By Michael Zhou
The Internet is a great place for any business to advertise, especially a brick and mortar business. There are 28 million small businesses in the United States, and many of them have brick and mortar locations they rely on for their revenue.
While there are plenty of ways for an online retailer to bring traffic directly to their website, a brick and mortar business has to generate foot traffic and that takes extra effort. Utilizing online tactics to bring more customers to a brick and mortar business is an effective marketing tool, and it becomes even more effective when you use multichannel digital marketing techniques.
What is Multichannel Digital Marketing?
Multichannel online marketing is utilizing as many online marketing channels as possible to reach similar target audiences. You use multiple channels because different segments of your target audience use different digital platforms. There will be some social media websites that the older members of your demographic use that your younger audience will never go to. Using multiple channels, and tailoring each message for each channel, will significantly enhance your marketing results.
Pay Per Click
A pay per click (PPC) marketing is an effective way to push specific marketing messages across a variety of digital platforms. When you hire an experienced online marketing agency, that agency will start to put together multiple campaigns to reach your marketing goals. Check out these tips for hiring a PPC agency that can help your brick and mortar store.
Organic SEO
In the early days of search engine optimization (SEO), advertisers could buy links that appeared to give good traffic and those links would move the advertiser’s website into the top of the search results. When Google caught on that much of that traffic was fabricated by the link sellers, they put a penalty on any website that utilizes paid links.
The replacement for paid links is organic SEO. Through organic SEO, you build up web traffic based on real referral websites and create a more durable stream of traffic to your website. This form of SEO link building also helps generate more profitable foot traffic to your business as well, and is a powerful tool used by marketing experts.
Local SEO
There are a lot of good reasons to buy local beyond just helping local businesses to survive. Money that is spent with local businesses helps to create three-and-a-half times more wealth for the entire local community than shopping at national chain stores. The problem is that the chain stores usually have more advertising dollars than local business. But with local SEO, local companies can even the playing field.
Local SEO means using local product terms and local vernacular to speak to your audience. It means creating a website that speaks directly to your local audience, which is going to increase foot traffic into your brick and mortar store. It also means using services such as Google My Business to assist more consumers in locating your brick and mortar business online and increase your foot traffic.
Social Media Advertising
Why would you need to hire someone to run your social media platforms? First of all, if you are on all of the applicable social media platforms for your business, then you will not have time to run your online presence. Social media websites such as Facebook have their own demographics and not every social media platform can be used for every business. You need experts to not only get you on the right platforms, but to manage those platforms so they make you money.
Social media can be a very powerful way to advertise your brick and mortar business to your local clientele. The reason you want a professional working on your social media pages is because each platform has its own rules for promoting your business. If you want to maximize the power of social media, then you need an experienced company that knows how to get you more foot traffic without getting your social media page removed.
Email Marketing
Email marketing can be an effective way to grow a customer base, but you need to play within the rules of the game if you want to win. In recent years, there have been restrictions put on email marketing that have moved it into something only professionals should be doing. You can replace your weekly print advertisement with an email newsletter and get a higher rate of return for your brick and mortar business.
Text Marketing
A text message about one of your promotions sent to a consumer who is already out shopping is going to get great results. Text marketing is effective because people read their text messages and respond to them. A professional digital marketing firm is going to have a list of people who have opted-in to receiving marketing texts, which means only people who are interested in reading your information are getting your texts.
Remarketing
When the consumers of a brick and mortar store visit the store’s website and look up products, that creates an opportunity for remarketing. If that consumer does not purchase a product online or head out to the brick and mortar location to buy a product, then the store can send out targeted advertisements to the consumer reminding them of their interest in the product. Remarketing can be done across a variety of platforms and can be a powerful way to retain repeat business and bring in new clients.
Yelp
A brick and mortar business cannot ask its customers to leave a Yelp review, but it can remind its customers it is on the website to be reviewed. Consumers know what Yelp does because they use it all of the time. By reminding your customers through many different online platforms that you are on that popular rating website, you are encouraging them to leave reviews and that only helps your business.
Your brick and mortar business relies on Internet marketing just as much as any online retailer. It is important to contact an online marketing company to help you reach across multiple online channels to reach out to as many new consumers as possible.
Michael Zhou is a Senior VP of Business Intelligence Development and has assisted the Fortune 1000 company with expertise in the web as a whole, including ground-zero marketing efforts that benefit both consumer and vendor. He is also contributor on Esprittoday.
Marketing stock photo by PopTika/Shutterstock
