Set up an attractive storefront on a heavy traffic street to build a loyal customer base. Those days are long gone! Today, people are too busy on their smart devices chatting, checking directions while others are on social media. They will barely recognize the well-done storefront.  What is more, consumers are using the web to find local businesses that sell products they are want to buy.

So how do you ensure you market your local business effectively in today’s digital age? In this article, we delve discuss three effective digital marketing strategies for local businesses. Are you interested in finding the secrets?

Well. Let us dive right into it.

Claim Your Local Listing

Are you interested in increased online traffic as well as physical shop traffic? Consider local business listing services. You need to claim a listing to appear on the search results.  Local listing means showing your customers where you are located.

Through local business listing, search engines will display your business name, the address and the phone number on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Local business listing is a chance for the local business to increase their sales. Consider local listing as a lead generation avenue. It is a way to wow clients who are ready to purchase!

To achieve this, consider enlisting your corporate location and information on the popular business directories as well as the mobile websites. The business listing directories work in the same way yellow pages works.

It is simply a record of all businesses in the area. The local listing services providers also classify the businesses into a certain class, by area, or even size. For a successful local business listing, add photos, social links, as well as the contact links. Benefits of using the local business listing service include:

• Ability to grow your business fast
• For local businessmen, you get top position in local searches
• It is an opportunity for developing the brand image
• Presence on local listing makes you a trusted brand.

Create a Mobile Friendly Website

A mobile-friendly website is one that renders well on small devices. Think of your website as your most valued salesperson. If the salesperson is not customer friendly, your sales numbers will not grow.

Being your marketing brochure, the website needs to contain all the important information. Above all, it should be user-friendly and offer a better browsing experience for your visitors like what has been done with Thrive Themes – it’s fast and user -friendly.  Moreover, a mobile-friendly website makes it easy for customers to find products. In addition, it is a ranking factor used by search engines.

When local customers find your business on the search results, the next thing is that they navigate to your website. This is possible using a mobile device. The responsiveness features matter. The website should be easy to navigate with a simple background for faster loading time. This also contributes to increased average time on the website. Customer’s patience decreases when a website is loading slower than expected.

Social Media Presence

Another killer strategy is the use of social media to market locally. The social media platforms offer geographic targeting which is useful in targeting customers near you.

For instance, let us say you are running a restaurant in town. You are targeting people who work at the nearby business complex and want to attract them to your restaurant for lunch. Running a targeted ad on Facebook, an hour before lunchtime is a very good marketing strategy.

The advantage of setting up social media ads is that they are cheaper and more effective. You do not need to pay for an expensive website design. In addition, you can run a timed advert for say one day or just lunch hour advert. This makes it an effective marketing strategy for startups. Social media marketing campaigns also allow you to determine the budget as well as customize the ads to the objective.

For a successful social media marketing campaign, understand your audience and customize the campaign to meet their needs. Moreover, determine the goal and build a campaign using the right content. Set the budget and schedule the social media campaigns to ensure effectiveness. To determine which campaigns to optimize, make use of analytics tools.

Key Takeaway

Those are the most important digital marketing strategies for local businesses. Make sure that your business is listed on the local business directories, has a mobile-friendly website and maintain an active social media presence. Alternatively, you can contact an expert to assist you.

Over the last few years, e-commerce platform has become unexpectedly successful and so as the payment gateway. Making online payment for the products and services has become so easy nowadays. Undoubtedly, a lot of people make payment through their debit card and credit card. A payment gateway is services that process the payment transaction between the customer and the merchant. In a nutshell, it acts as a connecting door through which transactions can be done automatically from the customer to the retailer.

If you run an online store, you will need a shopping cart. There is a lot of shopping cart software out there to choose from.

However, picking the right one can be a daunting task for someone who has just started his online business or if you have used one but not so happy about it.

Here are 5 important factors to keep in mind while selecting your next shopping cart.

1. Hosted or not hosted

A hosted shopping cart is where you pay monthly to host and run your online store.

The hosted shopping cart is divided into two parts

• Remotely Hosted
• Locally Hosted

You may choose to host the shopping cart locally on your own web server or take advantage of a remotely hosted shopping cart. In a remotely hosted shopping cart, the hosting of your online store will be done by your shopping cart provider.

