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Hyperlocal Marketing: 10 Tips to Reach High-Intent Customers Nearby

Do you want to promote your business to customers in your local area? Then hyperlocal marketing is the way to go. Optimising your business for local or ‘near me’ searches is vital to increase your online presence, engage nearby customers and boost your in-store sales.

But what exactly is hyperlocal marketing? Why is it important? And how can you incorporate it into your existing marketing strategy? This article covers everything you need to know to start reaching high-intent customers in your local area, today!

Hyperlocal marketing ads Google Maps

What is hyperlocal marketing?

Hyperlocal marketing is a strategy that targets potential customers who are close to your business location and looking for products and services like yours. The local area is usually very specific, for example just a few blocks or streets around a business. The idea is to increase footfall and sales by focusing on a local market segment of purchase-ready customers without taking up too much of your time or budget.

Any business with a brick-and-mortar store can use hyperlocal marketing. From restaurants and hotels, to retail, grocery stores, estate agents, beauty salons and many more. The way it works is simple. For example, if someone wants to find a local restaurant they might Google ‘restaurants near me’. That’s called a hyper local search. If you’ve optimized your restaurant for ‘near me’ searches, then you’ll show up in those results.

So, how do you show up in these high-intent location-based searches? It all comes down to using the best hyperlocal marketing tactics. There are lots of easy and affordable ways to drive local search, footfall and sales to your local business. We will tell you how later in this article. But first, let’s look at why it’s so important and the benefits of hyperlocal marketing.

Why is hyperlocal marketing so important?

Hyper local searches have surged in popularity in recent years. According to Think With Google, a whopping 76% of people who conducted a local search visited a related business, and 28% of those searches resulted in a purchase. ‘Near me’ searches have seen exponential growth in recent years. And even without the ‘near me’ tag, searchers expect Google to take their location into account and serve the nearest results first.

Google itself has significantly optimized local search in recent years, providing robust Google Maps results for near me searches. Users can search for nearby places and find local events and activities, complete with high quality photos, ratings and descriptions these places. Local search results in Google Maps are based on relevance, distance and prominence as well as a users personal preferences. While on some results pages, including desktop, it provides additional results in a ‘Discover more places’ section of the SERP.

Given the ever increasing use of mobile devices, the surge in popularity of near me searches, and users reliance on relevant, location-based search results, hyperlocal marketing is an important consideration for any business looking to get found locally.

Hyperlocal near me searches
Image courtesy of Chatmeter

The benefits of hyperlocal marketing 

Hyperlocal marketing lets you drive in-store footfall and capitalize on ‘near me’ searches that have high purchase intent. Use it well and you can access the sweet spot of consumers who are already in your area and searching for businesses like yours. This is just one of the many benefits of hyper local marketing. 

Here’s a look at some more:

  • Highly targeted: Hyperlocal lets you pinpoint your marketing and advertising efforts towards purchase-ready people in your local area for the highest returns. 
  • Budget friendly: Forget about wasting money on customers that can’t get to you. Hyperlocal makes your budget go further because you are focusing on a small geographic area and targeting purchase-ready customers who are more likely to convert into customers. Use it to get found for your products and services by people who are physically there and are actively looking for you.
  • Increased footfall and sales: Local businesses with brick and mortar stores can significantly increase footfall and sales.
  • Flexible: Try a few different hyperlocal strategies for a quick win, or try them all. You can set your own goals, budgets and strategies to suit you.
  • High ROI: People making near me searches usually have high purchase intent, so it’s easier and cheaper to get them to convert. What’s more, optimizing your business for local queries is less competitive and more affordable. Overall, a higher portion of leads will turn into customers.

10 hyperlocal marketing strategies & ideas

Ready to nail your hyperlocal marketing strategy? Check out our top ideas and tactics to try.

Get a Google My Business Profile

Listing your business on Google Business Profile should be a top priority for your hyperlocal marketing campaign. Using Google My Business lets you show up in local business search results pages, get enquiries and leads from it, answer questions about your products or services, and promote your sales, promotions and events.

All you need to do is open an account and follow the instructions. It’s as simple as that! Don’t forget to enter complete data, keep your hours up-to-date, manage your reviews and add high quality photos. Google my Business is very easy to use, plus it’s completely free. The people who will see your Google My Business listing are people in your local area who are actively searching for a business like yours. 

Google My Business is part of any hyperlocal marketing strategy

Show Local Search Ads on Google Maps

Advertising on Google Maps can be a very effective way to reach local customers. If you run a locally based business, ads on Google Maps make it easy for people to see you and get your location. To get started, enable location assets for your Google Ads account, update your Business Profile, use location targeting and bid by location, and be sure to optimise your keywords so that they relate to your location and what people are searching for locally.

Use local SEO in your hyperlocal marketing

So, you’ve got a great website, but is it optimised for local SEO? Your website has a big impact on your organic search rankings and it can help you rank higher in local search results so you get more enquiries, leads and customers.

To show up in local and ‘near me’ searches you will need to create a user-friendly website for your business and optimise it with high quality content and local keywords related to your business. Add local keywords and other relevant identifiers to your landing page, product and business pages. 

You’ll also need to follow SEO best practices such as using keywords in your metadata such as page titles, meta descriptions and headings. Don’t forget to make sure you include your business address and contact details on your website.

By optimising your website for local SEO, Google can easily understand who you are, what you do and where you’re located. It will then show your website to more people in your local area.

