Part of the company I work for specializes in building web presence for local businesses. Examples are taxi firms, restaurants, builders, other tradesmen, etc. Clearly, these are companies whos target audience is local to their location. One question we always get asked is "how can I best spend my budget on marketing?" These sorts of companies have about an average $2000 budget to spend, perhaps as a one off, sometimes as an annual budget. What are your ideas on how best to spend this?
- First thing I'd do is, see where they are getting business from right now, and where they are advertising. Find the critical 20% of advertising efforts that give them 80% of results, then focus on what already works, see how you can optimize it further, and use the proposed marketing budget to scale it up. Chances are, they already advertise on the right places, but they lack the required sales/marketing knowledge to attract and convert potential customers who see/hear their ads. - Think about their typical customer, where do they look for when a need for the specific service arises, what media they use, what are they exactly looking for, where your client fits in all of that... - Find the big players in the industry, and see where they advertise, where they continuously keep investing their advertising budget (because it gives them results). - Give them a mobile version of their site (there are online tools you can use to quickly convert the site into a mobile-optimized version and tweak it), this might be a very important decision for some businesses where people often don't have much time for initial research, or they don't have any go-to brands implanted in their mind, eg. from your example above, taxi companies or restaurants... many people just do on-the-spot research with their smartphone, and you definitely want some presence there - Build them a FB page and propose a plan how to grow/manage it, I've seen some nice communities build around specific local business fan pages (+ they can use it for whatever news and promotions they have, it will act as an initial seed and the word o' mouth will spread from there) Just a few ideas..
The most effective use of money to get TARGETED TRAFFIC of course would be PPC. Doing social media, mobile sites, etc. in effect are passive, and far less of a guarantee for success.
Just did a site for a local sports and leisure centre. Overall, on balance, we decided to spend their budget shared out between: The local business directory - Offline and offline presence (1 year) Google PPC - Gradually building budget Weekly Ads in two local papers for a test run
All suggestions above are good to you. In addition to all, I must say that just reach to the target audience within the region. Like what your local people do for eg. read new papers rather than surfing net because as per your example, i am not sure if online will be much targeting for you depending on the region you wanted to target. A part form that you can for sure go for online advertising using CPC which is actually you will be paid for a person seeing your ad and obviously at cheapest rate.