It All Comes Down to Marketing: Dominate Your Local Market

By Audrey Nesbitt

If you are looking to attract new, relevant clients and customers to your local business, you need to undertake a local marketing strategy that combines traditional and new marketing channels with a combination of offline and online tactics. Determining which marketing channels and tactics to use is the tricky part. How do you know if your potential customers are on TikTok or Facebook? How do you get started in virtual events? Should you consider setting up an Ecommerce shop with Shopify or Facebook Shops? Do flyers still convert? How can you dominate local search with search engine optimization? And cold calling sucks but does it still work?

This book is your one stop shop for all your local marketing questions.

In this book, we cover a variety of marketing channels and tactics including:

Search Engine Optimization
Google My Business
Social Media
Tracking Pixels
Ecommerce
Flyers and Business Cards
Email Marketing
Live Events
Virtual Events
Cold Calling
and so much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Audrey Nesbitt
• Release date: May 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463498484

Audrey Nesbitt

Audrey Nesbitt, is a marketing & communications expert with a deep passion for emerging technologies and gender equality initiatives. She currently mentors for WITM Women in Technology Management at Ryerson University, and a non-profit educational hub for women and youth in Blockchain and AI.

Book preview

IT ALL COMES DOWN TO MARKETING

Dominate Your Local Market

By Audrey Nesbitt

Published by Audrey Nesbitt at Smashwords

Copyright © 2020, Audrey Nesbitt

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or modified in any form, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Dedication

To the marketer in all of us, after all, it all comes down to marketing.

Word of mouth can be as important, if not more important, for neighborhood businesses as traditional advertising.

- Ekaterina Walter

Author’s note

I love marketing. To me, it is a continually evolving process always in need of adapting and refining. The terms for what is popular in marketing have changed over the years, but the concept of what good marketing is has not.

Online you will find definitions of marketing to mean the process of getting clients or customers interested in your product or service. I believe it goes further in the sense that it is the process of creating and maintaining a relationship. Whether it's a business relationship with clients or a personal relationship, we can adapt and refine how we are perceived. It's all marketing.

A great marketing person has a drive that lies deep within them. A knack for thinking outside the box. A love of the hustle. Whether it’s called online or offline marketing, growth hacking marketing, e-commerce marketing, experiential marketing, regardless, to me, it is all marketing. And it all comes down to marketing.

A special thanks to Alex Genadinik for helping me with this project.

Audrey

We’re all born naked, and the rest is a drag.

-RuPaul

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1. What defines a local business?

2. Can your business benefit from this book?

3. Offline marketing is indispensable

4. Nailing the elevator pitch

5. Perfecting the sales pitch

6. Long-term marketing strategies to create long-term customers

7. Adapt and refine

CHAPTER 2: ONLINE MARKETING

1. SEO (search engine optimization)

2. Yelp

3. Additional websites for your business listing

4. Social media marketing

5. Tracking pixels

6. Google My Business

7. YouTube promotional videos & SEO

8. Dominating SEO

9. E-commerce

CHAPTER 3: DAY TO DAY MARKETING

1. Business cards

What your business cards should include:

