How to Promote Your Business Locally

This may be obvious but a great way to promote your local business is to make sure you can be found online. That starts with a website.

Your business website should be filled with local information that clearly defines where your business is located and your hours of operation.

It’s a really good idea to list the products and services your business offers.

One way to help increase the likelihood your business shows up in search is to link to and build links from other local area businesses. 

The way to do that is to create and publish blog posts. You can even reach out to and mention other area businesses that might lend their influence to you within your blog posts. 

One of the best utilities you should consider is building an email list with the aid of your website. More on the importance of building an email list later in this article.

Speaking of search, local consumers often use Google to search for products, services, and businesses. Having a Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business is probably the single best account you should create.

Google Business Profile is a free tool that allows you to promote your business website and show up in Google Search and Maps.

Your Google Business Profile also allows you to see and connect with customers, post updates and see how your customers are interacting with your business on Google.

Here’s the thing, anyone can leave a review using the reviews facility. And as such, this will help keep you involved and engaged with your customer base.

Google Business Profile will also allow you to leverage the opportunity to let your audience know about your other social accounts as well as the opportunity to links about upcoming events, blog posts, and press you may have received.

We would submit that the most important asset you can create, build and leverage to promote your business is your email list!

Don’t have one or not sure how an email list can help you promote your business?

No problem.

An email list is a big-time asset than can be responsible for real top-line revenue!

Being able to communicate with your audience is a big deal.

The opportunity to let your audience know you have specials or deals, new products, and services can lead to transactional relationships.

Take for instance the uncomfortable very real lockdowns the world experienced. So many businesses were negatively impacted because they failed to build a real email list of current or existing customers. The inability to communicate whether their local business was open or closed resulted in obscurity and confusion.

If those same businesses were able to communicate with their customers via email, they could simply inform their audience of their modified hours of operation, and how they were going to serve their customers should they need products or services their business offered (curbside pickup, online, etc).

Once a local business develops an email list, they are also not as reliant on some of the other big tech platforms for traffic.

Instead, the plan and strategy to leverage some of these social and search platforms would be to build an email list by which a local business could then communicate and market to an interested local audience.