Marketing to Today's Consumer: Takeaways from Explore Dallas
Last Friday, I had the pleasure of attending the first ever Explore event in Dallas presented by Jason Falls, social media strategist and founder of Social Media Explorer. The event focused on social media and content marketing for businesses, so here are a few key tips you can use for marketing your local business online.
Tell a Story with Your Marketing
The theme of the day was storytelling; as people, we love hearing, telling, and sharing stories. And if you’re not telling a story on behalf of your business, one is being told for you— in the form of social media posts, word of mouth, online reviews, and more. So, it’s important not only to listen to what is being said about you online, but also to tell a story that gets consumers to take action. A good story will prompt consumers to share it with their networks, engage with your business, and ultimately become a customer.
Create Content Tailored to Your Target Audience
So how do you tell a story with your marketing? You create content. Whether it’s a blog post, how-to video, or photos of your products, you need to create and share content that drives your target audience to take action. Evergreen content, or educational content that is not time-bound, is safe to share frequently on blogs and social media and often generates a lot of “likes” and shares from consumers, while decision-making content, like a product spotlight, and promotional content, like a special offer, can entice site visits or conversions.
Employ SEO Best Practices
When sharing content on publicly-facing sites like your website or blog, social media sites like Twitter or Google Plus, a content site like YouTube, or other online outposts, make sure to employ search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. This means using business keywords, local keywords, and metadata to ensure your content is discoverable across search engines, so more consumers can find your content.
Listen & Measure
It’s important to listen across social media sites to see how consumers are responding to, engaging with, and sharing your content. Metrics such as engagements, likes, comments, site visits, and more can help you determine how your content is being received. Plus, you can use social media as a type of forum to ask questions and conduct polls to see how people on social media feel about your brand, which can then inform the types of marketing you use to connect with them.
Go Mobile
In today’s online landscape, one of the most important places to be is on consumers’ mobile devices. Consumers on the go spend less time looking at social media on their Smartphone than on their computer, but they are highly likely to conduct a search for a local business or research a product on their mobile device. In fact:
- 46% of consumers research an item on their Smartphone before going to buy it in store
- 37% researched an item on their phone before buying online
- After looking up data on their Smartphone, 61% of users called the business and 59% visited
- 31% of adults use a mobile phone to look up a local business or restaurant
What does this all mean for your local business? It reiterates the need for a total Web presence – on both the local and mobile Web – to make sure your business is seen by potential customers online. It also means creating fresh, compelling content can get consumers to take the action you want them to take, whether it’s as simple as liking a Facebook post or contacting your business.
How is your business using storytelling, SEO, and mobile marketing to reach consumers online? Let us know in the comments.
Tamara Weintraub helps equip small business owners with information about local online advertising, social media marketing, and more as a blogger for ReachCast and ReachLocal.
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