Most local business owners do two things wrong when it comes to applying local marketing tools. They focus on referrals and content creation that is preferable to them and not necessarily needed by their ideal demographic.
This Local Marketing Minute series will teach you about some of the local marketing tools that will help grow your business.
10 Local Marketing Tools You Should Start Using:
- KWFinder
- SEMrush
- WordPress
- Elementor
- RankMath
- Business Made Simple
- ActiveCampaign
- VideoPeel
- Planoly
- Wave.video
You need to focus on targeted marketing and not just content that appeals to you. We know that can be boring and discouraging, but if you consistently put this work in, we promise you’ll see results.
If you’re sick of spending time on tools that don’t work, read on for the 10 that we can’t live without. While these tools aren’t free, they are all worth the cost and are easy to use!
These are the tools we’re currently ‘screaming’ about.
KWFinder
Think about it… what do you spend your time searching for online? What do you Google? We’re betting it’s not anything you’re NOT interested in, right? Right! So then why, as a business owner, would you spend ANY time creating content that your ideal customers are not searching for?
You wouldn’t believe the number of business owners we’ve come across that do. It’s common.
We have a service or a product that we sell with which we ultimately want to win lifetime customers. We win them, for a while, and then we end up forgetting why they came to us in the first place. We start in another direction. Sometimes for no reason at all. Sometimes because we’re bored.
But, the true winnings are found in the original reason our customers came to us. Naturally, once we stop serving up information that is relevant to the needs of the demographic we’re serving, we lose them. It’s madness and it must stop!
So, how do we keep creating content, whether it’s in the form of a blog, video, or a website page, that acts as a thick and wide net to pull in our ideal customers?
The answer is keywords. The tool is KWFINDER
It can be discouraging when you’re not able to gain the online traffic you want not to mention the foot traffic for your local business. Stop being beat by Amazon. It’s time for them to take a backseat to your local greatness!
Use this tool to find the keyword GOLD that your ideal customers are searching for and lead the masses straight to your door!
And go!
SEMrush
What is SEO?
Have you noticed, as humans, we often hear something many times before we actually pay any attention to the fact that we have no idea what it means? It’s the worst when we get caught in a social conversation and we have to pretend we understand. Just nod and hope the convo doesn’t circle back. Then we high tail it back to our desktop and fiercely Google our way to a better understanding. How embarrassing we are… to ourselves!
The fact is, however, if we don’t understand what SEO is and how it can work in our favor, we are doing ourselves a massive disservice.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search engines are our friends, but, we need to understand how they work and how our websites are performing overall. The not-so-good news is that search engines change the way they work all the time. This is when it hurts to not be a techie.
But, there is some help out there for us…
Semrush is our favorite tool to help grow online visibility. They offer multiple SEO tools and will help with attracting a larger social media following, in addition to much more.
Knowledge is power. Knowing which keywords you’re starting to lose (or already lost) to your competitors will help you stay on top. This tool will help you stay ahead of your competition. We call that power! How about you?
WordPress
Ahhhh… We just love us some WordPress!
This online website platform will get you more visibility. The tools offered by WordPress are fantastic. This is especially true with regard to the 10-mile radius needs of a local business. Remember, we’re talking about marketing tools necessary for gaining more local business.
Many business owners go with Wix or SquareSpace. They heard it was more user-friendly and that was appealing. Of course, it sounded better! Makes sense to us too. But, easier isn’t always better. WordPress will offer more local marketing tools even though it’s a little more difficult for the inexperienced.
Let’s talk blogging with regard to this particular platform.
If you’re new to blogging (we’re talking novice level), it will take some time. But, don’t let that deter you from starting. We promise, with a little online training that you can easily find, it won’t take long to at least master the basics which will be all you need to begin. Once you begin, you’ll be unstoppable.
Check out our Local Marketing Minute video for more info on why WordPress is the way to go for one of your local marketing tools and why we love and recommend ALL the tools mentioned in this blog.
We’re going to stick with a theme through the next two tools. If that doesn’t tell you how much we love WordPress, we don’t know what will.
Elementor
When it comes to building your website, Elementor is our favorite page builder. Many of the clients we’ve had have come to us after trying to use this tool to build their websites. Though there are numerous courses and videos out there to teach you how to DIY with Elementor, it has proven to be difficult.
So, here’s our tip… If you really want to go at it alone then the best option for you is to go ahead and buy Elementor PRO. That will be your best bet.
Otherwise, you’ll likely run into all the problems we’ve seen occur which will ultimately lead you to find and hire a developer. If you end up having to do this make sure you find one who has experience working and building websites for your type of business.
Onto another WordPress gem…
RankMath
We’ve gone over the importance of on-page SEO in Doing Local SEO For Small Business? Managers Listen Up. This is the plugin to use for your on-page SEO needs. We used to use Yoast SEO plugin a few years back and ended up switching our clients over to RankMath.
Here’s the thing… when you find an easy-to-use tool that is chock-full of better features, you make the leap, and it’s as simple as that. Time is money and we’ve found that the time it takes to log and track the changes made to a website page is substantial. If you’re into saving time and money, and not having to track every little change yourself, then go with RankMath.
If you have a website, it’s likely you’ve already hired SEO blog writers. If you haven’t yet, you will eventually. At RebelFishLocal, we take care of choosing the focus keyword and blog title to target our ideal customers and let our bloggers take care of the rest.
