Local marketing stack checklist
5 exercises to increase brand awareness
Customers do lots of searching and researching before they make a purchase; a local business must stand out while a customer reviews their business online. The better online presence that a local business has, the better chance they have of winning more customers.
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Why should a local business care about the customer journey?
- Nearly every consumer using search engines to research before purchasing.
- 97% of consumers go online to research products or services before purchasing locally (BIA/Kelsey Study)
- Consumers look online to study a business’s reputation.
- 86% of people will hesitate to purchase from a business that has negative online reviews (Vendasta)
- Consumers use online listings to find the physical address/location of a business.
- Google My Business (GMB) listings populate results directly in front of consumers searching for your location.
Go deeper on local marketing
The checklist is the diagnostic. Each exercise has a discipline behind it worth understanding properly: Google Business Profile management for exercise one, asking for reviews for exercise two, and local listing management for the consistency work in exercise three — which is where most of the real ranking gains hide. Exercises four and five feed into a broader local search strategy, and reviews specifically are worth understanding as a reputation asset rather than a vanity metric. Agencies running these five exercises across a full client roster manage the listings, reviews and profile data from one place inside Vendasta’s small business software platform.
What’s in the checklist
Five exercises an agency can run on any local business in an afternoon — each one a specific thing to check, and what to do when it fails:
- The listing that decides whether they show up at all. Most local businesses have one and have never touched it. There’s a right way and a wrong way to claim it, and picking wrong can cost weeks.
- How to actually get reviews — four methods that work, including the one most businesses dismiss because it sounds too simple
- The consistency audit. Business listings live across five distinct categories of sites. Most owners know about two of them. The checklist names all five and shows which ones search engines weight most heavily.
- The search audit — exactly what to type, and how to read what comes back. This is the exercise that usually surprises people.
- What to publish, and what to settle before publishing anything — including the two questions to answer before a single word gets written