Do you need local marketing, regional marketing, or national marketing?

Do you need local marketing, regional marketing, or national marketing?

Every business has its own unique market area, and regardless if that area is local or national, every business benefits from the right online marketing strategy. What is the right strategy for your business?

Local Marketing
Businesses that need to have their customers physically walk in their door in order to complete the business transaction benefit from local online marketing. Think of dentists as a good example. A tooth cannot be filled if it’s not in the dentist’s office. Territorial businesses are also a good example of only needing local marketing. If it is not possible for someone outside of your territory to buy from you, local is your only option.

Keyword Strategy for Local Marketing
Make sure that you’re keywords are heavily targeted to your city or suburb. This includes any pay-per-click campaigns that you are using. You will get a bigger bang for your buck by adding your city, your suburb, your neighborhood, and even your local slang (if applicable) as part of your keywords. When you don’t include a localizer, you put yourself in competition with every similar business on the internet. Reducing your competition increases your chances of moving your website to the top of the list.

Regional Marketing
Businesses that have a few states in their territory would need regional marketing. Other good examples of regional marketing would be car dealerships. It is not uncommon for customers that don’t live in town to travel in to see a particular vehicle they’re interested in. It is realistic to think someone would travel a few hundred miles for a vehicle, but it’s not realistic for the average customer to come from across the country. Regional businesses don’t necessarily need their customer to step into their office, but they’re restricted in delivery area or consumer area.

Keyword Strategy for Regional Marketing
Like local marketing, when you’re customer area is a multiple city, multiple state area, you will get better traffic by geo-targeting your keywords to those areas as if you are local to each of the cities and states you target. In addition to adding keywords for those areas, your website content must also include each city or state you’ve added into your keywords. You will get better results if the search engine sees those keywords on the page, and not solely in the meta data. Adding this content can be as simple as adding an “Areas of Service” paragraph at the bottom of your home page with a list of each of the targeted cities and states. Once again, you’re narrowing your search competition and increasing your chances of moving to the top of the search.

National Marketing
Businesses that deliver anywhere in the country benefit the most from national marketing. If your product or service could be delivered anywhere, then national marketing would help you the most. A great example is software companies or retail consumer products.

Keyword Strategy for National Marketing
Believe it or not, on a national scale, geo-targeting your keywords will increase your search traffic. People search local. If you sell to consumers in Citrus County Fl, even though you are located in Wyoming, targeting your site’s keywords to include Nashville will get better results than leaving the local out of your keywords. Try searching for your product without a locator in your keywords. Look at the number of website results. Now try the same search with a locator in the keywords. The number of website results will be significantly smaller. It is easier to compete with a few hundred thousand other sites than tens of millions. You can target multiple states and multiple cities. If your website is correctly optimized, you can even change regions at will.

Pay-per-click campaigns are especially important to geo-target. You’ll pay less per click for a targeted keyword than for a general keyword. The general keywords have more people playing, so you have to bid more per click just to get placed in a decent spot. Besides, there is so much click fraud out there that it would be a shame to pay $10 for a fraudulent click on a national scale than $.50 for a localized click. You reduce budget waste by purchasing less expensive clicks.

To manage your online marketing, first, make sure you have an optimized website and great traffic analytics. Visit my website for more tips and advice.