5 Best Practices for Local Business Marketing on Social Media
Becoming the “busiest restaurant on the street” is every local business owner’s dream. And with customers being increasingly influenced by online reviews and social proof for their purchasing decisions, it’s never been as critical to master the skill of local business marketing as now.
By following simple, yet very effective local online marketing tactics, any local business owner can become successful, beat their competition, become a leading authority in their market, set new standards, have an impeccable online presence and become recession-proof.
The first best practice when it comes to local social media marketing, is looking for people who live close to the local business and who have already expressed an interest on social media about the products or service this local business provides. You can easily do so thanks to Twitter.
Simply login to your Twitter account and in the search box enter the following code in Twitter’s search box: “keyword” near:location within:km
The second best practice when it comes to local social media marketing, is to use Facebook ads. When you choose this option, you’ll have to decide which campaign objective to select among the 11 different campaign objectives available. The most common one to select for local business marketing is the “store traffic” campaign objective as it will allow you to market your business to local people. In order to use this campaign objective, you will need to add the details of your local business.
If you have multiple local businesses, Facebook will ask you to create a main Page that acts as an umbrella for all your local businesses. You’ll also be required to create a new Page for each business that you add. These local business Pages will be linked to your main Page and you'll be able to manage them all from your main Page as well.
The third best practice when it comes to social media for local business is to customize and optimize your social media accounts. This is done by making sure that your banners are up to date and clearly explain what your local business provides, where it’s located, what sets it apart from other similar businesses and how people can get in touch.
To do so, start by updating your banners. Your banners should include pictures of your target audience, a headline stating what your local business offers, for example “Voted the best Italian restaurant in Sydney 5 years in a row” and stating your website URL.
Since Facebook allows you to have a video banner instead of a static image cover, it is important to leverage this feature to help promote your local business even further.
When creating your video for local online marketing, make sure you follow the size recommendation. Ideally, your cover video should be 820 x 462 pixels. In terms of the length, it should be from 20 seconds to 90 seconds long. If people view your video from a mobile device though, the sides of the video won’t show so make sure important elements such as text overlay are closer to the middle of the video so it’s not cut off when watched from a mobile device. The video for local business marketing should include all the important information about your local business such as where you are located, what you offer, what sets you apart from similar local businesses and how people can get in touch.
Customize your social media accounts further for local online marketing by adding a profile picture that is 250 x 250 pixels. The profile picture can be your logo or a headshot of you if you are the face of the business
The fourth best practice when it comes to social media for local businesses is to publish posts about your local business on a regular basis. Your posts should not just be about promoting your local business but also publishing posts about your customers and your special events.
If you’ve booked special entertainment at your local business such as a band, you can publish posts about the band setting up the stage or publish video posts of them rehearsing.
The fifth best practice when it comes to social media for local businesses is leveraging influencers.
Influencers are people who have large and engaged audiences as well as authority and credibility. What this means is you can ask an influencer to market your local business. When using influencers as part of your social media for local business strategy, you can either pay them a flat fee, or commissions or negotiate something else to make it a win-win situation for both you and the influencer.
