Local area marketing is a marketing strategy to promote your business, products and services to a specific geographic area or your local community. The goal of marketing in your local area helps you connect with your target audience, build brand awareness, attract customers and drive business growth in your geographic location.
The key to successful local area marketing is to understand the unique needs and characteristics of the local community. This enables you to tailor marketing strategies and promotions to effectively connect with the target audience and measure the success of your efforts.
What Types of Businesses Benefit from Local Area Marketing?
Local area marketing can be beneficial for a wide range of businesses. It is particularly relevant for businesses that rely on local customers and have a physical presence within a specific geographic region. Listed below are the types of businesses that can benefit from focusing on local area marketing:
- Retail Stores: Small retail businesses, such as clothing boutiques, bookshops, specialty shops or grocery stores that heavily rely on local customers. Targeting the immediate community through local area marketing strategies can boost foot traffic and increase sales.
- Restaurants and Cafes: Food and hospitality providers including restaurants, cafes and bakeries often draw customers from the surrounding neighbourhood. Effective local area marketing can attract customers through promotions of special menus or events, and helps build a loyal local customer base.
- Service-Based Businesses: Local service providers, such as hair salons, beauty therapists, health or luxury spas, yoga and pilates studoes, gyms and pet groomers often operate within a specific area. Local area marketing can help generate awareness, showcase expertise, and establish trust among the local residents.
- Healthcare and Medical Practices: Local medical and healthcare facilities such as clinics, naturopaths, dental practices, chiropractors, massage therapists and allied health practitioners most often assist patients in their immediate vicinity. Local area marketing can help these businesses connect with local residents and position them as trusted healthcare providers.
- Local Professional Services: Businesses offering professional services such as law firms, accountants, real estate agencies and financial advisors can benefit from local area marketing by targeting local businesses and individuals who need their expertise.
- Tradespersons and Contractors: Local businesses providing home services such as plumbing, electrical work, landscaping and home cleaning can focus on local area marketing to reach homeowners and property managers within their service area.
- Local Entertainment and Event Venues: Theatres, cinemas, music venues, sports arenas and event spaces rely on attracting local audiences to their performances and events. Effective local area marketing can help generate buzz, sell tickets and build a loyal following.
- Local Tourism and Hospitality: Businesses in the tourism and hospitality sector such as hotels, bed and breakfasts, tour operators and local attractions benefit from local area marketing to attract tourists and visitors to experience the local offerings.
5 Benefits of Local Area Marketing
By understanding and catering to the unique characteristics of your local customers, you can drive customer engagement, customer loyalty, word of mouth referrals leading to business growth.
1. Tailored Messages & Promotions
You can create specific tailored marketing messages and promotions that resonate with your target audience. Understanding your audience and tailoring your marketing messages specifically to them will help your business stand out and cater directly to their needs.
2. Create a Strong Community Connection
Having a presence and being active in your local area will help create a strong connection with local residents. Some ways you can engage is to participate in local events, support other businesses, join or support local clubs and sponsor sporting events. You may like to consider collaborating with local influencers and other businesses. These activities demonstrate your commitment to the community and creates a positive association with your brand.
3. Personalised Experiences Build Customer Loyalty
Getting to know your audience on a personal level will help form professional relationships and build customer loyalty. For example, if you run a café, ask your staff to address customers by name when they arrive to make them feel welcome. Most local communities are quite tight-knit networks and word spreads quickly, both positive and negative. Your customers are likely to share their experiences and recommend your business to family, friends and colleagues. Be mindful if a customer has a negative experience, they are likely to share that with their network too.
4. Cost Effective Marketing Strategy
In most instances, local area marketing campaigns will require a smaller budget in comparison to running large marketing campaigns. You can optimise your marketing budget by targeting a smaller, more defined audience. Do this via local marketing channels such as local directories, community groups, local events and social media platforms.
5. Competitive Advantage of Locality
Most online search preferences begin with local because it’s convenient. When you create an online local listing you are increasing your visibility. Local area marketing also allows you to compete effectively with larger businesses that may not have the same local presence. By emphasising your local area expertise and origins, you are demonstrating you understand and are one with the community’s unique needs. Additionally, and particularly after the pandemic, local customers developed a preference to support local businesses and ‘shop local’.
How to Get Started with Local Area Marketing
The first step to successful local area marketing is to do your research, and most importantly REALLY understand your target market. These insights will guide you to incorporate marketing strategies to reach a wider audience and improve your local visibility.
Here is a list of ways you can get started with local area marketing:
- Google Business Profile
Create a Google Business Profile for your business. This helps your business appear in local searches. Include all your business details such as address, phone number, hours of operation, link to website and allow customer reviews. - List the Business in Online Directories
List your business in online directories allowing more customers to find you. Some local directories include True Local, Yelp, White Pages, Yellow Pages, HiPages and your local council directories. - Local Council and Local Trader’s Associations
Quite often local councils have a department that supports local business. They can direct you to marketing opportunities such as being featured in a local news story, connect you with other local business owners and social events. Local traders associations are also established to support and connect business owners in a local area. - Signage that Stand Out
Effective and well designed signage will help you stand out and draw the attention of people passing or driving by. Signage should be consistent with your branding and flow through to all aspects of your business. This helps to increase brand awareness, create familiarity and builds trust with your local community. - Social Media Platforms
Social media accounts can widen your reach, create brand awareness and showcase your products and services. Again, this comes down to understanding your target audience and being active only on the platforms they are most likely to be using.
For more recommendations you may like to read, 10 Local Area Marketing Strategies for Small Business.
Measure, Review & Refine
The success of any marketing strategy depends on careful planning, execution, monitoring, and adaptation based on results and feedback. Each business should assess its unique situation, set clear goals and implement appropriate strategies. Also continuously evaluate and refine your marketing efforts based on metrics that measure the success of marketing activities.
Are finding marketing your business challenging? Perhaps you don’t know where to begin? We would love to hear from you. Our aim is to make marketing accessible and as easy as possible. Register for a free 30 minute Marketing Chat and let us know your marketing challenges.
