Local businesses often skip using Google advertising because of a common misconception that it only benefits multinational companies. But what businesses should know is that local paid traffic is as valuable as a global audience and is actually easier to set up than creating a full-blown Local Area Marketing campaign.
What is Local Area Marketing?
Local Area Marketing (LAM) is, according to Franchise Business, the implementation of “marketing opportunities in local communities”. Actively using LAM campaigns helps your business, both at the franchise and national levels, to increase brand awareness, web and in-store visits and repeat customers.
LAM campaigns are also useful for non-franchise businesses. If you’re a solo business location that wants to target a community and have an edge over your competitors, you can also apply these strategies and tailor them to your needs and goals.
Most LAM campaigns target people within a 10km radius but, depending on what you want, campaigns could expand their target areas.
What you need for a successful LAM campaign
Targeting a local community can be a little daunting if you don’t know what you need to be seen. Here are the basics:
- A Google My Business profile – because it’s the biggest search engine and around 3.9 billion (yes) searches are made each day, this is the perfect environment for your customers to find you
- Social media accounts that tell the story about your brand in relation to your location
- A website, with a blog and a well-thought keyword strategy
If you’re intent on running a Local Area Marketing campaign, it’s also important that you add in PPC, especially Google local ads.
Why you should use Google local ads
Any business that wants to increase their in-store visits and improve awareness about the services they offer can create a local ad campaign. You can take advantage of the fact that almost half of searches on Google have local intent – meaning that the person typing a string of keywords is looking for a service near them. Imagine looking for a dog-friendly cafe in Darlinghurst and getting several results in seconds.
Aside from that, according to Safari Digital, “near me” searches have increased by over 130% in the last year and over half of these “near me” searches result in an offline in-store visit.
And it’s going to be easier for you if you try out Google local ads. Because your proposed ad campaign is more relevant to potential customers near you, you’ll actually spend less for better performance.
If you want to skip several steps and spend less time creating campaigns, you can use OneClick.
Create Local Area Marketing campaigns in seconds with OneClick
Just recently, we at DigitalMaas launched our newest product called OneClick, a world-first fully automated advertising function that’s available on our Platform. This is ideal for businesses with multiple locations that want to target specific suburbs or cities – but this also works with one or a few locations too.
In short, it’s perfect for any Local Area Marketing (LAM) campaign.
All you need is a verified and optimised Google My Business profile and import it on the Platform. If you haven’t begun updating your GMB profile yet, we suggest running it through our location audit feature (here’s how you can perform an audit). Once you’ve worked on optimising your profile, the next step is to create a template.
Template Creation
OneClick helps you create templates to use for your Local Area Marketing campaigns and, if you have several locations, you can use them on any number of profiles. The steps are pretty straightforward:
- Choose your goal, budget and keyword themes
- Connect your locations
- Capture your audience
It takes but a few seconds to create templates, compared to taking hours on Google Ads.
Cooperation between National Marketing Teams and franchisees
With these templates in place, it will be easier for National Marketing Teams to implement ads across all franchise locations. All they have to do is to select which location they want to target and have it approved.
Really simple, right?
Be seen just about everywhere
One of the biggest benefits of signing up to OneClick for your Local Area Marketing campaigns is that it gets you seen across Google. Your ad will be seen on:
- Search
- Maps
- GMB profiles
- Display
- YouTube
Perfect for any type of Local Area Marketing campaign
These campaigns don’t just help you increase brand awareness but also target various goals you want to achieve. Here are some examples:
- New product launches
- Promoting store services
- New store openings
- Increase in-store visits
Just set up your templates according to what goals you want to accomplish.
Make Local Area Marketing work for you
Don’t fall for the misconception that advertising on Google is meant only for big businesses – local businesses can benefit from using paid ads too. Local Area Marketing enables you to tap your local community and get a competitive edge even over global brands. With the launch of OneClick, it’s now easier to get to the top of searches and track your location performance. No need to spend so much time mulling over how to run your ad: we’ve simplified the process for you so you can get results faster.
Sign up for a DigitalMaas Platform today to access OneClick and other tools to help you become your customer’s first choice.
