3 Ways to Improve Your Local Marketing in 2016

 

Think Mobile

In order to succeed in 2016, you must think mobile. This requires adopting a frame of mind that puts yourself in the shoes of your consumer at any given moment that may connect them with your brand. Consumers today are mostly loyal to their own needs and not brands, so the better you can understand the need of your product in day-to-day life, the more likely you will be able convert them. One term you’ll hear a lot this year to describe this type of marketing is “micro-moments”.

What are micro-moments?

In the pre-smartphone era, when you had a question or had a random thought arise that sparked curiosity, you’d either a) wait until you were at a computer to research it, or b) completely forget about it, and move on with your life.

Now that we have the source of all information at our fingertips, we can receive instant information to whatever query pops into our minds. Consumers are no longer carving out time to do research on a specific topic at their desktops, but rather spending a few seconds here and there researching whatever comes to mind at the moment. Marketing experts have given these quick research sessions the term “micro-moments”, and brands are racing to get in front of them.

For more ideas on how to harness the power of mobile marketing, read our recent blog post, “Mobile Dominates Best New Strategies of 2015”

Enhanced Local Listing Content

As I mentioned earlier, consumers are becoming more and more loyal to their needs rather than specific brands. If you are a brick and mortar business, you need to fill out as many fields as possible in your local listings. For example, if you are a restaurant – do you provide valet? Is there a dress code? Are reservations required? Not only does this information provide credibility to the listing which instills trust in the user, it provides meaningful content that may be the deciding factor that leads to an in-store purchase.

In addition to providing enhanced content about your business, it’s crucial that you are actively monitoring and responding to reviews, uploading new images and making sure that your listings are consistently up-to-date and accurate.

Enhanced Local Landing Pages

Google recently announced that its knowledge panel will begin populating schema data from local pages. Google My Business listings currently display a fairly limited amount of information compared to other listing channels, so this new development will allow business owners to display more specific information via schema markup.

In his recent blog post, Mike Blumenthal explained, “The specification supports the standard array of schema options including address, lat-long and phone as well as the recently added place actions like reservations and ordering, special hours and departmental detail […]

With this direct schema to Knowledge Panel pilot and the broad rollout of the Google My Business API, Google is signaling a more open and flexible approach to allowing multi- location businesses to provide detailed location information to Google.

In conclusion, 2016 is going to be the year marketers really have to understand their consumers on a deeper level and create hyper-specific content to meet their needs. Local search engine marketers will have to look beyond ranking and accuracy, and will have to begin focusing on enhanced local content in order to stand out.

 

Image credit: Google