Marketing a small business is difficult, and sometimes it’s difficult to know how to handle your marketing campaign, especially on a local scale.  Many of the tips and tricks you may see advertised on bigger sites like Entrepreneur.com or Moz.com might only be applicable to a larger, national or multi-national business.  What is the small-medium sized business to do when they need to market themselves, grow there business and attract/retain more customers?  Hopefully this article will give you a bit of a head start on the competition, and provide you with some helpful advice as to how to go about getting started.

For this article we are focusing on one moderately sized local market, Plymouth, England.  It is a good example because it is not too large that it would start becoming a national problem, and it is not too small as to warrant being disregarded as not worth marketing to.  You can see these types of examples all across the globe, and with the rise of mobile Internet usage, more people are finding and interacting with local business through online mediums.  This makes local Internet marketing one of the most important and potentially lucrative avenues of approach when it comes to growing your small business.

Local Directories

One tip for all local companies is to make sure they saturate their business information across all local directories.  You may be surprised at how much these things are used by locals to find something they need.  Not only do they usually all offer free listings, but they also can provide welcome and needed traffic, as well as potential benefits for your website when it comes to the Google algorithm.

Local SEO Companies

Following our Plymouth example, the next step the local business would do would be to find an seo service company plymouth and start consulting with them on a strategy.  Hopefully your site is already in a decent standing to start receiving some organic traffic, but even if you’ve done everything right, you will still probably need a skilled hand to guide your site to the top of the rankings.  SEO companies do this for a living, so it may be best to consult with one of them before trying it on your own.

They can also usually hook you up with graphic designers or content writers for you site.  It may sometimes seem like an afterthought, but proper design and content is pretty crucial to a good SEO campaign, and if you are just getting started it may be helpful to go with an SEO for these fronts as well.  I’ve seen several examples where a site needed to be completely redesigned in order to make it suitable.

Go Old School, Word of Mouth

This may seem counter-intuitive for an Internet marketing article, but going old-school and getting some good traction with word-of-mouth can be the most useful and effective way of generating and keeping business.  Sure, the web accounts for billions of searches a day, but nothing beats the trust established when someone recommends a company to a friend.

Set up some incentive programs for current customers, so that they can get rewarded if they bring in new clients.  Dentists do this all the time, and I’ve personally gotten leads on a very good dentist in my hometown.  This may have happened anyway if they hadn’t given some incentive for doing so, but it doesn’t hurt to grease the wheels a bit

So I hope this has provided a little bit of value to you.  Hopefully this year sees your small business grow to be a much larger one…