Businesses with a brick-and-mortar location need an effective way to reach a specific geographic area, and local advertising provides that venue. Through local advertising, businesses can reach new customers in a local community and increase their brand awareness. Yet sometimes getting started in local advertising feels overwhelming. What are the best channels to use? How can you most effectively spend your marketing dollars? Here are some tips to help you get started with local advertising.

1. Set Your Goals

Start by setting your goals. Goals will drive your marketing efforts, because without a goal you cannot know if your marketing is finding success. Some examples of goals to use for local brick-and-mortar businesses include:

• Improve brand awareness
• Increase foot traffic to your location
• Increase sales figures

Once you’ve defined your goals, you can set key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine if you’re meeting them, and adjust your marketing efforts if you’re falling short.

2. Define Your Target Audience

Next, define your target audience. Having a narrowly defined audience allows you to fine-tune your targeting and spend money only on the advertising that will effectively reach your target demographic. This makes your advertising efforts as efficient and effective as possible.

3. Choose the Right Channels and Tactics

Once you know your audience, you can choose the advertising channels where they are most likely to see your advertisements. With local advertising, there are some highly effective channels and tactics available. Local radio, for example, is only going to reach people who live in or visit your target area. Local SEO can help you promote your products or services to local customers while they’re searching for them online. And geotargeting uses geographic modifiers to deliver ads to customers in a specific area. Again, this helps make your marketing dollars more effective. 

Which one of these channels should be your main focus? That answer is not easy, because it will vary depending on the business. The best approach is an integrated marketing strategy that creates a cohesive marketing experience between these various channels. By blending different channels together, like using radio advertising to point people to social media or running display ads to retarget radio listeners, you will more effectively reach the people in your local community with a unified message.

4. Build a Measurement Strategy

You cannot advertise effectively and with confidence if you aren’t measuring your success. You need to know what is working, and what is not, so you can refine your advertising efforts. Tracking KPIs will give you data you can use to measure your effectiveness. Tie those KPIs to your original goals, then tweak your advertising if needed.

5. Consult a Media Partner

Local advertising and building an effective local advertising strategy is not always easy. When done well, it is highly effective, but choosing the right channels, defining your audience, and analyzing results takes practice. Consulting with a media partner, like Zimmer, can help you in each of these local advertising efforts. A media partner knows the local market and the advertising channels well, and can guide you to better decisions.

Local advertising is the most effective way to drive local traffic to your business. In the Joplin and Four State community, Zimmer is ready to help you create an effective local advertising plan. If you are looking to reach this market, reach out to Zimmer to learn more today.