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Before we dive into the best local marketing tools on the market, let’s start with two must-know local search statistics from HubSpot:
- Almost 50% of all searches on Google are local
- 88% of consumers doing a local search on their smartphones call or visit a store within 24 hours
This being said, it’s crucial for you to have a solid local marketing strategy in place. For your brand’s success, you need tools to maximize your local promotion efforts to attract the right, most valuable customers, and earn more revenue. Explore the 16 best local marketing tools.
16 Best Local Marketing Tools For Your Business
What are local marketing tools? Local marketing tools are solutions that let businesses reach customers within their geographic area. There are various types of local marketing tools to help you with your marketing efforts.
Let’s review the list of available tools by type. We’ll cover:
- Listings management platforms
- Review management solutions
- Local SEO Tools
- Local advertising solutions
- Social media marketing tools
- All-in-one solutions
Listings Management
Your business is likely to have several listings in various local directories. You need to ensure all of them are up-to-date, relevant, well-managed, and have no duplicates. Tools for automated listings management will help you solve this problem.
BrightLocal
BrightLocal is a local marketing automation platform. It enables businesses to increase their online visibility, manage their reputation as well as bring more potential customers from local search. BrightLocal enables business owners to :
- Fix duplicate listings
- Track their listing performance and optimization
- Analyze their listing rankings
- Generate listing reports easily and quickly
Yext
Yext is a local marketing automation service to help businesses effortlessly manage their listings. It integrates with over 150 most popular directories. With Yext, you can :
- Collect insights and data for easier listing reporting
- Prevent duplicate listings
- Clean up data to keep listings consistent
- Update your Google My Business listings
Advice Local
Advice Local is another tool for effective listings management. It can boast the largest number of directories supported. The platform’s network includes:
- Data aggregators (Foursquare, Infogroup, etc.)
- Data accelerators (Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc.)
- Data enhancers (Chamber of Commerce, Superpages, Judy’s Book, etc.)
- GPS accelerators (Apple, TomTom, Here, etc.)
Review management
According to Oberlo, 9 out of 10 people read reviews before making a purchase. However, monitoring reviews about your company and responding to them is rather time-consuming. Local marketing solutions for review management enable companies to easily track what clients say about them on various channels (review websites, social media, etc.).
Grade.us
Grade.us is one of the leading marketing tools for managing reviews on the market. It allows business owners to generate and monitor customer feedback from multiple channels. Grade.us’s standout feature is that you can market the collected reviews on the websites significant to your business. Businesses with multiple locations as well as established companies looking to scale will definitely enjoy the tool.
ReviewPush
ReviewPush is a solution that makes review management easy. It tracks the reviews people leave about your brand on the leading review websites. Also, you get notified about new reviews by email. You can even directly respond to it via email. The platform also helps you easily request reviews for each of your locations. A report-generating feature, you can get automatic reports at different levels (corporate, region, district, or store).
ReviewTrackers
ReviewTrackers is a great local marketing automation software solution designed to take control over your company’s listing information on the web to ensure brand visibility and boost online ranking. The platform also offers review widgets to show reviews on your company’s website to build brand credibility, influence customers’ decisions with social proof, and thus drive more conversions.
Local SEO Tools
Tools for local SEO can help businesses improve their web presence and findability as well as engage with their target audience. Tracking rankings, monitoring your business performance, getting competitor insight, selecting the right keywords, and encouraging customer engagement — all these tasks can be done with local SEO tools.
LocalFalcon
LocalFalcon is an SEO platform that allows your business to have a bird’s eye view of your ranking in various parts of a particular location (town or region). Besides, you can review competitor reports and rely on those for better visibility.
LocalFalcon enables businesses to realize how they rank locally and how their actions help them achieve a serious advantage over their competition. SEO positioning, SEO audit, Google My Business Audit, and even more can be done with LocalFalcon.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another world-renowned SEO tool with a rich toolset. It allows business owners to perform various SEO activities to improve their rankings in search results and therefore gain more traffic. With Ahrefs you can:
- Audit and optimize your website
- Analyze your competitors
- Track your ranking progress
- Find keywords your potential customers use while searching
- Find top performing content in your niche
Semrush
Semrush is one of the leading business local marketing tools. It helps businesses research competitors, develop an effective content marketing strategy, and find profitable keywords to grow their reach. The service also helps company owners understand why organic search isn’t working and how to fix this problem.
