How to Capitalise on Local Marketing During the Festive Period

This year has been especially hard for retailers, with more than three months of lockdown stopping consumers from visiting physical stores. The holiday season comes as the last chance to boost sales in 2021 and to start 2022 with a bang through local marketing!

But what to focus on?

In this article, we’ll review some local marketing tactics that can be implemented quickly, to help give 2020 that last extra boost through improving your search rankings, online traffic, and establishing your business in your local community.

1. Make one last fresh update to your local listings: Is your business offering delivery during the holiday period? Do you have new festive photos that your customers would love to see? Then make sure your customers know this! Updating your profiles for your retail network will not only bring traffic to your store, but it will help you display better what’s going on in each of your locations. Keep in mind that platforms like Google, Facebook or Bing take the “freshness” of the data into account while calculating relevancy and visibility. A bit of shiny new data can only help!

2. Add an offer post: Google My Business (GMB) gives you the option to add offer-type posts to the front. This allows you to promote any sales or deals that you have during the holiday season. Offer posts require a title, as well as a start and end date. You can include a photo, video, description, coupon, link and terms and conditions. And remember, by using Localistico you can launch an offer post for several locations at once, instead of having to do it manually.

3. Be on top of your local reputation: This includes Reviews and Q&A. With more customers doing last-minute shopping, it’s important to be on top of their comments, questions and concerns. Plus, as this is the season to be jolly, hopefully good moods mean more great reviews! It’s the perfect timing to connect with your customers, either by addressing their concerns and wishing them a nice holiday or thanking them for whatever they highlighted about your store or service. As discussed in our last article, Reputation Management: The Perks of Online Reviews, 90% of consumers read reviews before visiting a business and 95% read them before making a purchase. 

4. Boost your local social media: Social media is probably one of the quickest and most efficient ways to connect with customers. But how can you keep your strategy local? Here’s a list of things you can do:

• Set a location to your profile
• Tag the location in each post
• Use local hashtags
• Start conversations that are happening locally
• Share local pictures and videos.
• Create local marketing content to share

5. Keep your Store Pages fresh: If you have already created Local Store Pages, we highly encourage you to update them before the festive season starts. Some of the things these pages contain are opening hours, stock availability, promotions, appointment links, and much more. If you have invested in giving customers the locally customised content they are looking for, then make the most of it! Remember that 76% of local searches end in a visit to your store. If you want to learn more about Store Pages, check this blog post out. 

6. Launch Hyper localized Ads campaigns: Run and maintain geo-targeted campaigns to drive local awareness and capture high intent, local customers. By narrowing your target, you can make the most of your budget and improve conversion by reaching only potential customers close to you. These campaigns will help you appear in Google Search results as well as in Google Maps. Find out more here.

How can we help?

From the Localistico platform, you can update all of your information in bulk in just a few clicks. This will save you a significant amount of time and ensure that you keep the information synchronised across local platforms and in your store pages on the website. We can also help you launch Ad and Post campaigns for your promotions, whilst collecting all your analytics across channels, making your job simpler and more effective.