the conversion rate of your website. WatchThemLive is one of the best online CRO tools available on the market for analyzing user behavior. Using the service, you can record website visitors to detect website errors and provide a better UX experience for your online visitors. WatchThemLive has many other valuable features like heatmaps, insightful analytics, or session replays that can significantly improve your CRO strategies quickly. Since WatchThemLive (WTL) provides more detailed and comprehensive opportunities than Google Analytics Heat Map, it is our top recommendation for you among CRO tools.

2. Focus on Social Media Marketing 

Social media is the other great digital marketing tactic to grow your local store. Social media enables your local store to engage with current customers and attract new ones. Therefore, you should be active on one or more social media channels where your audience is likely to spend time. 

After choosing the right platform, you should regularly post high-quality content relevant to your local store. You can also collaborate with local influencers on social media to reach more targeted and engaged customers. Moreover, with the help of paid advertising, you can attract more users who match the profile of your target audience. 

Social media analytics is indeed vital and valuable. If utilized effectively, it can be highly beneficial to improve your social media marketing efforts and achieve the best results for your local store. In short, social media analytics can play a significant role in the success or failure of your social media presence.  

3. Take Advantage of Local Email Marketing 

Local email marketing is an affordable yet highly effective way of digital marketing that gets your message directly to potential customers in your area. According to Statista, there were 3.9 billion email users worldwide in 2019, and that number will increase to 4.48 billion by 2024. Therefore, many people use email and are likely to read your email messages. 

Not to appear spammy, first, obtain the consent of those to whom you will send emails. Send emails that contain valuable content or special offers. By focusing on crafting personalized emails, A/B testing, and audience segmentation, you can discover deeper insights, thereby developing more meaningful and deeper relationships with your subscribers. It will ultimately help you improve your email content and increase the ROI of your marketing efforts, resulting in brand awareness and customer loyalty. 

4. Invest in Google Ads 

Consider using local-friendly paid Google ads (formerly known as AdWords) to be accessible when customers need you. The platform enables local businesses to target local prospects with their advertising messages in local search results.

Ensure to create ads that target local customers and a wider audience. Use geolocation targeting in a radius to reach where your customers might be. In this way, when users click on your location in an ad, they are automatically taken to Google Maps for easy navigation. Also, you can use Google My Business to show address information with ads, and try callout extensions to highlight special offers and generate more customers for your local store. 

Wrap Up 

In today’s business world, digital marketing has become the norm, and if you are not involved in this, your local store will not grow as you would like. Then, digital marketing has become essential in today’s market to reach a much larger audience and increase your local sales and revenues. This post pointed to some top digital marketing strategies that help grow your local store. However, digital marketing is a vast field, and many other tips and techniques can be added to the above list. 

If you have not implemented digital marketing into your local business strategy yet, now is the best time to think more seriously about it.