Finding Customers/Clients/Patients/Guests Close to Your Location

For most businesses, customers will be found in their local service area, or within driving distance of their location.

For example, a dentist in Frisco, TX may have patients drive in from other areas around Dallas, but will most likely have mostly Frisco residents as patients.

A plumber based in San Diego, CA will probably not be interested in a callout from Los Angeles, unless perhaps its a big enough job to warrant the travel time and expense, although even regional licensing could pose a problem.

If your business has a defined 'catchment' area around one or more physical locations, or a service area within which you would respond to callouts, you want to ensure that your marketing and advertising is targeting only that area.

There are several marketing and advertising methods that allow this:

• Map search results (Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc)
• Local directories (Yelp, Urban Spoon, Yellow Pages, etc)
• Search results, geo-targeted (e.g. "Austin plumber" searched in Google or Bing)
• Facebook ads

Within each category, there are a number of tactics, both paid and unpaid, that should be used to ensure that your business is chosen by your prospective customers.

For example, to ensure your location appears when someone uses a map search, it's a good idea to have a Google+ business profile, as well as several address 'citations' on various other websites. Citatations are really just appearances of your business name, phone number and address.

In addition, you will want to ensure you have a mobile-friendly website, since a large (and growing) percentage of people use their mobile phones to look for local services and products.

Reputation is also important - when your business is listed alongside your competitors, you do not want to be the only one with one star out of five, simply because a disgruntled former employee gave your listing a bad rating.

Every local business should ensure they have at least one, preferably more, of these in place:

1. A location in map searches
2. A mobile-friendly website
3. Reputation management
4. Local directory listings
5. Optimized, geo-targeted search ads (e.g. Google Adwords with Ad Extensions)
6. Map search ads
7. Facebook ads, geo-targeted
8. Call tracking

Local businesses can also benefit from other methods such as video marketing, QR codes, email marketing, and text message marketing.

To find out how we can help you with any and all of these marketing and advertising strategies, call 1-877-752-0852 today.