The Fast Five-Step Strategy

by | Mar 2, 2022

Welcome to part three of our seven-part series, “The (Small) Business Owner’s Guide to Local Marketing.” Our series aims to provide business owners, particularly small business owners, with fast, actionable strategies to win and keep more customers. Today’s article will help you understand the Fast Five-Step Strategy, which will set up our next four posts in this series. 

The seven parts of this series break down as follows:

The last post in our series, “Five Benefits of Local Listings Marketing & Five Risks of Ignoring Local Listings Marketing” outlined some excellent reasons to take advantage of a local listings strategy. Today, we look at some questions you need to consider before you jump into strategy development. 

Articles 4 through 7 will detail the approach you should take. 

The (Small) Business Owner’s Guide to Local Marketing, Part Three

The Fast Five-Step Strategy

Now that we have made a case for why it’s so important to think about local listings and ‘near me’ marketing, let’s set up the advice coming in the rest of this series. Over the next several posts in this series, we’ll focus on how small- and medium-sized businesses can leverage this untapped marketing approach to grow the business. 

Our series will answer these five points:

  1. Help customers find you
  2. Make customers like you
  3. Get customers to buy from you
  4. Encourage customers to recommend you
  5. Get customers to come back

The first thing to do is to build a strategy around those objectives. And that doesn’t have to be some crazy complicated undertaking – just a quick sketch of where you want to go and how you want to get there. But you do need to map that for your own business and neighbourhood.   

Here are five questions to consider. The answers you give will become the basis of your fool-proof strategy for local digital marketing:

Step 1: What are the goals you want to achieve?

You won’t get anywhere if you don’t have a destination. And you can’t map success unless you set a specific goal. Whether it’s a straight revenue increase, adding X amount of new customers, or tracking how many people you are engaging with on your digital platforms – be sure you identify exactly what you want to achieve and how you plan to measure success.

Step 2: How will you attract the attention of potential customers?

When they are ready to buy, this is all about being where your customers look. So identify where you want to focus and ensure your business is always front and center.

Step 3: How will you win the trust of potential customers?

Once they know you exist, you still need to convince customers that your business is the right one for them. In our posts to come, we offer some ideas for winning the trust of potential customers through great content and reputation management.

Step 4: How will you turn that trust into sales?

We call this ‘conversion’ – or turning online interest into real-world purchases. We’ve got some ideas for how you can do that coming up in this series. 

Step 5: How will you keep customers’ loyalty once you have them?

Finally, how will you keep customers happy once you win them over? And how can you leverage those satisfied customers to win even more business?

Now that you’re thinking about these questions, our series will continue in our next post with some actions items that will help you deal with your answers. 

The (Small) Business Owner’s Guide to Local Marketing

Thank you for reading part three of our series titled “The (Small) Business Owner’s Guide to Local Marketing.” Next up in our series is “Build Awareness: Helping Customers Find You.”