If you’ve run out of ideas on how to market your local business, you’re going to want to listen to this one. Hey there, I’m Jillian Kendrick and welcome to the Momentum Marketing Podcast. I’m a mama, a wife, an entrepreneur and a three time best selling co-author. In each episode, you’ll get real world practical advice and strategies and maybe a parenting tip or two along the way. If you’re ready to create a business that supports your family and your lifestyle, then you’re in the right place.
Welcome back. Welcome back. I’m so excited to be here with you today. Thank you for tuning in to the Momentum Marketing Podcast.
As always, I’m your host, Jillian Kendrick and I’m really glad to be here spending this time with you today. We are talking about local marketing. As I’m sure you’re aware or you might have a clue that local marketing and online marketing can be a little bit similar, but they can be very different when you’re targeting an audience that’s really broad. And anybody in your state, anybody in the country that you live in, or anybody in the world can buy from you. That’s a really really broad list of people. And we want to narrow that down somewhat but local marketing for brick and mortar or businesses that specifically serve an area of their town, their state, their country, wherever you live. Maybe it’s a tri county thing. Maybe it’s a tri-state thing if you have that type of business or you want to learn more about it. This is definitely the episode for you. We are talking about marketing, local businesses and ideas that I’ve seen work and have come up with over the years. This is going to be an awesome value packed episode that you’re not going to want to miss. And even if you are the type of business that’s online and it’s more broad, I’m going to tell you to stay tuned and listen to this one anyway, because it might spark some ideas and help you break through a few of those barriers.
Before we dive in. If you’re looking at how to generate more leads online. If you want to learn how to do lead generation, the right way, the best way and the way that’s working right now today in the industry, head on over to jilliankendrick.com/masterclass and sign up for my absolutely free training. It is so good y’all. It’s 38-39 minutes long. So I’m not going to take up your entire day. It’s so good. It’s jam packed with tons and tons of value. I pepper in a few nuggets here and there and it’s just really good stuff, man. I’m so proud of that webinar. Head on over to jilliankendrick.com/masterclass where you can learn more about how to generate leads right now.
So let’s dive in and learn more about local business marketing. First and foremost, when it comes to doing anything related to local business or geo targeted businesses or areas that you are going to serve as a local business or as a brick and mortar. You absolutely have to have a Google My Business listing. I think it used to be called Google Places. Now they call it Google My Business. And what’s gonna happen when you have a Google My Business listing is that listing will come up first in the search results. So you can have a website, you can have a Facebook page, you can have other things that’s fine. But you wanna have a Google My Business listing because when somebody Googles pet stores or lawyers or bakeries or a car wash or whatever your business is, when they’re searching for things that are related to your business, similar to your business or that would qualify to be shown in a Google result. When you have a Google My Business listing, those show up first in the Google search before all the blogs before all of the other stuff before all of the websites. I don’t know that they show up before ads. That ad placement is first and then the Google My Business listings come second, but that’s what people are looking for. They’re going to see information about you. They’re going to see where you’re located. They’re going to see the image that you put into your listing.
Now, to get a Google My Business listing, you have to go through a whole process of signing up, making sure that you have a Google account going into Google My Business, creating your business or changing the business if you, you know, bought one or if you bought a franchise or something like that, and then you have to go through a verification process. So you can input all of the information. Change around the address or the suite number, maybe change the business name or change the logo. But in order to verify and get you into Google, you have to go through a manual verification process and I believe the verification process is they will send you a postcard with some kind of a code on it and then you take that code and you put it into Google.