RankMath makes it easy for them to see what parts of the blog still need to be optimized properly. The goal is to rank on Google, right? This tool makes it easy to know what still needs to be done in order to rank as high as possible.
The image to the right is a screenshot of where we currently are for this particular blog. See all that green? Those are the ‘green lights’ you want to see!
We have a few more points to go to hit 100, but it helps us to know where we need to improve!
Business Made Simple
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could funnel our ideal clients our way? We can! It’s called a sales funnel and Business Made Simple makes it easy to learn how to do just that. Here are the basics of how a sales funnel functions.
It starts with a free offer of some kind of asset in exchange for an email address. You can offer a free downloadable PDF or a discount coupon. The PDF can be informational, or something that helps them solve the main problem they have which is why YOU exist as a business. This will likely be what they Googled searched for which led them to you.
Once you’ve captured the email address, you’ll send out a sequence of emails over the course of 4 to 6 weeks. The emails you send will offer additional information, deal with common objections you regularly hear from your customers as it relates to buying from you, special offers, and strong calls to action. The purpose is to create and build a relationship that ultimately leads them to buy from you at which point you’ve gained a customer that you can hopefully keep for life.
This tool recommendation is a subscription to Business Made Simple. If you purchase your subscription using this Business Made Simple link, you’ll get a one-on-one call with me. We’ll strategize your sales funnel together during this call. This will put you ahead of the game as opposed to buying a subscription and having to figure it out on your own.
Building a sales funnel will be easy and fun with the two courses you’ll get with your subscription. You’ll learn the StoryBrand Messaging Framework and Marketing Made Simple.
ActiveCampaign
If there’s an option to automate something, why wouldn’t we do it, right? Listen though, if you enjoy the effort it takes to stay so consistently organized and so together that you can send out an email offer for each customer on a certain number of days after your last interaction with them, then, by all means, do your thing.
It is NOT our thing!
We love a way to automate emails so that we can focus on creating the most helpful and relevant content we end up sending their way; in addition to all the other business-type tasks on our lists.
If automating is more your thing too, we recommend Active Campaign.
This tool will help you reach your current and potential customers while streamlining your sales, marketing, and customer service departments. We are all about making things easier and we can’t imagine you feel any differently.
One thing you’ll want to consider automating is your email sequence. We go over email nurture campaigns in our 90 Day Marketing Plan blog.
VideoPeel
Reviews and testimonials are powerful and necessary, and if you have more than 25 reviews on Yelp and/or Google, you need to start collecting some video testimonials. We love using VideoPeel. Video testimonials enrich the customer experience. They help your potential customers relate to your happy customers and that makes for conversions.
This tool makes it easy to remotely capture their video testimonials. You will send an email to your email contacts requesting a testimonial. VideoPeel will show them the questions to be answered in order to get the very best content. We recommend keeping it very simple and brief by choosing 3 questions for them to focus on.
When you receive the completed video testimonials, you can add them to your website and social media. This helps with building the authority you have in your particular space.
We wrote a blog on this What Are Good Testimonial Questions For Clients? in which we list 20 questions for you to choose from. Here’s a bonus… this blog also lists ‘7 Questions To Email After 90-Days Of Using Your Service’, which you can add to your automated email sequence.
So, far we’ve covered tools to help you with your website, SEO, email, and review collection. Now we’re going to be talking about tools for social media.
Planoly
Strategy is extremely important when it comes to marketing on your social media platforms. Posting whatever you want whenever you want is a pointless waste of time. For planning social media posts we love Planoly.
First, identify the platform where your ideal customers spend their time. We are Instagram people because that’s where our ideal clients hang out. I have two business Insta accounts that enable me to use their auto-post feature. This makes planning easy and as I’ve mentioned having things automated is preferable.
Entrepreneurs have to use all parts of their brains, but it’s difficult to do that all at once. It’s best to be able to focus on strategy and logistics in one sitting and all the creative stuff in another. So, when you are able to plan out your posts, then write and create the content for each post, and finally automate the posts, life and business become much more enjoyable.
Plus, once your posts are out you want to be able to spend some time engaging with your audience so you can build even more trust and relationships. That’s the fun part!
Wave.video
If you’re making videos that are anywhere from 15 to 45 seconds long, and your ideal customers don’t spend their time on Instagram, then Wave.Video is the tool you should be using. This tool will help you edit your videos and will provide you with many free stock videos, templates, photos, and music so you can have as much fun as you want with each video.
Can we help you with your SEO and website needs?
If you’ve been creating content but no one is engaging with it Schedule a call HERE. My team will do a mini website & SEO audit. Then over 30-minutes I’ll share 3 things they found that is getting in the way of you showing up on more Google searches.
This audit is for 6-figure businesses with a brick-and-mortar location ONLY.
***Important Disclaimer & Distinction***
If you are a coach, agency, church, non-profit or e-commerce company all the tools listed above will give you a great start to learning local SEO. But to work with our agency RebelFish Local and implement what I share on the mini audit call, you need to have a physical business location. Not your home address, P.O. Box, or co-working address. You need your own storefront with a sign with your business name. So please don’t schedule a call.
So, tell us… What tools do you currently use and what tool(s) mentioned above tickle your fancy?
Drop a comment below to let us know.