What is Local Content Marketing?

Content marketing involves planning, creating, distributing, and publishing content (textual and visual) through channels, including websites, social media, blogs, podcasts, seminars, apps, and press releases to reach more audiences, generate more leads, and acquire sales for businesses. 

It’s a part of business marketing that comprises so many things. And likewise, it demands so many resources and a workforce that makes it almost impossible for small businesses to implement. Digital marketing was initially too expensive for small businesses, until recent years- thanks to Google and other tech companies that offer affordable solutions. 

Now, small businesses can engage in small-scale content marketing. Local content marketing focuses on the significance of a business within its community and service regions. Small businesses can use it to scale up and compete with their big counterparts. It only targets the right audience–people that seriously need your product and services and are within your service areas.

The Goals of Local Content Marketing

You won’t achieve much without a specific vision for your local content marketing strategy. It will profit you more as a local business if you focus on targeting and attracting the right audiences. These are the primary goals that businesses have in mind when choosing local content marketing: 

To Attract the Right Traffic to Your Website

Local content is prepared and designed to attract, educate, and enlighten people interested in your niche. The marketing strategy does not stray but only focuses on your potential client’s problems and solutions. For example, a pest control business in Texas using local content marketing will only publish pieces of content about common pests in the state. This will help drive a hyper-local audience and discourage visitors from other states that likely won’t become customers.

For Collaboration and Gaining Authority in Your Niche

It’s easier to rise to the top of the SERPs when you’re focused on one specific niche. Search engine algorithms and social media platforms will register your website content as a niche authority. Other businesses and websites will also want to link to your quality content to boost their visibility. Influencers and other writers may also email you to have a guest-posts on your website. This goal is easier to achieve with local content marketing! 

For More Social Shares 

Great content often acquires shares and likes on social networks. Awesome social media posts are resourceful, attractive, and problem-solving, and you can add all these elements to your articles by embracing local content marketing. By focusing your posts on events and concerns that your target audience cares about or by promoting local events, you’ll engage your potential customers and keep them coming back for more.

For Brand Awareness

There’s no other content marketing strategy that can do this better. Going local will open your eyes to the needs of your local community. It will enable you to meet local customers at the points of their needs, serving as an avenue for you to advertise your products and business to them. 

These goals are all connected. You can achieve all the other three by going for just one. Nevertheless, it’s essential to have a goal before you start implementing local content marketing. It will help streamline your journey, save time, and prevent wasting resources. For example, a business that desires social media shares will focus on engaging and short visual content creation. Meanwhile, a small business that seeks authoritative power will publish more resourceful, high-quality content and guides about the local area. 

Types of Local Content Marketing

You can use all types of content to promote your business. These forms include and are not limited to blogs, infographics, images, videos, eBooks, podcasts, case studies, memes, press releases, testimonials and reviews, guides, and how-to-videos. 

In local content marketing, blog posts will help a lot to attract your potential customers. Businesses with websites should invest a lot in their blog section. They should enrich it with articles that enlighten readers about their problems and possible solutions. You can also use it to update your audience about upcoming events and festivals in the state and your company’s participation. 

Blogs could also serve as means to educate them about your services and products. Guides could also come as blog posts. And you can create a series of articles and turn your website into a library for an audience interested in your niche. These people could sign up for your newsletters and become loyal fans of your website. 

Applying search engine optimization methods to the planning and development of blog posts will help you rise to the top of search engine result pages. It’s easier with local content marketing because you have only a few other businesses competing with the exact keywords. 

eBooks and case studies work for reporting research. You can use press releases to get your business into the mainstream. By revealing new findings in your niche on a public website, you can attract new traffic to your website and create brand awareness for your business. Memes, videos, and infographics do well on social networks. Testimonials and reviews are essential for gaining trust and showing reliability. 

Podcasting is an excellent way of enlightening your audiences. It’s a content form that any business can use to promote itself locally. However, it requires lots of planning and consistency. You may have to pick some months in which you will release a new weekly podcast, all speaking about the same subject. You can even bring on community leaders to discuss social ills. 

Finding Content Ideas

The best content ideas will come from you, the business owner. As an experienced person in your niche, you would have heard many customer complaints and know people’s areas of confusion about your business. You can generate much content just by trying to answer their questions and making them understand your niche and business operation. 

You can also get content ideas from your competitors and businesses in the same niche. There are many tools on the internet that you can be used to see what your competitors are posting on the website and social media pages. You can develop tons of content by rephrasing and upgrading your competitor’s articles. 

