Imagine someone has an eye infection and would like to consult an expert. However, they do not know someone in their neighborhood. What will they do? 

They will most likely search on Google, using their smartphones: “Ophthalmologists Near Me,” “Eye Specialists Near Me,” or “Eye Clinics Near Me.”

Now, if you are an ophthalmologist in that area, you need to ensure the following to convert this person with an immediate need into your customer:

• Get Found: Ensure they find your practice during the ‘near me’ search.
• Get Chosen: Enable them to choose your practice over the competition.
• Modernize Experience: Make it easy and convenient for them to engage with your practice anytime from their mobile devices.

Location marketing is about effectively managing these three aspects at every location to drive business growth. A location marketing platform provides all the tools, automation, and intelligence necessary to execute and master location marketing at scale. 

What is Location Marketing?

Location marketing is vital to drive business growth if you are a brick-and-mortar retail or service business. In today’s mobile-first world, it is necessary to attract hyperlocal, high-intent consumers – those in a specific geography with an immediate need – from search and social channels to your offline locations and make them your customers. 

In short, location based marketing is the art and science of dominating Local SEO, enabling seamless digital experiences, and streamlining marketing operations across locations to boost growth. 

Brick-and-mortar businesses such as hospitals, clinics, diagnostic labs, wellness centers, automotive dealerships, retail, and service brands that operate from physical locations targeting customers in a hyperlocal geographic area (5-10 mile radius) stand to gain the most from location marketing. 

This guide will help you understand every aspect of location based marketing and how to leverage it to attract new customers and boost revenue.

Shift in Consumer Behaviour & Emergence of Local Search

83% of the world’s population uses a smartphone today. In their moment of need, 88% of smartphone users search for a product or service on their mobile devices. Nearly half of all such searches have ‘local’ intent – users look for information, products, or services in a specific geographic area. 

In other words, ‘Local search’ is the starting point for most offline buying journeys today. 

Consider this: In 2020, out of the 2 trillion searches on Google, the most dominant search platform, 1 trillion were local searches.  

So, what is a local search? Any search that is location or geography-specific can be categorized as one. They typically target a localized area/geography/location, making them ‘hyperlocal‘ in nature. 

Examples include searches such as “Coffee Shop Near Me,” “Coffee Shop in Bangalore,” or “Coffee Shop in Whitefield.” In other words, any ‘Near Me’ or ‘City/Area/Location’- specific search can be categorized as a local search. 

Local Search today is a key source of ‘high-intent’ leads – consumers with the immediate need and high purchase intent – for brick-and-mortar businesses. Consumers rely on popular search and social platforms for such searches. 

Further, location-based brick-and-mortar businesses can now leverage the power of smartphones and location services to serve personalized content to consumers in their moment of need. Search-based target marketing through ad tech or app alerts and messaging notifications can bring consumers closer to buying a product or service.

Impact of Hyperlocal Search On Location Based Businesses

Mobile-driven, geography-specific organic search is the starting point for consumers’ offline buying journey today. Hence brick-and-mortar businesses must understand this change in consumer behavior and equip them with the right tools to attract and convert these high-intent consumers into customers. 

Why? Because every step of this hyperlocal search-led consumer buying journey is digitally influenced. 

Location marketing is vital for brick-and-mortar businesses to win customers at every step of this hyperlocal search-led buying journey. It is necessary to increase organic leads and conversions from search.  

The key goals of location marketing are:

1. Get More Leads

• Attract high-intent consumers doing a local search by enhancing hyperlocal digital discovery through effective local SEO strategies, insights, and metrics
• Drive choice by elevating hyperlocal social proof, reputation, and content

2. Boost Conversions

• Modernize customer experience by providing seamless online-to-offline engagement options
• Streamline marketing operations by tracking and responding to leads/customer inquiries in a timely, personalized, and consistent manner

Let us see how each of these two goals can be achieved!

1. Get More Leads

How does location marketing help your business to “Get more leads”?

A) Enhance Hyperlocal Discovery by Creating a Stellar Digital Presence

Let’s start with your business’s Digital Presence. Since consumers search online, your business’s digital presence across search & social media platforms should be standardized, consistent, accurate, and internally linked to your website. 

Further, ensuring your website is live and has store locators that point to the correct address on a map is a huge plus. Wherever possible back-link your location pages to your Business Profile on Google. Add URLs to your Google Business Profile that helps point visitors to your website. 

Make sure you have location pages with location-specific information like phone numbers, addresses, and services/products offered.

Google Business Profile (GBP) & Its Importance to Location Marketing

Since Google controls 89% of searches, your business must be optimized for hyperlocal searches on Google. Google 3-pack shows up on top for 93% of such searches. 

Significance of Google 3-Pack:

• About 70% of consumers doing a hyperlocal search choose a business ranked in 3-pack
• Businesses ranked here get 5X more traffic and 2X more leads

Why so? 

