Even if you have the best intentions, your customers may not find your business when they are searching online. Or, they may find your business, but end up making a purchase elsewhere. There can be a lot of reasons for why this is happening, and they can be located at any point in the sales funnel. This is why it is so important for Rockford businesses to pay attention to every step of a customer’s purchasing journey, starting from the local listing.
Working with local listings
Once your business is online, your contact information will start to spread out through multiple platforms that generate listings automatically. Some of these platforms (like Yelp) rank in the top spots on Google, or they have a built-up audience that relies on them for business information. These platforms will naturally generate a portion of the outside interest in your company, which makes listings management an important priority. If inaccurate contact information is spread through these directories, then you stand to lose potential customers.
Listings management will ensure that the brand information spread throughout these platforms is clear, accurate, and consistent. The practice focuses on maintaining accuracy in the core data, and then going through the various directories and suppressing duplicates, replacing misleading data with accurate data, and optimizing the way these directories present your business. Specific techniques used in listings management include:
- Claiming – Some directories will allow you to take direct control of your listing by integrating them with an automated tool that helps you monitor and maintain the data from a single control panel.
- Connecting – Listings data has to be indexable in order for it to spread to as many platforms as possible. Once you have a core of optimized information, you will be able to spread it to claimed directories and further across the web.
- Centralization – As the number of listings starts to grow, you will need a central hub that allows you to make changes across all of them in mere minutes instead of hours. There are a number of tools that allow you to find, claim, and control your listings automatically.
Integrating with local advertising
Once the listings are properly set up, you can take advantage of the momentum by using advertising. However, general advertising is not very efficient when it comes to small companies that target a localized audience. Sure, a giant multinational corporation can use its large marketing budget to target as wide of an audience as possible, but a local Rockford business would be wasting their budget. There are several ways in which you can tailor a local advertising campaign:
- Local search – Search engine marketing may be the most widely used form of local advertising. It can take two forms: one is long term SEO, where you invest in content and the structure of your website in order to rank higher in the free search algorithm, and one is short term SEM, where your website will pop up at the top of the results, but it will be tagged as an ad.
- Display advertising – Display ads allow you to target your audience more accurately, appearing on various websites that are already within your audience’s area of interest. For example, if you run a construction company in Rockford, your ad will show up across a network of blogs, e-commerce stores, and other related websites that target your industry.
- Social media advertising – Social media is huge, and their analytics and advertising tools are state of the art. If you have a more tech savvy audience that can easily be found on major social media platforms, this option can be very effective.
When you combine local advertising campaigns with the momentum of your listings, you stand to exponentially grow your customer base, if they are targeted properly.
Looking for a Listings Management Agency in Rockford?
Listings can be a very powerful tool, and when coupled with strong advertising efforts, it can create a very effective sales funnel. However, the listings have to provide correct information, otherwise customers may get lost along the way. If you are interested in fixing any issues you may have in this department, contact us for listings management in Rockford today.