Some things just take time. Developing a local online marketing strategy is like tending a garden. When you plant seeds and give it enough time, you end up with a wonderful little harvest. But one thing your marketing and growing a garden have in common is that time isn't the only thing you need for growth.
You need to water it, ensure it gets enough sunlight, weed it, save it from pests, etc. It takes consistent effort to keep a garden healthy and to reach its full potential.
The same goes for your local online marketing strategy.
Why Update Your Local Online Marketing Strategy?
Once upon a time, keyword stuffing used to be the name of the game (SEO). Digital marketers focused on stuffing as much of the target keyword (and its variations) into their website content as possible.
Imagine reading a blog with a long tail keyword (like “mobile car wash Las Vegas) stuffed 15 times in a 500-word piece. That would be an awkward read, but since that's what worked in the early 2000s, it's what marketers did. But when search engines started pushing websites that relied on keyword stuffing down the rankings, this marketing strategy was thrown out the window. The same thing happened with “buying” backlinks.
These are all examples of how rapidly (sometimes in a matter of weeks and months) digital marketing trends and practices can drastically change. And it’s precisely why local online marketing is not a one-time thing.
It’s not a temporary fling where everything is dreamy and perfect, but a long relationship that you build over time (with sacrifices and compromises). But as a result, you’d have something lasting and dependable.
There are several tangible and quantifiable benefits as well of constantly updating your local marketing strategy.
Stay Fresh
It's good to be consistent, but there is a fine line between consistency and stagnancy. No matter how effective your initial local marketing strategy was, if you don’t keep things fresh, your audience will eventually get bored. A fresh marketing approach every few months will most likely keep your audience engaged.
Stay Ahead Of The Competition
Your competitors, especially new ones, will likely follow the latest and most potent trends with their local online marketing strategy. And if you are stuck with your obsolete marketing tactics, they will drive your consumers away from you. Even if you retaliate by updating your local marketing approach, the chances are that a relatively sizeable portion of your consumer-base won't come back. Ideally, you should keep your local online marketing strategy updated preemptively.
Cut Ties With The Losers
Not every local marketing avenue is a gold mine, and even if it is, several mines run dry after a while. When you don't update your local marketing strategy, you typically keep investing time and resources on channels that don't work, simply because you haven't revised the plan. But if you update your marketing strategy every quarter or so, you get to reflect on what did and didn’t work in the last quarter, so you can cut back on those channels and divert resources to more productive online marketing avenues.
Become A Thought Leader
One of the most important goals of local online marketing is to become a thought leader within your local industry, and you can’t do that with an outdated marketing strategy and approach. Let’s say you repurpose and create modern construction tools for regional contractors. Your local online marketing strategy relies on written instruction manuals and detailed guides to help your target audience understand your product.
And you stick to that practice, even when “how-to” videos and visual guides become the norm. Since they are significantly easier to understand and less time consuming, your target audience will most likely be drawn to businesses that create visual guides, even if the underlying product is not as good as yours. It will also help your competitors establish themselves as the new thought leaders because people would find their content more helpful.
Without updating your approach and incorporation the best new practices in your local online marketing, it's quite easy to lose your status as an industry leader.
Conclusion
Local online marketing strategy is a long-term relationship, but like any other relationship, it’s more demanding at first. But once you find your groove, you will find it easier to stay fresh, update your marketing strategy periodically, and come up with new ways to keep your audience engaged.