• According to research, 90% of users select results ranked at the top of the search.
• Since Google 3-pack ranks on top, there is more consumer engagement with businesses ranked here.
• Furthermore, on mobile devices, consumers do not prefer ads. While ads can appear above Google 3-pack, CTR (click-through rate) is < 2%.

How To Rank in Google 3-Pack and Enhance Hyperlocal Discovery?

Google’s Local SEO algorithm prioritizes search results based on proximity, relevance, and prominence (PRP). While the business cannot influence proximity, both relevance and prominence can be enhanced by implementing the following best practices. 

Here is the checklist to optimize your digital profiles on Google:  

1. Accuracy and completeness of your Google Business Profile (GBP)
   1. Ensure every significant business detail, such as business name, address, contact details (NAP), working hours, working days, closing hours, map-pin, products and services, etc., are up-to date and accurate.
   2. Primary and additional categories that best fit your business
   3. Update your profile/listing on Google frequently with photos, FAQs, and posts.
   4. Respond to consumer queries.
   5. Highlight special categories like women-owned, disability friendly, etc. 
   6. Ensure your digital profiles/listings on other platforms are accurate and consistent with GBP.
      
2. Quantity and quality of reviews
   1. Review Quantity:
      1. Frequency: How often are customers reviewing the business – daily, once in 2 days, or weekly?
      2. Velocity: How many reviews does the business get in a day/week/month?
   2. Review Quality:
      1. Native Reviews: How many are written reviews with text vs. just star ratings? Review text with relevant keywords drives up rankings.
      2. Star Ratings: High numerical ratings in Google.
         
3. Frequency and quality of content: Regularly publish high-quality, contextual, and relevant content across your digital profiles (on the key search engine and social platforms) and website.
   

B) Build Compelling Social Proof

Once consumers discover your profile on Google, your reviews and ratings determine whether they choose you or your competitors. Both numerical star ratings and review count influence their decisions.

According to recent research on the influence of Google reviews on consumer choice by SOCi over 31K Google profiles, the Conversion rate (consumers choosing to engage with a business) increases by:

• 2.8% for every 10 new reviews earned by the business
• 4.4% for every 0.1 increase in star ratings
• 16.4% for businesses that respond to 100% of their reviews

In short, review count and quality not only helps businesses rank consistently in Google 3-pack but also plays a critical role in consumer choice and decision-making. 

C) Elevate Localized Content

Create and publish highly relevant and contextual local content (posts, videos, offers, promotions, and more) across all your digital assets – location-level listings on search, social platforms, and websites. 

• Create localized content with geo-targeted keywords (blog posts, videos, infographics, images) and optimize it with local hashtags.
• Use geotags in content posts across social media platforms.
• Reshare customers’ appreciation posts on your official handle. 

Why so? In today’s mobile-first world, content drives engagement. It is all the more significant in the context of hyperlocal marketing as it has the power to influence consumers with high purchase intent and make them your customers.

D) Targeted Campaigns

Targeted campaigns help convert high-intent searchers into customers. Run geo-location-specific local ads to target a specific area within your customer catchment areas. SMS/Whatsapp/Email campaigns can help announce offers and deals to your potential customers and continue to support growth & engagement.

In short, here is your checklist to get more hyperlocal leads in 2023.

2. Boost Conversions

Provide Seamless Online-to-Offline Experiences

Once your prospective customer has found you, what’s the next step? How do you ensure that the customer can reach you easily – it could be a “Book Appointment,” “Table Reservation,” a “Call,” or even “Chat.” Providing multiple, seamless options for prospective customers to reach you and engage with you from the convenience of their smartphones helps increase conversion rates.

Today, most millennial consumers would rather message than call a business. The ability to enable chat at different entry points of your business – be it your website, social media platform, or Google Business Listing can enhance the experience for the customer and aid in conversions.

Updating information regularly about your products & services and sharing a digital catalog online, via social media, or chat channels is today considered a must-have for businesses. Sharing offers and pricing information when consumers search can help convert them faster. 

Businesses can also add location-level ordering & shipping information to their listings and payment options. Finally, the accuracy of your map location and address for store pickup helps customers make that last step in closing the order.

Here’s your cheat sheet to enhance experience and boost conversions.

• Consistent information and regular updates for all the business listings for different locations and maps. 
• Offer options for online appointment booking and the ability to chat via Google Business Messages, WhatsApp, or other channels
• Informational screens or digital catalogs across the store displaying prices, directions, size & color availability, etc.
• Make it easy for customers to order from where they land, be it your website, Social Media, or Google Business Profile. 
• Provide shipping info & store pick-up facility clearly at the point of ordering 
• Make the payment process easy for the customers, offering online and in-cash payment options. 

The following infographic will help you easily access the cheat sheet to boost conversions.

Streamline Marketing Operations

For businesses with multiple physical locations, streamlining marketing operations is the bedrock of providing superior customer experiences at every location. 

• Lead-tracking – Tracking incoming leads and ensuring they are followed up in a timely manner is a no-brainer. Ensure you respond to every new customer/lead personalized and consistently. Set up a simple ticketing system or a mechanism to automate call recording to ensure you track all messages and calls via your Location Listings. Similarly, enable simple automation to delight customers – send booking/ordering links for after-hour calls/messages. 

