“How to Get More Local Cincinnati Customers (Techniques for Any Area)” written by Mike Marko.
Are you struggling to increase the number of local customers for your Cincinnati business using the internet?
It can be very frustrating when you put all the time and money into internet marketing techniques… only to have them not work. Many people are using outdated techniques or processes, and haven’t been adapting to the changing times.
In a previous blog post, I talked about why traditional internet marketing doesn’t work, but I didn’t go into detail on how to do local marketing… to get Cincinnati customers, or really any local customers depending on where you are located.
In this blog post I’m going to go into more detail as to how to get local customers.
NOTE: I may be talking about Cincinnati specifically, but these technique can be adapted for your local market.
Building Your Local Cincinnati Customer Base
I’ve recently been sharing the framework for the Pervasive Presence™ framework. It’s a frame work where you combine being Omnipresent, Relevant, and Intimate in your internet marketing to help you stand out as THE choice in your market.
An Engineered (and Proven) Framework
I’ve engineered this framework based on a lot of research, testing, and helping a lot of businesses become the choice in their marketplace… helping them literally become the “Big Fish” in their “small pond”.
When I first started trying to explain this process, I realized that must have appeared pretty intimidating. There can be a lot of moving parts, especially if you presently do minimal, and relatively ineffective, internet marketing.
That’s why I broke things down.
I created three levels, or three “gears”, to help you know at what stage you need to start implementing Pervasive Presence and grow your business.
I’m going to talk about these three gears to help you better understand not only how Pervasive Presence can help you with your local marketing, but also how you can start implementing it today.
1st Gear of Pervasive Presence™:
Website and Local Search
The first stage to implementing Pervasive Presence™ sets the foundation for your internet marketing. If you don’t do this right, you’ll not be very successful at the other stages.
There are three elements of the “1st Gear”:
- Website
- Google Business & Maps
- Local SEO
Let’s talk about each in some detail.
Website
Your website is the foundation of everything you do online. You need a website that is designed right to help guide your customers.
The biggest mistakes people make with their website is:
- They don’t get the website built by someone who really knows that they are doing.
- They only build the website to look good, and not to help the visitor.
When someone visits your website, you have TWO TO THREE SECONDS to answer these three questions:
- Who are you. What do you do as a business (eg. carpet cleaning).
- How can you help them. What services do you want to be know for (eg. getting the really tough stains out).
- What do they do next to take the primary action you want them to take. Remember this is the primary action… for many businesses wanting local clients this is a phone call so your phone number needs to be very easily seen.
In above video I talk about what you can do to help improve your website.
Once you get those three points covered, then you can go further into detail as to why you are the supplier of choice for your visitor.
Google Business & Maps
Google Business (also known as Google My Business) and Google Maps are probably two very underutilized tools at your disposal. These two things, which are really linked together, can alone help you build up your local business…
If done right.
The first step is to make sure you claim your Google My Business. If the listing is already showing up when you Google your company name, then there will be a link to claim it if you haven’t already.
If your business doesn’t show up yet, maybe because it is a relatively new business, then you can go to Google My Business and create an account.
Once you have an account you should configure it to have your company details. Google Maps is linked to Google My Business, so what you do on Google My Business affects your Google Maps listing.
But that is the BARE MINIMUM.
Really to get the best results from your Google My Business it needs to be optimized REGULARLY. There is a lot of things that need to be done on a monthly basis to help it rise in the rankings and stay there.
A company like IM Consultant Services can work with you to help ensure you get the most out of your Google My Business. If done correctly, many businesses can start seeing an improvement to their business within one to three months.
Local SEO
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is more of a longer term strategy and a key aspect of Pervasive Presence™. The goal of combining Local SEO with Google Maps is to help ensure, long term, that you come up in the top places in search when someone looks for your services in Google.
Local SEO helps fill in the gaps, and covers more search terms, than just doing Google Business and Maps.
This can be further augmented by including a blog on your website. If you do start a blog, I recommend following these tips: How to Get Leads With A Blog | How to SEO Blog Posts.
Again, it is important to have a company that is known for getting local SEO results to help you. IM Consultant Services can work with you to help improve your search performance. If done correctly, It can take between six to twelve months to start seeing great results with SEO (don’t go with people that promise faster SEO results… you can end up damaging your website reputation with Google and never recover).
2nd Gear of Pervasive Presence™:
Google Adwords
Now that you have set the foundation, the next step is to further solidify your presence in Google. Depending on your budge this can be done right after you have finished your setup of the 1st Gear of Pervasive Presence™, or it can wait until you start getting some results for your marketing.
