Marketing for Brick and Mortar Businesses

| February 11, 2016

Marketing for Brick and Mortar Businesses

Almost everything is available online these days. You can get items like jewellery, shoes, clothes, and even groceries online. It’s almost natural to assume that this online wave would cause the demise of traditional brick and mortar businesses. After all, who’d want to buy groceries from the neighbourhood grocer when they can order something online from sites like Big Basket or ZopNow?

Would you be surprised to know that you’re jumping the gun here? Contrary to popular belief, brick and mortar businesses are actually experiencing a lot of growth since the advent of online commerce. Here are a few tricks on how to take advantage of the Internet to promote your brick and mortar business.

Figure out Your Local Influence

As a brick and mortar business, there’s really no need marketing to the entire country. In fact, you don’t even need to market to an entire city. You first need to figure out your sphere of influence. Try to understand just how far you would deliver or from what distance would customers come to your store. Quoting an example of the grocery store again, you can’t expect a person to travel from the western side of the city to the eastern side just to visit your store and order groceries.

However, if you’re a bookstore known to have a wide collection of rare, hard to find books, it’s very likely that customers will travel the distance just to browse your collection.

Use Local Marketing Techniques

After you’ve figured out your local influence, it’s time to start using the information. You need to use local keywords in your website and ads. You can also use specific targeting parameters to ensure that audiences from outside your sphere of influence aren’t targeted with your ads. For example, if you want to focus your ads on people form a particular suburb in Mumbai, you can use AdWords to focus your ads on Mumbai.

That way, your PPC ads won’t be displayed to people from Bengaluru or Kolkata. This would not only cut down on your expenses, but also reduce the competition. Focusing on local marketing and your local community would ensure that you get the right exposure.

Mobile Marketing is King

If you haven’t started to take advantage of mobile search and Google Maps listing, you should do that now. Local marketing and mobile go hand in hand. In fact, you’ll find that people rarely search for local businesses on their desktop or laptop. They’ll use their smart phone to search and if your business is listed on the Map, they’ll have directions to reach you.

Most customers will ignore any search results that don’t have a Map listing. They just don’t want to waste their time trying to locate your business. That’s why it’s a good idea to advertise on mobile search and claim your business on Google Maps. That would allow you to get new customers and increase your revenue by a considerable margin. Big, online businesses don’t really have these advantages. It’s a good idea to take advantage of them.