• Real-time alerts & notifications – Provide notifications to key stakeholders to inform them of essential activities on your Listing/Social Platforms and websites. For instance, alerting customer service when a negative review is received helps with timely corrective action. Getting notified for status updates, Q&A, and customer queries via messaging or your listing platform can enhance the responsiveness of your business. 

• Consistency in Brand Communication – Ensure you craft & share brand consistent communication across all locations – this helps standardize how customers view your business across the board. 

• Manage your digital assets – Consistently managing your digital assets across all locations becomes very important in executing your location marketing. Create a single version of the truth to track the health of your location listings and manage updates & changes such as responses to reviews, services, attributes, hours, etc. 

• Insights & Analytics – Effectively use reports & analytics to continually track and benchmark location performance, especially interaction metrics on Google such as calls, direction requests & website clicks. Cross-reference this with marketing activities performed at the location, such as incentivizing employees to get new reviews or a product offer you ran.

• Location marketing is complex. While the marketing team at corporate can come up with excellent & creative marketing strategies, a lot of the success also hinges on how well the location teams are aligned to execute these programs. Make sure your location managers & teams are co-opted into the overall vision. Skill them on tools, products, and techniques to ensure success. Run pilots in a subset of locations, and calibrate the results carefully before rolling it out to all locations.

Why Do Physical Businesses Need a Location Marketing Platform?

Three key aspects of location marketing were explored in the past sections – enhancing your business locations’ discoverability, improving your business’s ability to convert search-based visitors into customers & aligning your marketing operations across all locations. 

However, as we have seen in detail, location marketing is complex – to create and execute, as there are multiple aspects to consider. To be successful at this consistently across multiple locations (10s/100s/1000s) every single day, you need a location marketing platform. 

An ideal location marketing platform provides your business with all the tools, automation, and intelligence necessary to execute and master location marketing activities across all your locations at scale. 

Key Benefits of Location Marketing Platform 

1. Attract & Engage New Customers

Location Marketing tools help you manage your digital presence at scale across platforms. This, in turn, ensures your listings appear on top and attract your customers. They also allow you to track such leads in a single place so you can follow up and convert them effectively.

2. Superior Customer Experiences

Create personalized & superior experiences with potential customers and drive engagement through context-sensitive two-way communication. Meet customers where they are and communicate the latest offers, discounts, and giveaways. A location marketing platform can help your business locations with seamless customer interactions.

3. Understand Localized Consumer Behaviour 

Track and analyze the customer journey from business discovery to consideration and purchase at every location. Personalize your location marketing efforts to convert more. 

4. Improve Marketing ROI 

With a location marketing platform, you have access to tools & analytics to track and improve your marketing ROI across the critical aspects of local discovery, engagement, and conversions.

5. Boost Local Brand Awareness 

With a location marketing platform, you can easily create and distribute content regularly across social media & channels – a sure-fire way to enhance your local engagement in the communities that you serve.

Zceppa: The Only Location-Marketing Platform For Your Business 

For multi-location retail or service businesses, having a location-marketing platform as part of your omnichannel marketing strategy is a must, not a choice. 

If you run or manage a multi-location business, then location marketing is in your critical path. Fast-track your location marketing journey, get more leads and increase conversions at every location with Zceppa’s all-in-one platform. Let’s tell you how.

1.   Drive Business Growth: Attract more new customers from hyperlocal search

• Listings – Enhance hyperlocal discovery by optimizing cross-platform digital presence and reach for all your locations
•  Reviews –  Build compelling social proof by getting and managing customer reviews across platforms and locations at scale
•  Social –  Elevate localized social activity by creating and publishing dynamic content across platforms and locations

2.   Modernize Customer Experience: Enhance customer engagement and boost conversions

• Interact: Enable omni-channel 2-way messaging (WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Google)
• Campaign: Send targeted and personalized communication to customers via email, WhatsApp and SMS
• Appointments: Provide 24/7 self-service scheduling across locations
• Payments: Enable digital payments at every location

3.   Streamline Marketing Operations: Increase productivity and efficiency

• Lead Manager: Never miss a lead with unified inbox 
• Multi-Loc Manager: Manage you all your locations/profiles centrally
• Insights: Improve business processes with analytics & intelligence

Businesses using Zceppa have consistently seen 2X growth in leads and 5X increase in conversions, delivering 200X ROI.

Conclusion 

Implementing an effective and successful location marketing strategy across multiple locations is complex. Managing digital presence, collecting and responding to customer reviews, creating and publishing localized content and providing seamless online-to-offline customer experience at every location is impossible without tools, technology, automation and intelligence.

Whether you have 50 or 500+ locations, investing in a platform like Zceppa will help you successfully execute and manage location marketing at scale. Dominate hyperlocal search, get more inbound leads and boost conversions at every location with Zceppa’s all-in-one platform. 

Interested? Sign-up for a free trial.