Local advertising
Local advertising lets businesses bring customers from nearby locations by delivering relevant area-targeted advertisements in the right place at the right moment.
Google Ads
Google Ads is a platform that is likely to need no introduction. It is a paid advertising tool known as ‘pay-per-click’ (PPC). Google Ads can help drive the most valuable traffic to your company website. With Google Ads, you can create and share timely mobile and desktop ads. So your prospects will find your company’s website on Google’s results page while using it to find the services and/or goods you offer.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads is also a tool that everybody knows. It lets you connect with users who mostly use Facebook for various purposes. As they spend lots of time scrolling through their newsfeed or watching stories, you have a perfect opportunity to grasp their attention and promote your products and/or services.
With Facebook, you can:
- Draw your audience’s attention to special offers or promotions
- Encourage people to visit your company’s website to buy what you offer or find more details
- Provide driving and walking directions to your location
- Prompt prospects to call you immediately
- etc.
Yelp Ads
Yelp Ads is a local advertising platform. It lets businesses display ads (both desktop and mobile) on competitor business pages and also on Yelp’s search results page. People will find the sponsored (paid) results above the organic ones. In this aspect, Yelp Ads resembles Google Ads.
Yelp ads would be a perfect match if you are :
- A small or mid-sized business having 1 to 9 locations and operating locally
- A large business operating on a national or regional level and have 10 or more locations
Social media marketing
Social media has long ceased to be a platform for sharing photos and interesting posts with friends. Properly leveraged, social networks can become an effective marketing tool allowing you to engage with your prospects, boost brand awareness, enhance loyalty, and maximize profits.
Buffer
Buffer is a platform for better social media management. The tool enables businesses to effortlessly:
- Schedule posts to share relevant information with your audience on various networks from one place
- Measure your social media performance to develop better content
- Respond to your customers’ comments to demonstrate your care and appreciation
- Track your metrics such as engagement, reach, and following to identify areas for improvement
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is one of the most famous social media marketing tools. It can:
- Help your business generate content ideas
- Develop high-performing relevant content
- Find influencers that can power up your brand
- Track your performance
- Research relevant keywords as well as trending topics your prospects are interested in
Missinglttr
Missinglttr is a social media management solution that enables businesses to share engaging content as well as distribute it effectively by finding the leading influencers in your industry. With Missinglttr, you can forget about switching between different apps to help your social media channels grow.
Also, Missinglttr offers automated drip campaigns — it automatically detects your content regardless of what platform you publish your posts on (be it an online publishing platform like Medium, your company blog, or even your Youtube channel) and adds it to the library to be dripped out later.
The All-In-One Marketing Solution
With the local marketing tools mentioned above, it’s definitely easier to put together your local marketing strategies. However, navigating between various platforms is rather inconvenient and time-consuming.
Luckily, the market offers all-in-one local marketing automation platforms like PromoRepublic to take your marketing efforts to the next level. Such tools allow businesses with multiple locations to work with all major marketing channels through one dashboard.
PromoRepublic is an end-to-end platform that enables multi-location businesses to solve a wide range of local marketing tasks:
- Reputation Management. Timely track customer feedback, online reviews, and company mentions to understand how people perceive your brand.
- Social Media Marketing. Plan localized posts for various networks, manage customer communication, and display ads to increase brand awareness across local communities.
- Brand Management. Ensure brand consistency across all your locations.
- Local SEO. Build citations, manage your multiple listings, and keep them up-to-date for increased search traffic and better online findability.
- Distributed Marketing. Distribute brand templates and assets and decide what elements your local workforce can modify without violating brand guidelines.
- Insight-Driven Marketing. Uncover new growth opportunities on social media networks to make smart marketing decisions based on the analytics reports consolidated from various channels.
The Bottom Line
Now you’re equipped with a comprehensive list of local marketing tools to enhance your online presence, boost your findability, and easily manage your brand reputation on the web. If you want to learn how to maximize your local marketing efforts, increase brand awareness across local communities, drive more local traffic, and even more, book a demo with our expert. We’re here to help your brand thrive.