Now, in order to have a Google My Business listing you have to have a physical address, and this is really important, you have to have a physical address where customers can go and meet you and do business at that location. So for instance, if you have an online business and you rent a P.O. box or a UPS box or a mailbox. I think they’re called MailboxJoey close to us. If you rent a box, if all you have is that box to receive mail, then you can’t create a Google My Business listing. In order to create a Google My Business listing, you have to have a physical address that customers can go to to meet you. There, go into the physical location and do business at that location. If you’re like me and you have an online business and all you have is a box that you rent. I can’t create a Google My Business listing because even though I have a physical address, even though I have a suite number, Google knows that it’s a UPS store. I’m sure other people before me have tried and it doesn’t work. Now you might be able to get away with having a co-working space mailbox because yes, it’s a mailbox. But in a co-working space, you can physically meet clients or customers at that space and you could do business in that location. Technically, you might have to argue that with Google My Business, I’ve never tried. I don’t go to co-working spaces regularly. But case in point, you have to have a physical location where you can meet customers and do business next.
Once you have that listing, let me tell you as long as you have enough information in that listing, you don’t really need a website. I know a lot of small businesses, local businesses will use a Facebook page or a Facebook group or something like that as their website. And that’s fine. It’s pretty easy nowadays to go to Web.com or I think Vistaprint has website building services. You can literally create a website in Google with a gmail account. You don’t have to have a Google Business admin suite in order to create a website through Google and it’s free, the URL will be website.google.com. I think there are ways to change that or you could pay a minimal fee to get the URL switched, but it is pretty easy to do nowadays. There’s Wix.com, there’s Squarespace, there’s Weebly, there’s half a dozen others or you can just use Google and create a website. You could use a Facebook page if you wanted to make that your website, but you might not even need all of that if you have enough information inside of your Google My Business listing.
Next, we need to create awareness for our business. Whether you want to run Google pay per click ads or you want to run Facebook ads or Youtube or something else. Maybe you want to advertise in the Penny Saver. You need to be running some of ad. Personally, I really like Facebook and Instagram ads because you can start as low as $5 a day and you can geo target, which is what’s really important for small businesses, brick and mortar businesses, and local businesses. And what I mean by geo target is I can go into Facebook, start an ad and I can tell that ad, ok, here is my physical location at 111 Main Street or wherever your business is. And I wanna advertise to a person within a 40 mile radius or within a five mile radius or within whatever radius you think might be appropriate for your specific kind of business. And within Facebook, you can target things like people who are homeowners. You can target the top 5, 10 and 25% of household incomes within zip codes. You can target parents. You can target moms. There’s a lot of additional targeting that you can do outside of just the geo targeting.
And the other thing that’s great about using Facebook geo targeting is you can actually specify exemptions. So you can say target so many people within so many miles of this particular zip code or this particular pinpoint on a map, but don’t show this area or don’t do this or you can have exceptions to all of those rules which I really like a lot. And because you can start Facebook and Instagram ads at just $5 a day, they’re very economical and feasible for any business owner at any level. Google ads are a little bit of a different beast, so to speak. You have to specify the keywords that you’re interested in targeting. You have to bid on how much you’re willing to spend for that click. So you have to know your ROI really, really well or be willing to play around with it for a bit until you hit that sweet spot.
And the other thing that’s different about Google on Facebook ads, in my opinion, two things actually. One Google only gives you a certain number of characters that you can use for the title of your ad or the headline of your ad. And so you have to be really, really good and brief and succinct with what you’re going to say and who you’re trying to attract. And the second thing about Google ads versus Facebook ads from a strategy perspective is Facebook and Instagram are more of discovery platforms. They’re more of, I’m scrolling through feeds. I’m looking at different things and oh, here’s a new local business, here’s a new bakery, here’s a new veterinarian office that just opened up. Oh, I can check that out because I have a pet or because I like pastries or because I’m interested in this particular thing. Facebook and Instagram are much more discovery platforms. Whereas Google, we go to Google to look up specific things. So when I needed a plumber, I Googled plumbers in my local area. When I needed to learn how to do something brand new in Powerpoint, I Googled how to do that and found a tutorial video. The nature of the use of Google as a platform is much more for search and specific needs. Whereas Facebook and Instagram are much more discovery platforms. So you really need to think about which one is going to serve you better.
For me as an online business owner, I need people to discover me. I have specific things that people would Google that I can help with or that I can provide value on. But for the most part, my business does really well with Facebook and Instagram ads and we’ve really not seen a lot of traction with Google pay per click. But that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be applicable to your specific business. You just have to decide which strategy is going to work for you.