In remotely hosted options, you can do customization of pages to suit according to your sites. It offers most of the customization and modern themes which can be attractive to the customers. You can also opt for free trials to test them out and see if they provide the uniform customization that you require.

It comes with different pricing plans and on the basis of product listings, bandwidth for website traffic, features, etc., you can choose your plan. Additionally, a remotely hosted shopping cart is performed through a web-based control panel which is also known as a dashboard. Through your dashboard, you can actually customize the look of your cart. You can do this by selecting from a list of premade templates.

In certain cases, custom templates are also available which you can purchase for a one-time fee. Some remotely hosted shopping carts also allow huge flexibility. However, some are inflexible according to other features. As it gets automatically updated, it will always be up-to-date and will have the highest version of the software.

One of the best thing about the remotely hosted is that all of the setup and configuration of the shopping cart software is taken care of by the service provider on your behalf. It simply means that if you are not a very technical person, then you don’t have to worry about the updates, security patches, and setting up your own web server. This is the best option for someone who is not technically savvy or not have good web developing skills.

These have come a long way now by being integrated with page builders and email software like Kartra and Clickfunnels and customers are attracted to the Kartra pricing options because you’re able to get everything under one roof instead of piecing it all together.

For any e-commerce platform, Payment card industry (PCI) compliance is very important. Hence, in remotely hosted, you don’t worry about it either. It can be easily achieved with hosted carts because they handle the customer card info on their own servers which should already be PCI compliant.

Some of the other benefits of the remotely hosted shopping cart are:

• Fast implementation
• Secure connection supplied
• Monitoring of service
• Quick & easy to set up
• Support whenever required

Nevertheless, with so many advantages, remotely hosted carts do have some disadvantages such as when compared to locally hosted carts, they offer less flexibility and they are expensive.

On the contrary, The primary benefit of locally hosted shopping carts is that they are more cost-effective to operate in the long run. As compared to remotely hosted carts, they provide more flexibility and maximum customization. You can get full control of the cart in locally hosted shopping carts. One of the biggest cons of locally hosted carts is maintenance and upfront cost.

2. Features

Look out the features you want to have in your shopping cart such as is the cart mobile friendly or not, can your customer do shopping through your online store using their mobile phones, do you need recurring billing, do you need shipping integration, support for digital downloads, limited time sales, fulfillment center integration, SEO functionality, Facebook integration, mailing list support, product reviews, tools you will use in managing the order’s accounting software integration, cart abandonment features, analytics, inventory management, whether you can implement the trust signals or not, the difficulty level of changing your message templates and email designs, etc.

3. Customer Support

If you’re an e-commerce company, support is extremely important. The customer support can vary from one shopping cart providers to others. Some offer no customer support, some provide only email support, some of them offer phone support during business hours, and some of them offer 24/7 phone support. Choose according to your requirement and make sure it matches your needs.

4. Pricing

Pricing yet another factor to consider while selecting your shopping cart but not the important one. Before taking price as an important factor, think about your business. Your shopping cart reflects your business, your brand, your online personality and you can’t lose that by going for a cheap shopping cart which may lack any important features. Not every low-cost shopping are bad.

You just have to make sure that with pricing you are also looking at all other features. The excellent feature will give you more sales and profits.

5. Get feedback

Shopping carts are the most important and complicated decision. Make sure you are able to use it, make sure the other people in your company is able to use it. If not, will it require a lot of training and configuration? Get the feedback from all the people who are going to use the shopping cart software and try them before picking the good one.

Selecting a shopping cart is an extremely essential decision. Write down all the features you required and go for the best one. Make sure you are getting support from all sides such as the merchant account provider, the payment gateway, and the shopping cart provider.

“I couldn’t sell it.

I was running out of options,” describes Tommy Collins, a real estate investor that was struggling to sell the properties he’d thought was going to turn big profits.

That’s when a friend suggested looking online.

That’s when everything turned around.

He began using the web to build online connections with other professionals in an effort to build a network.

It all started looking for buyers.

Which according to Tommy, “worked like a charm.”

“I began looking to see what other real estate investors in my area were looking for then it was just a matter of going out and finding the deal.”

He credits getting into multiple Facebook groups and real estate investment groups he found online to connect with other like minded investors, realtors, and money partners.

Here’s how to get the most from your real estate investment club

1. Join with the idea of providing value

   This allows you to position yourself as the authority while giving content, expertise and building your network all at the same time.

