Sukla Sengupta brought her Abrakadoodle art school franchise for the Northern VA zone in 2009. Reputed as silicon valley of the East, Reston and surrounding areas of Northern VA have fabulous school districts and one of the richest median household income in the country. Hoping for a modest return on her franchise investment, she spent on advertising in the local news papers and yellow pages. However, response to her summer camps in 2009 and 2010 was lukewarm and growth of registered children for after school programme never picked up. In 2011, she first turned to Google Ad words and Facebook pages. She was spending a modest amount on Google Ad words. Sukla also hired a professional social media company to do push chat in the zip codes for which she had the permission for the franchise. Her business picked up. It was not a galore success but reasonable enough to put more investment into web marketing to receive far better return than traditional local news paper advertisement and yellow pages listing.
Given by the reality that most of the people in the Northern America will find a local business using Google search, one may immediately think for Google Ad words and local SEO as starting options. However, it is easier said than done as you will face two practical issues.
Firstly Google Ad words for local promotion does not return enough leads that can sustain the business. At best, 5% of your quality customers will be acquired through Ad words campaign.
Secondly, local search engine optimization ( SEO ) is highly competitive. If you start today, it will take at least 6-12 months before your business can be on the first page of the Google search. However, I must say, every business should do local SEO for their future survival.
Then how will you manage to get rest of the 95% of the customers to sustain your cash flow? What are your options as a local business owner?
Push campaign yields better result if done with proper care and messaging among the targetr= populatio. But how do you do Push campaign for local marketing?
Most effective of all will be facebook chat with the local people. Within a month, it will be possible to tell your service to at least 1000 local residents within the target zip codes in the Facebook. However for this, you must have a Facebook page that offers sale coupons or groupon equivalent coupon etc. Also you need to be connected to the local residents via Facebook in a professional manner using the Facebook page of your business.
What's about facebook Ad? It works if you are looking for branding but if you are after getting leads, then I will advise you to avoid it. For local business lead generation, cost of Facebook Ad is so high, it is unsustainable.
Your second best option is local Google page. It will provide you with instant local SEO. All you need is to put up a Google page and then bring local resident's gmail into this circle. Then as soon as someone will do local search on service, it will show your business in the top of the Google search if any of the person's contact or friend is in your Google page. This offers the required reference point as well. You must tell your satisfied customers to join your Google page for getting more sales coupon and promotion. Asking them to join in your email list for promotion is completely outdated and you will be missing the the nice benefit of Google+ for local business.
Finding your business in google search is only the first half of the struggle to acquire new customers. Second half starts with online reputation management. Once a customer finds you through search or push campaign, he or she will do research on your business in Google. They will look for customer feedback, reputation, price comparison etc. If they find more negatives than positives on your business, then no matter how many times you figure on the top of the Google search, customer conversion will be poor and a distant reality. Therefore, every business has to manage their online reputation.
There are a lot of ways to do it.
An easy and quick option is to manage your reputation in Yelp and many other local directories. Other option is to write nice "customer feedback" blogs on your service and then pull them up on the top of the Google search when your company name is researched. These should be posted from the forums which have no link with your company website. Customer feedback in your Facebook and Google page can also be used to build an online reputation.
And finally do not ignore postings in Craiglist and other local ethnic classifieds such as Sulekha for the Indian community etc. Your business should have continuous presence in Craiglist and must respond against Craiglist posting in timely manner.
In TSN LLC ( www.socialmediatech.net), we offer a combined service so that your business builds up online reputation in the local community over the time. Our first priority is to push your cash flow up. And therefore, we will focus on lead generation first. Once that is stabilized, we will work on to build your online reputation, local SEO, Google page and directory submission. We have more than 100 web marketing experts in our Indian back office to serve your business at extremely cost effective rate.
This is how it works. We will assign you an account manager who will be your effective resident web marketing sales consultant. He or she will work with you to build your marketing and sales campaign.
First, we will focus on acquiring more customers through push campaign like facebook chats, craiglist response etc. Local lead generation starts at $350 per month and once this investment is justified by the number and quality of leads, we will move to next stage-which is building your online reputation, Google page, Local SEO and local directory submission.
To learn in more details, drop your questions in contact@socialmediatech.net and get our free advice for your local business.
