If you’re a small business owner who has a local business such as a dentist, attorney, chiropractor, beauty salon or in the home improvement arena, your online marketing strategies need to be a bit different.

While so many marketers will steer you down the path that the power is in having a massive list, what good will it do you to have a following of 5,000 people who mostly reside outside your service area?

After analyzing several of my clients, performing in depth market research, and what is really effective for them, I discovered the strategies that work best for them in attracting customers and clients that are interested in what they have to offer and how regardless of the industry that they are in, how any small business owner can begin to apply them for great results.

Let’s get to it.

Use video on your website

As a local, small business owner, your strength in building a following that rave about you and your business is your personality. What you need to do is create videos that allow your potential customers and clients to learn more about you before they hire you or by your products or services.

A typical question that I get about this is;

“What kind of videos should I create?”

This should be pretty easy. Take a look at your business. Let’s say that you own a beauty salon, you may want to start a series of videos that show women how to care for their hair between hair appointment visits.

You can cover everything from what kinds of shampoos are best for color treated hair to what kinds of conditioners work best for heat damaged hair or what products work best with curly hair. The list of opportunities is endless.

What clients have found is that if they do a video showing “how to” use a particular product such as a certain kind of shampoo. They then feature that shampoo at their salon, in most every case they see an increase in sales for that particular product because of that prior exposure.

Think about that for a moment, as a small business owner would you rather see your clients purchase the items that they are going to need from you or someone else?

There are times that I get a different responds from some of my clients. “Well my business is different.”

“I’m in home improvements.” or “I’m in heating and air conditioning”, “I’m a plumber” and the list goes on and on.

Let’s take a plumber for example.

You can make a video showing people “how to fix your sink”. This is great because when people in your area see your video, not only does it allow them to get to know your better but when they need your service on bigger more complicated jobs they won’t hesitate on calling you.

If you prefer not to create instructional videos then create a library of testimonial videos from happy, satisfied customers and clients.

What I will say is that the most powerful is a combination of both testimonials about your local business and instructional videos showing off your skills teaching others. This combination solidifies you as the only choice in your area.

In tomorrow’s post we will continue to talk about the best small business marketing solutions and how you can implement them in to your business to attract more customers and clients.

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