Next Level Local Business Marketing Strategies For 2024

Have a local business?

Today we are going to share seven local business marketing strategies that can help you take it to the next level in 2024!

Create a Lead Magnet for Your Business

The first thing you should do is create a lead magnet for your business.

What is a Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet is a freebie that you offer to the potential customer in exchange for their email address. 

The purpose of a lead magnet is to help you attract potential customers, convert them into leads, and build trust that you can then capitalize on to sell them your products and services. 

You have probably encountered digital lead magnets while browsing the web. You know how some websites offer a discount, a free report, or a free ebook, but you need to subscribe to their email list to get it? These are lead magnets.

You can use the same strategy to get leads for your local business!

How to Create a Lead Magnet That Converts

So how can you create an appealing lead magnet?

Alex Hormozi, an entrepreneur and investor who reached $100M+ net worth by his early 30s, argues that a lead magnet should provide a complete solution to a narrowly defined problem. 

Here’s one of the examples that he provides:

Let’s say that you do massages and are struggling to get clients. That’s probably because you are not giving away enough free massages.

If you gave away $10 massages for free and then pitched those leads $100 massage packages, you’d probably have a much easier time getting clients!

It might seem weird to just give away something that you would normally charge for but it can help you make much more money in the long run. 

You can learn more about this approach to marketing by watching this video:

Giving away products and services for free is the best way to get leads. So figure out what you can use as your lead magnet!

How to Build a Lead Generation Funnel

You will also need a lead generation funnel for your lead magnet. 

We recommend using the squeeze page funnel because it’s super easy to build. This funnel only has two pages:

1. A squeeze page where you offer the potential customer your lead magnet in exchange for their email address.
2. A thank you page where you thank the potential customer and explain how they can redeem your free offer.

You can easily build a squeeze page funnel with ClickFunnels 2.0.

Our software includes a squeeze page funnel template, a variety of proven squeeze page templates, and a visual editor that you can use to customize the pages in your funnel.

Get Them to Redeem Your Free Offer With This Six-Email Welcome Sequence

Potential customers need to get value from your lead magnet in order for this approach to work.

This is where local business owners face a unique challenge: how can you get someone to redeem your free offer?

Let’s say your lead magnet is a free pizza voucher. Who would say no to a free pizza, right?

But the reality is that people are busy. They might give you their email address to get the voucher but then never get around to redeeming it.

This is a problem because if they never come to your restaurant to get their free pizza, you can’t convert them into customers and then into regular customers. So how can you solve this?

We recommend sending every new email subscriber this welcome sequence:

• Day #1: Who are you? – Introduce yourself to the new subscribers and show them that there’s a real person behind this business.
• Day #2: Where did you come from? – Share your “origin story”. Why did you start this business?
• Day #3: What do you do? – Explain to the new subscriber what you specialize in.
• Day #4: What makes you an expert at what you do? – Establish your credibility by sharing formal credentials, relevant experience, and your most impressive accomplishments.
• Day #5: Who do you do this for? – Describe your target audience. Who are your dream customers?
• Day #6: Remind them to redeem your free offer! – Remind the new subscriber about your free offer and encourage them to redeem it.

This welcome sequence can help you create an emotional connection, build more trust, and hopefully get the new subscriber to redeem your free offer. 

Our software, ClickFunnels 2.0, has an email marketing functionality that you can use to set up your welcome sequence.

Once the new subscriber completes this sequence, you want to continue providing free value via email, ideally in the form of a regular email newsletter (it can be weekly, biweekly, or monthly). 

This will allow you to stay top of mind with them and further increase the chances of them actually redeeming your free offer!

Use Marketing to Promote Your Lead Magnet

There’s one key mindset shift that you need to make if you want to use this approach to grow your local business:

You need to start driving traffic to your squeeze page instead of your website or your sales page.

Meaning, that when you are doing marketing, you shouldn’t be promoting your products or services, you should be promoting your lead magnet!

This idea can be difficult to wrap your head around because it feels counterintuitive, especially if you are paying for ads just to give away free stuff.

But remember: the more traffic you drive to your squeeze page, the more leads you’ll generate and the more sales you will make!