Before we dive into the second part of the local business advice. I want to share something really exciting with you. I’ve opened enrollment to my brand new gorgeous program: The Ultimate AI Formula. This is such a good program. It’s an insane amount of value for a really small amount of money. If you have struggled at all with trying to create content through ChatGPT, if you’ve tried to use AI, if you’ve dipped your toes into the world of AI and you’re not really producing anything worthwhile. I can’t tell you how many times I had tried to use AI several months, if not a year ago and it really just didn’t give me anything back that I could actually use. And so I’m sitting there thinking, well, Skynet isn’t coming any time soon. The robots are useless. I’m just going to do it all on my own. But the reality was I was not using AI or ChatGPT, in the best way possible. I wasn’t getting anything out of it because I wasn’t putting anything into it. I had to learn the hard way that AI is much more of a learning tool than it is a production tool. And so when I was able to teach AI about myself about my business, about who I’m trying to target, about my audience, about the way that I write, and the things that I say, then ChatGPT and other AI systems were able to give me back content that was so much better. It sounded like I wrote it, it sounded like something that I would want to read and it was so good. Now, granted, it wasn’t perfect. I still had to edit and tweak and Jillianify the content that it gave me. But it made my content production so much faster and so much easier because it was producing stuff that was actually applicable to me, to my writing style, to the things that I say, to the way that I speak and to the nature of how I write. This formula that I’m going to teach you inside of The Ultimate AI Formula has absolutely fast tracked my content creation exponentially.
So for only $37 you can get access right now to The Ultimate AI Formula. Just head over to automatedmama.com/aiformula, all one word A-I-formula. And you can get access for only 37 bucks. It’s at a discount right now probably for the next couple of weeks or so. And then it’s going to be going up, I think we’re going to sell it for $197 or something. So if you want The Ultimate AI Formula at a very, very steep discount. This is seriously some of the best stuff that I have put together. Go ahead right now to automatedmama.com/aiformula and grab your copy today because the price is going to go up in the next couple of weeks. I’m going to teach you exactly what you need to say and put into ChatGPT to teach it how to talk like you. And to teach it how to produce content like you, I give you a couple of, I actually write out all of the prompts for you and all you have to do is piece in the blank spaces. All you have to do is input the different blanks that I’ve written into the prompt and I promise it is going to reduce your content creation by hours and hours and hours. And it’s actually going to produce stuff that looks and sounds like you wrote it. So, head on over to automatedmama.com/aiformula to grab your copy now, before the price goes up in just a couple of weeks.
There’s one more strategy I want to share with you and then we’re gonna tell you how to tie it all together. So on top of your Google My Business listing different types of ads, the geo targeting, we talked about all of that. The other thing that you can do. And this is a good idea if you’re ready to run ads or even if you’re just not quite ready to run ads. Sometimes ads are really intimidating for people and they’re just not quite ready to do it or they don’t know how to do it. Whatever your situation is, I would also recommend doing this strategy which is: get a list of the type of people that you can serve.
So I’ll give you an example. One of my listeners wrote in to hello@jilliankendrick.com. I actually do check that inbox and I do respond to every single email I get except for the rando ones, the cold emails, who are like “come join us on this thing” and I’m like, I have no idea who you are. Those I delete. But I do respond to the other actual ones. So if you really are a human being with a legit question or concern. I do respond to those. One of my list wrote, “Hey, I’m trying to market my local business. What ideas would you have to do that?” And specifically, she sold basically kitchen equipment, spatulas and aprons and microwaves, pots and pans and knife sets. She sold kitchen equipment to restaurants. So let’s use that as our example for this specific strategy. The idea that I shared with her was, you know, who your target audience is. You know that you’re going after restaurant or businesses that can use the equipment that she sells. That’s who she’s targeting, that’s who she’s going after. There’s nothing stopping her from going on Google, and she could do this herself or she could go pay somebody on Upwork or Fiver to do this for her. She can go Google all of the restaurants in her local area within the area that she would be willing to serve, or willing to ship to, or willing to drive to, and not even just restaurants. But think about this you guys, churches need that type of equipment. Nonprofits need that kind of equipment. Daycare centers need that kind of equipment. Just because she sells restaurant supplies doesn’t mean that she’s limited to selling only to restaurants or restaurantours or owners, she can sell to anyone who has a need for the product and the solution that she’s providing. What’s to stop her from going on Google or paying somebody on upwork to then go on Google and aggregate a spreadsheet of all of the churches, daycare centers, senior living centers, restaurants, medical facilities, and so on and so forth. That could be her potential customers. And then once she has that list, then figure out who might the decision maker of that restaurant be? Is it a manager or no pro maybe, maybe not. Is it the owner?
