As a local business owner, you know that “word of mouth” is easily the most effective and important way to market your business. Indeed, especially when it comes to local business, word of mouth is a very common and crucial means of attracting customers to your door.
Your prospective customers will look to their friends and acquaintances to find and learn more about your business.
Your prospects rely on such information because frankly they don’t know anything about you or your business. You have to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and understand that they are taking a bit of a risk when they decide to use your services or products. After all, they don’t know if your services or products are just plain bad, if they can trust you, etc.
Get Your Business On the Map
Google’s been undergoing a lot of developments lately in order to appeal to local business owners.
One important area of change has been with Google Maps.
Obviously, as a local business owner, Google Maps is very relevant and important to your business. When potential customers are looking for a business near them online, they typically use map sites like Google Maps.
Yeah I know.
What can a shirtless man sporting men’s deodorant teach you about marketing your business?
Well, a lot of things actually. This advertising campaign is easily one of the most popular advertising campaigns to come along in the last few years. Not only did it receive a lot of attention from viewers but it also sparked a great deal of positive reaction too.
I know you are likely thinking…do I really need another window decal to put on my business?
Indeed, just when you thought that you had all the window decals you need, along comes Facebook with yet another one.
Apparently, Facebook is sending special window decals to certain local businesses that have text-to-like SMS instructions on them. The picture below demonstrates what it looks like
It’s no secret that Facebook is a massive force in the internet world. It has nearly 500 million users already an counting. As such, Facebook is a powerful tool for local internet marketing, and can greatly help you both attract and retain local customers for your business.
Look out Foursquare and Google Latitude! Facebook is now getting into the location-based social networking sphere.
Ad Age reported that Facebook is preparing to launch a new feature that will allow any Facebook users to broadcast their current location along with status updates. This allows marketers to further target individuals with even more relevant location-relevant ads.
To be honest, it seems absolutely natural that Facebook would get into the geo-networking game. The more information it has about it’s users, the better relevant ads it can serve to them. Moreover, it gives its users yet another tool with which they can interact with their social network. Wouldn’t it be kinda cool to know the exact location of some of your Facebook friends (or be really really creepy at least)?
In case you haven’t heard, Google has renamed its local business site from Local Business Center to Google Places. This isn’t just a name change either. Google’s brought some more features to the Places pages to further help local businesses market themselves. For instance, you can now specify an are that you can service on Google Maps so that customers can know if they fall within your service area. You can also post real-time updates (just like Twitter) to your Places page which can help you promote specials, discounts, etc. It appears that Google is bringing these changes as a means to revamp and retool its local business initiatives.
You may or may not have heard of a little location-based social networking site called Foursquare.
For those of you who have heard of it, you may also know that it has one of the fastest growing user bases of all the social networks. In fact, though it is still a very new service, it is already closing in on 1 million users!
Moreover, because of it’s sudden rise in popularity and it’s value as an effective local internet marketing platform, Yahoo had offered as much as $125 million to buy Foursquare!