Okay, so now with all that out of the way, let’s take a look at various local business marketing strategies that you can use to promote your lead magnet:

Local Business Marketing Strategy #1: Leafleting

Local businesses have been using leafleting since the invention of leaflets. And it’s still effective to this day!

Needless to say, this strategy works best when entrepreneurs use it to promote their lead magnets: free pizza, free gym membership, free car wash, etc.

However, if you want to make the most out of this old-school local business marketing strategy, you should add an online twist to it:

Use leaflets to promote your lead magnet but make it clear that if potential customers want to get a voucher for it, they need to go to your squeeze page. Make sure to provide both a web address and a QR link. 

That way, instead of simply putting vouchers in people’s mailboxes and hoping that they come in to redeem your free offer, you will be driving traffic to your squeeze page and converting it into leads!

Local Business Marketing Strategy #2: Sponsoring Local Events

Sponsoring local events is another tried-and-true local business marketing strategy that has been around for ages.

We recommend using the advertisement placements that you get in exchange for the sponsorship to drive traffic to your squeeze page.

By the way, if you are a sponsor of the event, the organizers will probably be okay with you handing out leaflets as well!

Local Business Marketing Strategy #3: Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has an extremely low barrier of entry so there’s no excuse not to do it. 

Choose a social media platform that makes the most sense for your business, create a content schedule that you can keep up indefinitely, and start posting.

Ideally, you want to post a mix of:

1. Educational content – You probably have skills that your dream customers want to learn. So why not teach them those skills? Share your expert advice, tips and tricks, procedures people should follow, etc.
2. Inspirational content – This can mean sharing inspirational quotes, images, stories, etc. that somehow relate to your business.
3. Promotional content – This can mean before-and-after photos, case studies, customer testimonials, etc. Make sure to link to your lead magnet in the captions.

You can use apps like MeetEdgar or Buffer to schedule content in advance so that you wouldn’t have to fly by the seat of your pants. 

Just posting content is not enough, though. You also need to generate engagement, which you can do by encouraging discussion in the comments and interacting with your followers. Ideally, you want to reply to every comment that you get.

Finally, if you already have an active social media presence due to your personal social media usage, you might want to make it private once you launch your business profile.

It might also make sense to go through your personal profile and clean it up by removing controversial stuff such as hot takes on politics and current events. 

Keep in mind that even if your personal profile is set to private, someone can still screenshot something you said and start drama over it. Social media is a crazy place!

This might feel unfair but when you create a business profile, you become a public person in a sense. While you have the right to express your opinion, it may not be wise if you are a business owner. Is it worth alienating potential customers over it?

Local Business Marketing Strategy #4: Social Media Advertising

You can also run ads on social media.

Social media platforms have incredible ad targeting capabilities, which makes it easy to create ad campaigns that are laser-focused on your dream customers.

There’s something that you need to understand about paid ads, though: you are going to lose money until you figure out how to run them profitably. And that might take a while!

Also, paid advertising can be volatile, so you need to keep a close eye on the numbers even if your campaign is doing well. You never know when ad costs might unexpectedly shoot up. 

Finally, we want to once again emphasize that you should promote your lead magnet, not your products or services!

Local Business Marketing Strategy #5: Google Search Ads

Google Search ads are displayed at the top of the search results for their target keyword. 

Choosing the right keywords will require some keyword research but you should probably target variations of “[your product or service] in [your location]”.

Something to keep in mind here is that the bigger the city that you are based in, the more it makes sense to target specific areas or neighborhoods as opposed to the city itself.

Say, if someone is in North London and wants pizza, they probably won’t be willing to go all the way down to South London to get it.

So if you have a pizza place in South London, it might make sense to target “pizza in South London” or even more specifically “pizza in [your neighborhood]” instead of targeting “pizza in London”. 

Commercial keywords like that can work really well for promoting your lead magnet. If someone is already googling “pizza in Croydon” and you show them an ad for your FREE PIZZA offer, they will probably feel inclined to take you up on it!

Local Business Marketing Strategy #6: Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is the practice of optimizing websites and web pages in order to attract organic search traffic from Google.

Local business owners tend to be completely clueless about SEO so you might be able to outcompete your rivals relatively easily if you can get the basics right. But what are those basics?

