Meet Bob. Bob lives in Toronto, has a girlfriend whose birthday is coming up soon, but the catch is he’s too busy to go out and find her the perfect gift. This is where local inbound marketing saves Bob’s day.While on a break from work he can easily research what he needs to buy. For such a personal gift, however, he’ll need to really handpick the item. Luckily, using just his smartphone, he can search for local stores and shops throughout Toronto so he can drop by one on his way home. Any businesses or establishments that can offer Bob the best gift for his girlfriend BUT don’t implement good local inbound marketing for Toronto will miss out – they’ll never even reach their ideal target market.Local inbound marketing is huge for small to mid-sized businesses, as Bob’s story shows. It’s common sense to focus on your local market, but in the global, digital environment sometimes business owners fail to do so.You see, local inbound marketing leverages proximity, scale, and user experience to business owners’ advantage.
A Matter of Proximity
In Bob’s case, it’s simply much easier to find something close. You should know that Bob’s case is practically everyone’s case.In fact, Google’s universal search is smart enough to take your IP address’ location and match it to local results whenever you search for something specific that Google’s algorithm might construe as an item you want to purchase.
is an entire experience that business need to leverage through local inbound marketing.Speaking of Google, the SEO impact of local inbound marketing is sufficiently significant that it’s a direct contributor to the growth of your business’ online presence.
A Matter of Scale
As mentioned earlier, the digital ecommerce landscape is global – it’s easy to reach out to someone from halfway across the world and let them know your business exists. But what’s the value of that?You want to reach out to Bob, not someone a thousand miles away from Toronto. It’s a matter of scale: you can reach a wider audience, but you can only cash in on some – so focus on that some and maximize their revenue-generating potential. A second facet of scale comes into play here: if your business is simply not big enough to stretch its offerings to other geographic locations, there’s no return on investment you can reap to justify marketing to other locales. Your business is not Coke or Levi’s – at least not yet.
A Matter of User Experience
Everything is about UX now – even the sales funnel is focused on providing the best experience possible, from search to purchase. If we take a look at Bob, his consumer journey had several points where UX would have had a big impact, such as his smartphone search. This is another reason local inbound marketing should be done perfectly.Local inbound marketing spans
, mobile design and optimization, and local target marketing. The game-changers like mobile use have their own ecosystems: mobile consumer research starts either on search engines (48%), branded mobile sites (33%), or branded apps (26%). If your local inbound marketing doesn’t extend to these unique ecosystems, you’ll never reach Bob.So next time you plan on
designing a mobile ecommerce site
, always consider local inbound marketing Toronto – or wherever it is you’re targeting.So, Bob’s boyfriend of the year for getting his girlfriend the perfect birthday present, and you earn as much as you can from your Toronto audience through local inbound marketing – everyone wins.
Image: Man Using Cell Phone Courtesy: Sean Justice, New York, NY
