Most owners of local businesses mistakenly believe that they need not bother about advertising online or take active part in social media.
As the business is popular within the town, most residents know about it and does not require publicity – or, at best, a couple of advertisements in the local paper might suffice.
It has been stated often and still worth reiterating if you neglect the internet and social media, you are doing so at your own risk.
If you have a local business, or an online business that has a local aspect, you are missing out on a tremendous opportunity to grow if you are not exploiting local online advertising.
Surveys reveal 66% of households in urban areas; use the internet as an information source even when shopping locally. In today’s digital age, more and more people are searching the internet, rather than the traditional media sources for information, recommendations, and reviews of local businesses.
Besides, people are spending ever increasing amounts of time on Facebook – so you might as well meet and greet them where they spend their time.
To the question where exactly you should advertise online – the two highly rewarding outlets are Google and Facebook.
Facebook provides an economical medium to reach your potential customers on a much broader scale. So you should focus on ways that you can advertise your local business on Facebook!
As a start, you have to create a Facebook page. But merely having a Facebook page will not suffice unless you understand the benefits that it can provide your business. Having a page for your business means that your business can be discovered by anyone on Facebook.
Even without your doing anything, a user can accidentally stumble upon your page. That means already a lot of potential for exposure while you have done nothing but opened a page.
Now, once you have your page, you must obviously do everything that is possible to ensure that maximum number of people discover your page. For this, you have to optimize your page for the graph search.
Make sure to pick things that relate directly to your business and try to cover as many aspects as possible so that you can show up in more searches. Fill out your entire profile using apt keywords.
You have to let Facebook take your local business to the next level and for this you should utilize all of the great features that Facebook has to offer by –
- Build a Community for Your Page
- Optimize for the graph search
- Inspire for engagement with your page
- Optimizing for mobile devices and this is important
- Grow through highly targeted ads
- Get repeat customers by advertising in your physical location
As your Facebook presence continues to grow, make sure that you continue to provide quality content and special deals. The better the content the stronger your connection will be.