Email marketing is one of the best tools a local business owner can have.  Being able to reach your customer base – especially the ones who are already buying from you is invaluable.

Here’s why: everyone has email now and opens it daily, if not several times a day. So why not collect your customer’s email addresses so you can send them helpful information related to your local business?  Doing this will keep your company in the mind of your customer.

Using coupons in your email marketing is also a great way to keep your customers coming back for your services/products.  Experian reports that overall, two-thirds of US households use coupons and the number using online coupons has grown 46% in the past three years. As we’ve all heard – times are tough.  Consumers are doing everything they can to make the most of their buying decisions.

Email marketing is a simple effective way of getting your business offers in the hands of your customers without spending a ton of money.  And chances are your competitors haven’t thought of email marketing nor how to implement a campaign.

Technorati Tags: email marketing, Local business, local business owner

These days local business owners need internet marketing in order to thrive.  It’s that simple. No one is using the telephone directory to find a business.  Instead they are sitting in front of their computer searching Google or one of the other search engines for what they need.  And this is why internet marketing is important for local business.

And it gets better.  Now customers are typing in words that describe exactly what they are looking for.  This is great news for local business owners because it is now possible to target potential customers based on what those customers type when searching on the internet.

Let me show you an example.  Say you are searching for a pizza place that is close to your home.  You open your internet browser and type in…what? You don’t want every pizza place in the U.S. right? So you type in “your home town pizza restaurant.” Now what comes up is a list of the pizza places near your home.

Fine, you say, but how does this help you as a local business owner?  Well, let’s say you specialize in deep dish pizza.  You can use your website to target people looking for a deep dish pizza place by using what’s called search engine optimization (SEO).  This means you are optimizing the content on your website page for a specific keyword that people are using to search for.  It’s how the search engines find results for people searching the web and it’s a fabulous tool for local business owners who what to be found by customers looking for their products.

The major search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo) all use maps to help people conduct local searches.  As a local business owner, you want to get on that map! The maps are always at the top of the page and frankly, that’s where people are looking.  In my next post I’ll show you how to do exactly that.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, internet marketing to local business, Local business, local business internet marketing