Generating leads for your local business can take considerable time and effort. You need a super-targeted approach so that every lead you reach out to qualifies for your business.
You may have come across countless tips and hacks to grow your business online, raising questions like:
- Are you supposed to be on TikTok?
- Do you have to maintain an Instagram profile?
- Will optimizing your local Google listings help?
But which ones are actually effective in generating leads for you in the long term? Let’s have a closer look.
What’s Local Lead Generation?
As the name suggests, local lead generation is all about reaching potential customers for a small business within a single area or region.
Such leads are extremely important to the success of any small local business.
So, with local lead generation, you focus all your resources on targeting the audience of one particular area, like a single zip code, city, or region. That means if a person is located in your area of market interest and fits the buyer persona you are targeting, that’s a potential qualified lead for your local business.
How to Get Leads for Your Local Business?
Local businesses most often have a tiny budget for marketing. As a result, the resources they can spend on marketing are generally limited, restricting their access to quality marketing services or consultancy.
But with the advancement of online marketing methods, shouldn’t local lead generation be a breeze for businesses? Well, that’s often not the case.
Online marketing could be intimidating for a few, especially for business owners who are just starting out. And it will only be an uphill task with all the new changes that Google is rolling out.
So, how do you increase visibility and get noticed in this hyper-competitive market? Don’t worry, we have all your answers.
3 Effective Lead Generation Strategies for Your Local Business
Local businesses heavily rely on organizing community events to attract local buyers. While organizing local meet-ups and fairs is a fail-proof way of getting to know your customers and pitching your product or service to them, there are other proven ways to promote your business in the local market, like:
- Know Where Your Customers Are Looking:
The most effective way to start off your marketing journey for your local business is to know where your customers are looking for similar products or services. Researching your ideal customers will save you a ton of time and effort rather than guessing or blindly following other businesses.
For example, if you have a dairy business where most of your customers still read the newspaper, you could consider advertising your business in the local newspapers.
Or, if you have a grocery store, you could consider adding more signage outside the store to lure in customers walking by.
However, the easiest way to learn more about your customers is through Google. Searching on Google has now almost become a reflex action when people need to know or buy something. So, start by testing what your potential customers would search to find similar businesses like yours.
Let’s say you own a Chinese restaurant business in Dallas, Texas. In that case, the most effective way to make your business visible on Google is to get on Google local listings.
People will search the keywords “Chinese restaurants in Dallas” or “Chinese food near me” on Google to look up their options. And the very first option that pops up on the search results is Google Maps.
So, your first task would be to get your business included on GMB (Google My Business) listings and optimize it to rank your business in Google Maps. You can easily do so by:
- Adding complete information about your business,
- Keeping your business hours accurate,
- Verifying your business location,
- Responding to reviews actively,
- Adding photos, and
- Including in-store products (or dishes).
All these will help you establish relevance for Google to understand your business better so that your business ranks in the local listings according to distance and prominence.
For further information, you can refer to Google’s own guidelines for local listings here.
- Get Listed in Articles
You might have noticed that a few articles follow the local listings on Google when you search for local businesses (or restaurants).
These are exhaustive lists of local businesses compiled by local reviewers, journalists, guides, critiques, or businesses.
So, reach out to the writers of these top-ranking articles and get featured in their lists. Send them samples of your product and invite them to write reviews on their websites.
Getting backlinks on two or three top articles is an effective lead-generation method to boost your website traffic and help you get noticed among the prominent players of your niche.
Wondering how to pitch your product to local writers or journalists?
You can start with a cold email lead generation.
- Instead of sending just one or two fragmented emails to your leads, you could set up cold email drip campaigns for them over a month so they get ample time to respond to your messages.
- Moreover, cold emails are easy too. You can automate the entire campaign, set it, and send emails to hundreds of leads with just a few clicks. Yep, that’s pretty much it.
- Automated cold email campaigns help you save valuable time and resources so you can concentrate on your core competencies peacefully.
And with Omni, it’s super-easy. You can set up an email campaign in just a couple of minutes and reach out to high-quality people by spending only 10 minutes/ day.
Want to know how you can set up your email outreach system with Omni? You can follow this quickstart guide to cold emailing success with Omni.
Bonus tip – Write Your Own Articles
Writing blogs, guides, and articles on the most searched keywords related to your business will surely help your business in SEO.
Maintaining a steady flow of articles on your websites helps you in multiple ways:
- You can stay relevant,
- Establish yourself as an industry leader, and
- Optimize your business for SEO.
Consider consulting an SEO expert and publishing content pieces regularly to climb up higher in SERPs.
- Add Your Business to All Local Directories
Adding your business to listicles and directories like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Thrillist, Thumbtack, Yellow Pages, etc., is a winning lead-generation strategy for local businesses.
People generally rely on directories like these for reviews and recommendations on local businesses. Needless to say, finding your business at the top of these directories will boost your visibility drastically and, ultimately, your sales.
Pro tip
Running an ad is an easy hack to beat your competition and rank at the top of these directories.
You can even run an ad on Google local listings to jump your competitors. And this should be at the top of your lead generation methods and strategies, as Google local listings appear at the topmost section of the search result pages.
In Summary
The key to generating unlimited leads for your local business is to take your business where your customers are. Optimize your business on Google, Bing, social media platforms, directories, etc., for maximum visibility.
The most effective lead-generation method for local businesses is word-of-mouth publicity. So, ensure you provide the best product or service and, most importantly, an unparalleled after-sales service. Because reviews, testimonials, and personal recommendations are the foundation stones of building brand credibility.
And if you wish to expand into new territories with cold email campaigns, sign up for OmniLeads. OmniLeads helps you get millions of verified leads in your exact target market without breaking the bank. Get ready access to the most up-to-date contact information of all the ideal clients you’ve been dying to work with.
Arm yourself with the world’s most effective lead database – OmniLeads, and get 25 leads free just for signing up.
