3 Tactics for Local Marketing During Tourist Season
If you’re using the Internet for local marketing in an area with a lot of tourist traffic, here are some strategies that you can use to make it more effective.
1: Go Local with Google
Go to Google.com/local and click the link labeled “Put your business on Google Maps”. This will give you options to add a listing for your business right on Google Maps. The advantages of this are many, but one to consider has to do with GPS. The Google Maps service can be used as a navigation service on mobile devices. This means that visitors can get live directions to your shop, which is too good to pass up. As a tip, having a Google+ page is a great enhancement to this.
2: Get Reviews
If you’re in a tourist area, you probably have locals who come into your business all year round. Encourage them to leave write reviews of your business on Google. One of the ways you might encourage people to do this is to offer some sort of a prize or other incentive to write the review. Remember, however, that it’s getting ethically grey to ask them to write a good review in return for some sort of compensation. You can get around this by making it into a best review contest or something similar.
3: Get Listings on Local Sites
Make sure you take opportunities to get advertisements or mentions on local sites. This allows you to piggyback on the SEO of those sites and, if Google smiles upon you, it might just bring up your search engines ranking and allow you to get more visitors to your site.
Be sure that you include a map to your business on your site using Google Maps if you’re using their service. This allows you to package everything up nicely so that your visitors are brought right to the directions to your business from Google, your reviews and so forth if they use the map service to navigate to your business.
Local marketing is important, but it’s useless if out of town visitors cannot find your business. Using Google Maps and their reviews service, you can take care of this easily.
Google has recently released some updates to its search quality technology, so it’s a good time to reassess your local marketing and make sure you’re using all of the technology available to maximize its value.