First, you should take care of technical SEO. This stuff may seem boring but it’s important. You need to make sure that Google can crawl and index your website. 

Once that’s done, it’s time to start creating SEO content. Each article you publish on your website should target a specific keyword.

We recommend using Ahrefs for keyword research. Here’s a 10-minute tutorial that can help you learn how to find promising keywords:

The vast majority of people who use Google Search click on one of the top three search results, with the top result having an average click-through rate of 27.6%.

That’s why your aim should be to reach the top spot or at the very least rank in the second or third place for your target keyword. 

This means that you need to make sure that you can realistically rank that high when you are choosing keywords. It’s okay to be ambitious but don’t be delusional. 

Needless to say, if you want your content to stand a chance at getting to the top of search results, you have to make sure that it’s better than everything that is currently ranking for that keyword. So do some competitive research and see how you can improve on what’s already out there. 

The most important thing that you need to focus on is meeting search intent. Your content should provide whatever it is that people are looking for when they type that keyword into Google. 

There’s this popular belief that the longer the blog post, the better it will rank, but that’s simply not true. You should cover the subject as comprehensively as you need to in order to meet the search intent but don’t pad your article with fluff just to inflate its word count.

Readability is also important:

• Use subheadlines, bullet points, and numbered lists
• Keep your paragraphs short. 1-2 lines is ideal, 4-5 lines should be the absolute limit
• Use images and videos to break up the text

Finally, you should optimize your article with a tool like Clearscope or Surfer. Once that’s done, it’s time to publish it on your website.

Then you need to build as many backlinks to it as you possibly can. 

Here’s a great introduction to link building by Adam Enfroy, one of the best link builders out there:

Note that you can have the best content in the world but it’s not going to rank if it doesn’t have enough backlinks. Link building isn’t optional, it’s an absolute necessity.

Also, keep in mind that search engine optimization takes time. Even if you are doing everything right, it will likely take months until you start ranking for your target keywords. 

But if you continue publishing content and building backlinks to it, you should start seeing a steady increase in organic search traffic within 12-18 months!

Local Business Marketing Strategy #7: Influencer Marketing

You can also experiment with influencer marketing. 

Typically, when an influencer has an audience in the 1,000 – 100,000 followers range, it tends to be both engaged and aligned with them. 

This means that if there’s a significant overlap between their audience and your target demographic, partnering with them can help you reach your dream customers. 

Consider reaching out to promising nano and micro-influencers and striking up three-month partnerships where they give you three shoutouts over the course of three months.

Make it clear that you want them to promote your free offer, not your products or services. They should mention your lead magnet and direct their followers to your squeeze page. 

If you decide to partner with several influencers at the same time, make sure that you give them all unique links so that you can see how much traffic each influencer is sending your way.

Some local businesses may also benefit from offering influencers free services in exchange for shoutouts. This can be especially effective if it’s something that would look good on Instagram. 

Say, if you run a local gym, you can offer influencers free personal training in exchange for them posting before-and-after photos and including a link to your lead magnet in the captions. That way, you get not just shoutouts but also social proof. 

Ideally, you want to build long-term partnerships with influencers who can reliably bring in leads that convert into paying customers. 

Just keep in mind that as nano and micro-influencers become more popular, the effectiveness of your campaigns might start declining due to their audiences changing.

Say, if a local influencer becomes famous on a national level, they will get a ton of new followers from all across the country. Consequently, the demographic makeup of their audience will change. This might make it more difficult for you to get leads for your local business.

That’s why it’s important to always keep a close eye on the numbers. Does the math still work?

Build a Squeeze Page Funnel for Your Local Business in Just Five Days!

We want to invite you to a free online workshop where our co-founder Russel Brunson will walk you through building a squeeze page funnel for your business step-by-step. 

In just five days you will create your lead magnet, build a squeeze page funnel, and set up a welcome sequence designed to convert leads into customers. 

at the end of this workshop, you will launch your funnel with a proven social media marketing strategy that doesn’t require any money to implement. 

So don’t hesitate and join our Five Day Lead Challenge today. It can help you take your business to the next level in 2024!

Join Our Five Day Lead Challenge Today!