Why Adwords
I personally prefer adding Adwords sooner rather than waiting.
I’m sure you have heard people telling you that you should be on social media because that is where the customers are to be found. Now while I agree that social media is an important of an overall Pervasive Presence™ framework, social media is a long term strategy that is used to help cultivate and retain customers over the period of months (or years) and not necessarily to get customers today.
The reason why I have Adwords as the “2nd Gear” is that people searching for key buyer terms are people you NEED To be in front of… and if you are successful then you increase the likelihood of the business.
What Is Adwords
Google Adwords is the platform where you pay to have your advertisement on Google. You know those posts on Google that are labelled “Ad”? Well those are the result of Google Adwords, and you bid for that spot.
Google Adwords has people bidding on keywords to have their ads placed ahead of everyone else.
The Real Magic of Adwords
What people usually miss out on Adwords, even most “digital marketers”, is that you can use Google Adwords to retarget your customers.
When you go shopping for a television, you have probably noticed that for the next week you are followed by television ads. Google Adwords is one platform that allows you to do that.
Unless they are in a real emergency (like a furnace is out in the middle of winter and the kids are freezing) most people don’t buy on the first exposure. In fact, statistically only 2% of people buy on that first exposure.
It has been shown that in general, it takes at least 7 to 10 exposures for someone in the market to buy. This means that they need to be somehow exposed to your company that many times to help ensure they buy from you.
This means that if you are only relying on that first exposure then you can be missing out on 98% of your marketing effort.
That’s why it is important to use Adwords not just to get them to your website, but also to keep reminding them who you are and what you can do for them. Best of all, it is typically “cheaper” to retarget people that have visited your website than it is to get “cold traffic” or people who don’t know you to click on your link for that first website visit.
You Need Help with the 2nd Gear
While you can maybe put together a website, get a Google Business profile together, and get some results… trying Google Adwords without experience can cause you to waste a a lot of time and money.
It is important to have a company that is known for getting Adwords results to help you. IM Consultant Services can work with you to setup and maintain your Google Adwords. If done correctly, you can start seeing results within weeks.
(SIDE NOTE: Don’t allow the Google reps to give you advice on your Google Ads… Google Ads is a huge money maker for Google and I’ve never heard of the Google reps giving a business tips to actually save them money. I’ve heard of just the opposite results.)
3rd Gear of Pervasive Presence™:
Social Media Marketing
Now that you have a solid foundation setup, it’s time to really focus on the omnipresence aspect of Pervasive Presence™.
This aspect of Pervasive Presence™ is really customized to your business type, goals, and your audience. It is much, much more than just setting up accounts and posting some content. In fact, if done incorrectly you can be wasting a lot of your time and money on social media marketing.
Yet… social media marketing is my favorite part of Pervasive Presence™.
To learn more about how to use social media in your Pervasive Presence™ strategy, check out my blog post, The Key To Making Pervasive Presence(TM) Work for You and Your Business.
Final Words About How to Get More Local Cincinnati Customers
In this blog post, we talked about how you can the Pervasive Presence™ framework to get more local Cincinnati customers. We talked about the three levels, or “gears”, of building up your internet marketing:
- 1st Gear of Pervasive Presence – Website and Local Search
- 2nd Gear of Pervasive Presence – Google Adwords
- 3rd Gear of Pervasive Presence – Social Media Marketing
Starting at first gear, you can build a solid foundation for your local customer marketing to help ensure real results.
If you need help with implementing Pervasive Presence™ and scale up your local business, then you should take a look at our “Results in Advance” program.
We start with a 30-60 minute free consultation where we together create a strategy that will grow your business effectively. Its actually a strategy session where you’ll walk away with actionable steps you can take to increase your business revenue. By the end, you can either take what we discussed and run with it yourself or we can agree to work together to crush your results!
If you want to learn about how to qualify for our “Results in Advance” program, please feel free to reach out to us by clicking the button below.
P.S. – If you like this post, feel free comment down below and/or share on Facebook.
Have questions and want to connect?
Add me on Facebook then shoot me a message:
http://www.Facebook.com/mike.marko.37
Suggested Articles:
1. The Key To Making Pervasive Presence Work for You and Your Business
2. How to Promote Your Business with Pervasive Presence
3. Making the Transition From Employee to Consultant
Author: Mike Marko
Click here to contact Mike
If you want a system to help you rank in Google just like I do, then check out IM Consultant Services.
Article: How to Get More Local Cincinnati Customers (Techniques for Any Area)
Also published on Medium.