Maybe if it’s a franchise, you might be limited with franchise stuff. I don’t know a whole lot about Franchising if I’m honest and I don’t know whether a McDonald’s franchise or a Chickfila franchise would require somebody to use their equipment or their vendor for equipment or if they’re allowed to use a local vendor. I don’t know what that looks like. You would have to figure that out for yourself. But she could aggregate this list, business name or restaurant name, address, phone number, who’s the owner, who’s the restaurateur, who’s the decision maker or manager of that business? And then she could send what we call a sales letter or a shock and awe package to that person. Sharing the variety of things that she sells what she’s offering. Maybe she’s doing a Black Friday sale, maybe she’s having a clearance and she needs to get rid of a bunch of equipment. So she’s having a flash sale. Whatever that looks like shock and awe packages can be many different things. You could include money like actual dollars in a shock and awe package. You could include a sample of the actual merchandise. So let’s say that she had a massive stock of aprons that she couldn’t sell and she was just going to throw away anyway. But why not include one of those aprons as a gift to build reciprocity inside of her shock and awe package. A sales letter or shock and awe can also include a DVD or a video or a QR code that hyperlinks to a sales video or even a webinar of what you’re selling, what you’re offering. Here’s our equipment, come in and check it out, that sort of thing. S&A packages can include other types of gifts. If you own a bakery or a restaurant, maybe it’s a sample of the food that you sell. I know a local vendor to me who sold caramels out of her basement. And she would send little packages of caramels to local businesses, and then they would try them and then go back to her to buy their corporate gifts. Like it’s brilliant. This stuff actually works. So some type of a sales letter video, sales, letter shock and awe package, something like that. She could easily put together and for a minimal amount of money or effort, she could ship all of these, she could go and have them delivered, she could deliver them if they really are of like local businesses that she could drive to, she could hand deliver them as well.
And these are just different alternative strategies to the classic idea of just running ads or buying media or buying TV, time and commercial space. And if I’m honest, I think they’re way more effective shock and awe packages building reciprocity, giving a gift to build that know, like, and trust with someone is huge. That’s the idea of what we talk about in List Builder Blueprint. When you provide a lead magnet, you’re giving them value so that you build that reciprocity. It’s not about, oh gosh, I need to give them something for free. No, it’s, I’m going to teach you or help you or give you a win or show you or change your mindset on this particular thing so that you can benefit from it completely free and I can demonstrate my skills, my value, my product, my quality, whatever that looks like for you.
And that leads to the last point that I wanna make when it comes to any type of marketing that you’re going to do, be it paid ads, be it a billboard on the highway, be it purchased media like commercial time, be it airspace on the radio, be it social ads, paper, click shock and awe packages, you name it, or even advertising in the Penny Saver, whatever marketing you do needs to have a call to action. What is a call to action? A call to action is: to learn more go to this website, if you want more information call me at this phone number, click here to apply, come into our store and receive 10% off. That is a call to action. You are giving them some kind of value upfront and then leading them towards where they can get more of that value.