Make sure you’re mobile friendly 

Did you know that more than half of website traffic is generated from mobile phones? In fact, a whopping 61% of consumers say they’re more likely to contact a local business and make a purchase from mobile friendly sites. This puts it ahead of desktop. And while it’s important to optimize your website for desktop, it’s vital to optimize it for mobile too.

Mobile friendly sites are easy to view and engage with on a mobile device. They show text and headings clearly, are quick to load and have clear calls to action. Whatever you do on your website, check to see how it looks on the mobile version too.

Get online reviews

Customers want to see customer reviews for your products or services. They look at them in detail to check you’re a real business, see any problems you’ve had and how you’ve dealt with them. What’s more, online reviews are an important ranking factor if you want to be seen in local search rankings. 

Don’t be afraid to ask your customers to leave you a review! Show your reviews on your website, Google profile and social media accounts. If it’s a good review, then great! If it’s negative, be sure to respond and do everything you can to resolve it.

Online reviews can boost local search results

Use online citations and local directories

An online citation is any mention of your business online. Add your business to local directories, review sites and other third-party websites. This tells Google that your business is credible, therefore worth showing as a top search result. It also helps you get more website traffic from those places.

As well as Google my Business, list your business on Facebook, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Yell.com, Foursquare and any other relevant directories. Do your research and you’ll be surprised at how many business and service websites you can list on.

In order to boost your local SEO, make sure your business details, name, address and phone number are consistent across all listings.

Up your content marketing

Content marketing is a big part of nailing any hyperlocal marketing strategy. Starting a blog is a great way to adopt content marketing and acquire local links. It lets you share articles regularly and can persuade users to buy your products when they are in the ‘intent’ phase of the customer journey.

If you have a list of local queries where people are looking to find answers to their questions, you can create blog posts around these to answer those queries. You can also create blogs around related keywords in your local area. You can also cover local events activities and news to share with your audience.

Creating great content also attracts inbound links which are important if you want to improve your business rankings and domain authority. The better your content is, the easier it will be to attract quality backlinks.

Publish content on your website and share it on your social media pages too, using the relevant location, tags and hashtags. You can even collaborate with other like-minded businesses and organisations to expand your audience.

Use hyperlocal advertising

You can create hyperlocal ads through Google Ads and Google Maps, especially with the rising number of users who use Google Maps as a search engine in itself, and not just a navigation tool.

For hyperlocal advertising you should set your radius to cover a small area around your business. This might seem counter intuitive, however the goal of hyperlocal advertising is to target nearby customers with high purchase intent without wasting resources on unnecessary areas.

Setting up hyperlocal ads is pretty straightforward. You’ll need to pick the center of your campaign, usually your business location, then set up your ideal radius around it. Use keyword research to identify the best keywords to bid for. Don’t forget to choose keywords with ‘near me’ and your location in them.

Hyperlocal social advertising

Hyperlocal social marketing

In addition to Google Maps and Google Ads, you can run hyperlocal ads on your social channels. Social media platforms provide big opportunities for hyperlocal, allowing businesses to easily build and customize their ads for highly targeted campaigns. Run local campaigns on Facebook with Local Awareness adds, and video editor as a tool in Instagram, LinkedIn and more.

Each platform has slightly different options for customising your ads, and they provide robust analytics to help you keep track of who sees them. Make sure you manage your comments and social interaction during your hyperlocal social marketing campaigns, engaging with your audience and answering any questions they might have.

Use your socials for other engagement too, such as fun competitions that encourage people to share your posts, tag their friends and come in store to collect a freebie.

Geofencing advertising

Geofencing is a powerful hyperlocal marketing tool, dramatically increasing the number of mobile users who see your marketing content, ads and notifications. You can use it to target customers who are nearby with relevant, location-based content and ads. It’s easy to set up a geofence around your business that triggers a push notification to customers walking past.

It works best if you have an app for your business. However, you can set it up on other platforms that have geofencing tech in their software. Once you’ve set it up, you can target nearby consumers with compelling offers, discounts and deals to entice them into your store.

Need help with geofencing? PlotProjects is the leading provider of geofencing for mobile apps. Contact the team for more information, or try a free trial and start sending location-based notifications today.

Geofencing advertising is great for local marketing

Offer local deals and discounts

There are myriad websites and apps that let you create local deals and discount vouchers for your local business. Make the most of these websites in your hyperlocal campaigns, as they can be a great way to drive more customers to your stores. Groupon and Flipp are great examples that let you take your offers and create ads and flyers on their platforms. But do a little research to find out which platforms are most popular in your location.

You can also use a local deals aggregator like PlotRewards API to offer local deals from your app or website. This user friendly API aggregates all the most up-to-date and relevant local offers from trusted discount and cash back providers around the globe.

Optimise your website for voice search

People love to ask their smart devices, and many of those searches come in the form of ‘near me’ searches. Prepare a list of search queries that people might ask smart devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home. Then optimize your website and listings for these terms to show up for those voice searches.

Offline advertising

Raise local awareness through traditional offline advertising too. Local newspapers, radio and magazines might be interested in your business, especially if you do something newsworthy. You can also make the most of marketing materials such as flyers, business cards and billboards.

Get involved in community engagement, become a local sponsor and take part in local events to raise your profile and boost brand awareness locally.

Looking for a hyperlocal marketing agency?

PlotProjects offers industry-leading, cost-effective solutions for location-based marketing and advertising.

We can help you with many aspects of hyperlocal marketing including geofencing advertising, POIs, local deals and discounts, and using geolocation to maximum effect across your entire digital infrastructure.

To talk to us about how to up your hyperlocal marketing game, get in touch!

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