Target Real Customers With Google Places and Other Free Tools

Last week we looked at the fact that, for most businesses, where you are and where your customers are is extremely important. I say most because there is a far higher percentage of businesses that target a local market than there are businesses that target the whole world.

Which is why, if you are a business targeting customers in a specific geographic area, your online marketing efforts need to be honed and not wasted on people that never will and never could buy your products. I.E. if you're a butcher in New York, there is little gained if a person in England who happens to be looking for a butcher finds your info online.

The goal is to utilize everything you do online to promote your business (blogging, tweeting, networking, SEOing and so on) and pinpoint it at the people that matter; your potential customers in your target area. For local business, broadcasting your info to the whole planet and having most of it land with non-target people is a waste of time and resources

Assuming you already have a Google Places targets your real customers website, let me elaborate on some of the important bits I didn't make clear in the last post:

1. Get a Google places account; I cannot emphasize this enough, the listings are created by Google so naturally Google is doing its best to make them findable to the right people. There are many location based services online but most people still turn to Google to get their information.

2. Optimize that account; If you are in a competitive local market you need to show up before your competitors online. There is plenty of info out there about optimizing your places page and many web development companies will help you with this. A good place to start is the Google Places forum page on optimizing your places page.

3. Use Web Analytics; It doesn't matter what analytics tool you use but measure who is coming to your site and how they are getting there. Google Analytics shows you where your site visitors are geographically and tells you how they are getting there. This allows you to adapt your techniques and find out what works and what doesn't. Make use of it.

4. Make social media location-relevant; Ahh the social media explosion, its blessed me with the ability to get regular updates on the eating habits of my 2nd cousin twice removed, but its also an online way to achieve that golden word of small business "Networking". Facebook and Twitter allow you to make yourself location specific - if you're a local business this is a great thing so take advantage of it. There are a gang of other local-social services out there but that link will give you the gist.

5. Integrate the real world with your online efforts; Finally, your online location based marketing needs to relate to the real world (not just point people to your business premises). If your business runs a promotion, let everyone in the area who follows you online know about it. Talk about things relevant to the region. Keep your social profiles and pages updated with local goings-on. Use inside jokes that only local people will get, it makes people feel 'in the know'.

This is simply a bit of clarification for those that wanted more info from last week's location based web marketing. Naturally, I personally think that having your business premises modeled in 3D for Google Earth is vitally important to reaching your target people (why else would we create a business providing just such a service?). However, there are other factors, this post was intended to outline a few.

useful links :

Google Places