2. Build a list of buyers

   If you aim to build a list of buyers in the first place, you’re likelihood for success goes up tremendously.

   Often people focus on getting the deal but the fact remains you need someone to close it out and get paid.

3. Communicate Often

   Always be in touch.

   Even if that means just posting regular to your social accounts, remember the more people see you – the more they’ll be inclined to know, like and trust you.

4. State what you want.

   Keep people informed on exactly what you’re looking for – funding, deals, etc.

Join the group and provide insight before you need to put a deal together.

That means sharing resources, providing tips, while also learning about your local market.

“It’s astonishing at how many people don’t tap into their local clubs and REIA groups because these are tremendous resources” states Ray Southern, a frequent REIA club visitor in Phoenix.

Local clubs can provide you with…

• Investor properties
• Local information about the market
• Techniques
• Money backers
• Buyers
• Real Estate agents
• Mortgage brokers
• Realtors

Just to name a few.

The great thing about technology is it’s made it so you can make all these connections, put deals together without ever leaving your home.

The writing is on the wall … if you can’t find your web site on the initial page of the search results when a potential customer is trying to find Salon Service services or products your web site is basically invisible.  More than likely you are not producing any new leads for prospective employees either.

Lots of people spend hundreds of dollars every year to get their hair done. But, that doesn’t change that salons are up against some seriously stiff competitors when trying to attract new consumers.

And if you haven’t accepted digital advertising and marketing yet to market your hair or nail salon – as well as utilized Facebook advertisements – you are missing out on the solitary largest possibility to setting up a local lead gen campaign to get prospective customers. Get ready to alter the way you obtain brand-new customers forever.

The majority of beauty parlor rely upon word-of-mouth advertising, handing out calling card, Groupon, and old-school strategies like conventional print marketing with promo code provides through outlets like Valpak, Moneymailer or similar in your area focused print magazines.

Consider how much you could alter your life as well as business with a steady stream of brand-new Hair Salon leads … You could be a huge success in a brief time period.

The secret to creating a stable stream of leads (and also new customers) ALL year-round is through regular beauty salon ads– including beauty salon postcard advertising.

Numerous salons skip this step when dealing with different beauty parlor marketing strategies– yet it a very important part of why they stay little and also do not create enough leads to grow their business.

Customizing your Facebook Page is one more terrific way to bring even more Hair Salon Leads to your service. Running contests with prizes, whether that be a $25 gift card to your establishment or a discount on an special service or holiday centered gift, your customers will certainly enjoy the convenience of being able to enter or get the promotion while on Facebook.

A hot new trend is to post content such as hair inspiration, how to tutorials and guides or engaging content related to your service that is offered in a short, easy to check out style.

Having multiple offers to target each department of you salon is also key.  So, if your company supplies hair, nails, massage and health club solutions, offer one deal related to each service kind.

You can match your Facebook advertisement’s special offer as well as design keeping that of your salon postcard advertising project.
I recommend running Facebook ads at the exact same time you’re running your beauty salon postcard advertising campaign.

Another way to produce more leads is to develop a website devoted to generating leads.  Be sure to have your contact information readily available with a link on each page.

Existing customers are not just a source for present company, yet additionally for recommendations– which are essentially COST-FREE leads.

It’s essential to stay in front of these clients so they always think to visit your salon when they need something.But rather than emailing and calling them each and every single day, you could utilize email advertising and marketing to instantly follow up with this lead for you. In a free e-mail marketing software, such as MailChimp for instance, you could establish an easy campaign to instantly email leads to make sure that you’re continuously connecting to them.

Make Friends with your local Chamber of commerce.  They typically have a list of people who have just moved to the area. By automatically mailing to all the new movers in your area, your company can just receive a stable stream of new consumers who need your services.

Many of those people require nearby hair salon and health spa solutions!

Or you can pay for leads.

With Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and marketing, your salon advertising and marketing shows up above both the Google Maps results AND the organic listings when individuals search for your services.

When someone googles for charm services like your own (and even for YOUR business straight), one of the very first things Google shows them is your Google company listing (like the one above).

Competitors is intense in the marketplace (nail, beauty salons, spas, hairdressers). Just as important as obtaining a steady stream of brand-new customers through marketing and online advertising, is keeping them!  Be sure to WOW the clients when they come through your door to ensure a long and successful career in the salon business.