2. Your name and catchphrase

3. Your photo

4. Possible additional info

5. Links and QR codes

6. Add humor

7. What not to add to your card

8. Go Pro

9. Double-sided business cards, Yay or Nay?

10. Tracking your business card marketing results

11. Prolonging the life of your business card

12. Networking

13. Creative follow-ups

CHAPTER 4: FLIER MARKETING

1. Is flyer marketing still effective?

2. Geographics, demographics and psychographics

3. Identifying your ideal customer

DESIGNING YOUR FLIER

4. Four elements of a great flier

5. AIDA

6. A in AIDA, creating a great offer

7. What type of images should you use?

8. AIDA Interest and Desire

9. Call to Action (the last A of AIDA)

10. Flyer printing

11. Mistakes NOT to make with your flyers

MARKETING YOUR FLYERS

12. Flyer distribution

13. Tracking the ROI of your flyer campaigns

CHAPTER 5: EVENT & WORKSHOP MARKETING

1. The Alex Genadinik hiking events case study

2. The basics of creating a successful event series

3. Generating revenue from your events

4. Pricing for events

5. Hiring staff for your event

6. Should you register your event as a business?

7. Should you get insurance for your event?

8. Getting a free event venue

9. Add pizzazz with sponsored prizes

10. Email Marketing

11. Getting Attendees

12. Local event websites and calendar listings

13. Promoting your events on social media

14. Promoting events on your website

15. SEO (search engine optimization) for your website

16. Branding

17. Building a leadership brand

18. Generating publicity and standing out above the crowd

19. Live streaming to grow your event

20. Virtual events

CHAPTER 6: OFFLINE MARKETING STRATEGIES

1. How to get appearances on the radio and podcasts

2. Getting referrals

3. Join a local press club

4. Where to splash your logo and website

5. Door to door marketing

6. Guerilla, Experiential, Viral

7. Newspaper ads

8. Direct mail campaigns

9. Cold calling sucks…but

10. Brick and mortar alternatives

MARKETING RESOURCES

FOREWORD

The advice in this book comes from my own experience and success in working on campaigns for many successful global and local brands. I love marketing, and I believe we all have to market something, whether it is ourselves, our businesses, or our passions. In sharing these strategies, I hope that you too will find success and be able to grow your business using these techniques. I wish you the best of luck in your business and hope that the ideas in this book will help you.

It all comes down to marketing.

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

- Jack Welch

1. What defines a local business?

Ok. So, this may seem like a silly question. But how you define your business dictates parts of your marketing strategy. I have consulted for small businesses that didn't realize how small their targeted geographic area was—knowing whether or not your customers come from within a 10-mile radius or a 2-mile radius affects your marketing strategies and impacts your budget.

If a large percentage of your customers/clients are within a few blocks, within a city, or a region, you are a local business. For example, for the most part, restaurants are all local. The bulk of all restaurant business is from those residing or working within proximity to it. There is a small percentage of restaurants that may have a larger target area and may be considered GLOCAL (a mix of both local and global) like the Cheesecake Factory.

This famous restaurant would have a marketing strategy with both global and local tactics to attract a consistent clientele within a few-mile radius, people from all parts of the area, but also from all over the world. Their cheesecakes are also available in various countries in retail grocery stores which would play into a larger, global marketing strategy.

GLOCAL is the idea, that to succeed, one must 'think global and act local.' This would entail a combination of local and global marketing strategies. Global brands like Starbucks and McDonalds could be considered successful GLOCAL brands in this instance. They adjust their menus and marketing to local demographics. Small to medium-sized businesses can also be GLOCAL if they sell locally through a brick and mortar location but sell globally through Etsy or Amazon.

A hair salon, a variety store, and most restaurants are local. Realtors, law firms, even a winery that has a lot of events (local) but sells wine to distributors and ships cases of wine nationally can be considered local or GLOCAL. What differs is the size of the radius in which your core customers would realistically live or work.

2. Can your business benefit from this book?

Yes. Though many of the businesses previously listed are quite different, a lot of the marketing techniques covered in this book can apply to any business type.

Why? Because your potential clients/customers, for the most part, behave the same. They use Facebook, Instagram, Google, and may spend lots of time on TikTok. Many of them shop on Etsy or Amazon or perhaps still read the community paper or go to local networking events.

I hope that by reading this book you learn more about the various marketing channels and tactics you can use to market your business. Perhaps you will be inspired to the point of crafting the next social media craze or launching the next big product.

3. Offline marketing is indispensable

Today, most small businesses, out of the gate, will say their marketing strategy focusses on social media or SEO (search engine optimization). Some still swear by flyers delivered by mail