Local marketing has its own set of mistakes. A business that only serves customers within a few towns does not need to beat national brands. It needs to be the obvious choice when someone nearby searches, asks a neighbor, or compares two names on Google Maps.
Here are five local marketing fails I see over and over, what each one costs, and what to do instead. Each ends with a quick check you can run today.
1. Letting Your Listings Run Themselves
Your business shows up in more places than your website: Google Business Profile, Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp, Facebook, and industry directories. Some of those listings exist whether you created them or not, and any of them can carry an old phone number, a former address, or hours from three years ago.
Claim the listings that matter in your industry and make your business name, address, and phone number match everywhere, including your own website. Small differences add up. A tree service we work with had “Inc” after its name on a few pages of its website, while the business is registered with the state as an LLC and every other page said so. It is a small thing, but it is exactly the kind of mismatch that makes a business look less established than it is.
Quick check: Search your business name on Google, Apple Maps, and Yelp. Write down the name, phone number, and hours each one shows. Do they all match?
2. Treating Reviews as Something That Just Happens
For a local business, reviews often decide who gets the call. Plenty of happy customers will leave one if you ask, but few think to do it on their own. Waiting for reviews to show up by themselves often means the people who bother are the ones with a complaint.
Ask every satisfied customer, in person and with a follow-up text or email that includes a direct link. Our page on how to leave a Google review in three easy steps is a good thing to send customers who have never left one. Then reply to every review. Thank the good ones by name, and answer the bad ones calmly, with an offer to make it right offline. Future customers read your replies too. How to get more five-star reviews covers the asking in more detail.
Quick check: Look at your last ten Google reviews. Did you reply to every one of them, and how many came in during the last three months?
3. Ignoring the Towns You Actually Serve
If your website only mentions the town where your office is, you are invisible to people searching in the five towns next door where you do half your work. Search engines can only connect you to the places your site and your listings talk about.
Name the towns you serve on your service pages and your Google Business Profile, and write about local work in a way that is specific: the neighborhood, the type of home, the problem you solved. Avoid the shortcut of copying one page and swapping in a different town name. Google’s spam policies treat near-identical pages built only to target different towns as doorway pages, and they do not help the visitor either. Creating great local content has ideas for writing about your area in a way that holds up.
Quick check: List the five towns where most of your customers live. Does each one appear somewhere on your website in a sentence that would mean something to a person who lives there?
4. Putting Everything on One Platform
Plenty of local businesses run their whole presence through one Facebook page or one Instagram account. That works until the platform changes how many people see your posts, or the account gets locked, and the customers you built up are suddenly out of reach.
Use social media, but treat it as rented space. The things you own are your website and your email list, so keep sending people to both. A simple sign-up on your site and an occasional email to past customers keeps you in touch no matter what any platform decides. The dos and don’ts of building an email list covers how to grow one the right way.
Quick check: If your main social account disappeared tomorrow, how many of your customers could you still reach?
5. Sounding Like a Different Business Everywhere
When an owner posts one week, a family member the next, and an outside helper after that, the business can end up sounding like three different companies. One post is formal, the next is full of slang, and the logo shows up in two different colors. Customers notice, even if they could not tell you exactly what feels off.
Write down a few simple rules everyone follows: the colors and logo to use, how you refer to the business, the tone you want (friendly and plain, for most local businesses), and a few words you never use. One page is enough. It keeps everyone sounding like the same business your customers met in person.
Quick check: Put your last five social posts, your homepage, and your Google Business Profile description side by side. Do they sound like the same business?
Where to Start
Start with your listings and your reviews. They are the first things a nearby customer sees, often before your website, and both can be cleaned up in a few hours.
These five are about local marketing. For the ten mistakes I see most often across a small business’s whole online presence, with a quick way to check for each one, see 10 common digital marketing mistakes and how to fix them.
If you want to know how your business looks to a customer searching nearby, start with a free website audit. I will tell you what to fix first, in plain language, with no pitch attached.
What would you add to this list? Leave a comment below.
This post was previously published and has been updated for content and relevancy.
Thanks, Paul for these pointers even though I’m the target (consumer). I do get pissed off if I’m lured to a site promising information only to find that they’re trying to sell me a product. It’s always good to try out new ways to do things and not limit ourselves. I do tend to stick with the old though. And I can see how staying consistent with a brand can be helpful, no matter in business or not. Who knows though I have no skill or interest in business, I could get inspired and change!
Sure thing, Lily!
I definitely understand where you’re coming from, and I can see how it would be frustrating to be lured in with promises of information only to find that the site is trying to sell you a product. It’s definitely important to try out new ways to do things, but it’s also important to stick with what works. I can see how consistency with a brand can be helpful, no matter what business you’re in.
Marketing as a single person takes so much time and effort! I hope you’ll address that this month. Cheers, Paul!
Thanks for the input, Diane! You’re right – marketing as a single person can be a lot of work. I hope to address that in this month’s training or maybe just as a blog post – great idea!. Thanks for reading!
What a great blog topic to learn about marketing fails. I double checked to make sure I’m following you on Twitter, I am!
Thank you for following me on Twitter, Martha! As for marketing fails, there are definitely a few that come to mind. Do you have any favorite marketing fails that you’ve seen?
Your advice is vital and easy to understand for the solopreneurs out here who are determined to find our way. I appreciate your message and know-how.
Thanks for the kind words, Julie! I’m glad you found the advice useful. If you have any additional questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
Greetings Paul, I appreciate the list to check my marketing skills. Honestly, I am still new at this and don’t even know how to do some of the things you listed. For example, I am unsure of how to properly link the social media accounts. Also, as for reviews, I am not even sure if I have any or where to check for them. I agree with Diane that this solo marketing is very time consuming, and for me extremely confusing. My strategy is to take a course at a time while I figure out each step along the way. Joining the UBC a little over a year ago has helped tremendously! Much gratitude for your services. Sending lots of love and virtual hugs. Jaime
Hi Jaime,
Thanks for your comment! It’s great to hear you’re taking some courses and joining a community like the UBC – both of those are great steps to learning more about marketing. As for linking social media accounts, usually, the best way to do that is to put the links on your website or blog and then use social media icons to link back to your accounts. For reviews, you can ask your clients or customers if they would be willing to write a review on sites like Google Business Profiles or Yelp. Hope that helps – keep up the good work! 馃檪
This is so helpful! I hadn’t even considered that there could be reviews out there yet, I’m blocking some time to claim my business everywhere and see what is possibly out there. If I find nothing, I’m ready when they do start coming in!
Thanks for your comment, Kimberly! Yes, it’s important to start planning and claiming your business listings now before others do. I hope that this information is helpful and that you’ll be able to get your business started off on the right foot!