Have you ever seen the movie Finding Dory? It’s super cute. It’s the second Finding Nemo. At the end of Finding Dory *spoiler alert* Dory the fish, the entire movie searching for her family. And what we learn about Dory when she’s at this aquarium, inside of this really big fish tank, is that her family places these little like stones or seashells or something like that, they place them along a trail that when you follow that trail of seashells or whatever it is, it leads back to the home that her and her parents lived in. And so Dory, who, if you know anything about that movie, has a really bad memory. And so if she forgets who she is or where she’s at, she can see the trail of seashells that will lead her back home. So in order to find her family, she has to follow the trail of seashells.
This is what your lead magnet and your call to action do for your business when it comes to bringing in new leads. Your call to action becomes that trail of seashells that leads them to where they want to go, where they want to be, the desired location that they want to get to, or the thing that they want to achieve. It’s the breadcrumb trail. It’s the trail of seashells that leads them back home. Your call to action is, hey, I’ve given you this value up front. I’ve helped you realize this thing or change your mind, your attitude, your positioning about something. And now if you want to learn more, if you want to achieve XYZ goal, now you can follow my call to action, my trail of breadcrumbs, to get to that desired success or location. So every single ad, all of your marketing, everything that you do, needs to have a call to action that takes them to where you want them to go.
I’m sure you’ve noticed at the beginning of the podcast, I mentioned my master class in the middle of the podcast. I mentioned my brand new AI formula program. This is not by accident, this is not happenstance. This is, I have laid the foundation, and now I want you to take the next step where I can provide you with even more value. And in order to have a call to action, you need to have two really important things.
The first is some kind of value or offer or lead magnet or it can be a coupon, it could be a video series, it can be something of value or even an offer. The offer for our example that we just talked about our restaurant supply company. The offer for her can be, hey, come into my store, bring this letter with you and receive 20% off your purchase of $100 or more. There’s a great example. Or hey, if you call me before December 1st, I will bring my brand new knife set and let your chefs try it out totally for free. I’ll come to your restaurant and you guys can test it out and see if you like it. That’s something of value. That’s a great call to action. But most of the time we need a mechanism for which this call to action can take place. And the way that we do that very often is through some kind of a software. So we wanna capture their information. We want to do that digital business card exchange, so to speak and give them an opportunity to hear more about us. But for us to learn more about them, it’s equal, that’s communication. So you can use software, you can follow up with them, we can email them, we can keep track of leads and all of this is done inside of a system. I show you way more about this inside of the master class.
So again, here’s my call to action head over to jilliankendrick.com/masterclass. And you can watch this amazing free training all about how to bring in leads, how to create compelling calls to action, and then how to follow up with them afterwards. I would love to hear from you and I would love to know if you have any questions about marketing, about systems, about automation, about AI, about calls to action, about running ads, about running a business. This is what I’ve done for the last 13 years and this is what I love to do is to support you and help you navigate the waters of the online world and make running your business that much easier. So send me an email hello@jilliankendrick.com. Let me know what questions you have if you have ideas for topics and episodes, because that’s actually where this topic came from. For today’s episode was an email from one of the list listeners. And my response, I was really excited about the ideas and strategies that I shared with this listener and I wanted to pass that knowledge on to you. So email me, let’s start a conversation. And as always, thank you so much for being here.
Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of the Momentum Marketing Podcast. If listening to this has brought you value, improved your life, or given you insight on how you can build your own momentum, then please share this with a friend. And if you’re ready to grow your business on autopilot, then I want to help you get there easier and faster with a free copy of my Entrepreneur’s Survival Kit. Just leave a review of this podcast wherever you’re listening right now. Hopefully it’s a five star review and you love it, then screenshot the review and email the screenshot to hello@jilliankendrick.com. Once we confirm the review, we’ll send you a copy of the survival kit. Totally free. Thank you so much for joining me and I’ll see you on the next episode. All content is written and recorded by Jillian Kendrick Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.
The Momentum Marketing Podcast
By Jillian Kendrick
Episode: # 39
Topic: How to properly market your local business
Contact: hello@jilliankendrick.com
Follow IG: instagram.com/automatedmama
