Steps to Kickstart Your Hyperlocal Marketing Strategy
Building a brand is more than just creating a website and setting up social media profiles. It’s about true, authentic engagement with your target customers. And, for any business, this means creating a real presence within the communities in which it serves.
Hyperlocal marketing helps companies to reach their target customers in the specific communities that matter most to them, increasing brand recognition and creating positive brand associations through strategic community partnerships. From large to small business marketing efforts, local brand awareness is the key to lasting community brand loyalty.
Take these steps to get started building your own hyperlocal marketing strategy:
Research your location(s)
Identify which specific communities you’ll be targeting with your local marketing efforts. Do you have areas near brick-and-mortar locations that you want to target? Or if your business is primarily online, do you have specific markets with higher rates of sales or growth? If you are not already familiar with your target geo, fire up the search bar and do your research on nearby neighborhoods. Where do your target personas live and work? It’s helpful to get a lay of the land when building plans for growth.
Craft messaging catered to your audience
Building hyperlocal brand awareness is about embracing the neighborhoods where your audience spends time to boost your brand perception and drive conversions for your business. This means investing time, energy, and, yes, marketing dollars into that effort to show a meaningful presence locally. Your brand messaging should reflect that presence. If there is regional slang, use it. If there are town-specific celebrations, find an opportunity to create promotions or conversations around them online. By speaking the language of your target audience, you show that you are invested in the community. This sentiment demonstrates to potential customers that you are invested in them, increasing local brand awareness, credibility, and trust.
Engage with your audience online and in the real world
If you want people to engage with your brand on the local level, it needs to be a two-way conversation—and not just online. Develop a social media presence that aligns with your brand goals, creating content that feels like an authentic extension of your brand. Practice good web hygiene and keep all web properties up-to-date with your current contact information and descriptive product offerings—this helps elevate you in “near me” searches. Be responsive through various online channels, like Yelp and Google My Business. Participate in and consider sponsoring local events to get in-person interactions with the people you are trying to reach. By identifying organizations that align with your brand values, unexpected partnerships can blossom and new local marketing opportunities can arise.
Create a lasting brand impression
It’s a competitive marketing landscape, so building a hyperlocal marketing strategy can help marketers pinpoint the right customers by location. Find unique ways to demonstrate your brand values with the sponsorship of community assets, participation in local events, or more tactile efforts to help get you in front of your target demographic, like Soofa out of home advertising (OOH) digital signs. These interactive outdoor marketing assets are strategically placed in high-traffic locations, helping to increase local brand awareness and improve conversion with every impression. With consistent messaging, your marketing teams can begin to build on your growing brand recognition nearby and really make your mark.
Set goals and measure your results
No marketing campaign would be complete without knowing its effectiveness. Work backward to define realistic goals, develop budgets, and set a timeframe for measurement. As with everything in marketing, it’s about iterating to maximize ROI. So plan your hyperlocal attack, build it out, test it, and review. Improvement starts with an honest look at your results, so leverage the vast library of tools, like Google Analytics to monitor organic search or Soofa’s ad impression monitoring to adjust your campaigns and see the impact hyperlocal marketing can make!
If you are hoping to build genuine credibility in a particular area, a local marketing strategy that is focused and specific can give your business a brand awareness boost in your key neighborhoods. So, consider getting hyperlocal with your efforts; a targeted approach will not only improve your marketing efforts but stretch your marketing dollars, too!