Content explorer tools provide the best content ideas. Ahrefs and Semrush offer the most excellent content-exploring tools. By entering a word or phrase in the search box, you can use this tool to see what other businesses in your niche publish on their blogs. These will present tons of content topics with links pointing to each one. There will also be data showing each article’s performance and key metrics. 

You may find hundreds of content ideas for just a keyword. Pick the best three or five articles, study them, and make excellent content that outperforms all three. Taking the lead position for the same keyword on the content explorer ranking should be your goal.

Preparing the Content

As mentioned earlier, search engine optimization techniques are essential when writing your textual content. You should use keywords appropriately, attractive images, add backlinks, and optimize your Meta tags. 

For local content marketing, make localized keywords your priority. These are keywords that contain location-specific phrases. There are tools for finding localized keywords, and you recognize these keywords when they have the name of a town or city. An example of such a keyword is “Los Angeles event planner.”

Your social media graphics should be colorful and attractive–that can’t be overemphasized. Could you make sure they are original? You can get original illustrations from Canva, Unsplash, Pexels, and Getty Images. 

Text overlay helps to optimize photos. It improves engagement and gives your visuals more meaning. Same reason why you should add subtitles to your videos. Moreover, the short ones are the best. A social media video should be between two to five minutes. Also, people enjoy how-to videos and top-five video reviews better than other forms. Learn more about optimizing your visual content here.

Long video content can be helpful for interviews and showing production processes. People interested in your brand will take time to see these videos, which could lead them to conversion. Showing them the production process or how the service has been carried out could help them gain confidence in your brand. 

Publishing Your Local Content

Publishing your local content shouldn’t be a difficult one. The only challenge at this stage may be where to post your content to attract the most profitable traffic. Your business website is one of the most appropriate places on the internet. The lucky article might bring thousands of traffic to your website. 

And if it doesn’t, it will be on your website forever as long as nothing happens to your website. It might be an excellent resource for people in the future. You could also take a different route: post on a popular website to tap from its traffic. It is called guest posting. 

There are websites in the same niche as you that have massive traffic. And they are open to posts from other writers and bloggers. You could contact them to publish your content and their website or business as the source and owner of the content. People who love this content may check your website for more of the article. Guest posting can be free; sometimes, owners of these websites may demand a fee. 

You could also post on article directories. They are sites where bloggers and savvy writers publish their articles to show the vast knowledge they possess in a field. There is no content discrimination; the sites accept and publish articles in all categories and niches. However, the piece may have to undergo some examination before it’s finally published. These sites include EzineArticles and Finder Master Blogs.

You can publish and distribute your press releases across various platforms using the media available on the internet. The popular press release media are PR Newswire, PRWeb, and PR.com. 

Finding Local Websites for Guest Posting

Google remains the platform for finding authoritative websites in your niche. With an extension from Moz bar that shows the rankings of websites on Google search engine result pages and some search operators, you can find loads of websites that would love to publish your content on their website. 

These search operators are unique keywords that reduce browsing hassle and direct you to the page or website you seek. Common examples include; 

• Inurl: This particular operator will reduce your search results to pages that contain the keyword you seek. For example, you can find a guest posting website for pest-related articles by saying [Pest control inurl: guest post]. Every result for this search will contain pest control and “guest posting” or “write-for-us” in their URL. And they will all be websites that accept pest control articles. You can also say [sponsored post inurl: pest control]. 

• Intitle: Like inurl, it returns webpages, but those with your search keyword in their title tags. An example is [Pest control intitle: infographic]. This will return pages that contain infographics about pest control. 

• Inanchor: This operator will limit your search to webpages that contain your search keyword in their anchor texts or point to the page with the keyword. An example is [pest control inanchor: infographic]. These search words will load results that contain infographics in the text pointing to the page, and that destination page will contain pest control.

Learn more about the search operators in this Google guide. 

Measuring the Success of a Local Content Marketing Campaign

The result is the justifier of all actions or campaigns. It tells you if your campaign is effective or not. All you need is some key performance metrics of your content and web pages, and you will be able to grade the success of your campaign. 

It will help if you get some tools to get these metrics. Google Analytics can help to measure the traffic coming from your guest posts. Ensure that the links in your content are labeled with the Google URL builder to identify traffic from your publishing websites. You can also use this tool to analyze the performance of the new articles published on your business website. 

There are other social share tools for measuring the number of shares for your content on social networks. You don’t have to worry about how to measure your guest post social shares, and most publishing sites usually have an inbuilt tool installed on their sites for this purpose. You can view your content performance right on the page.