So many marketing guides in the world give the same advice: cast a wide net, so you’ll inevitably find someone who wants what you have to offer. That’s not necessarily a bad strategy, but it’s something that’s more relevant for large corporations; they can shift attitudes. Smaller businesses need to target behaviours – you need people to show up on your website, or walk into your shop.
You do business in or near North York. You want clients from North York – local clients, who are the most likely to take advantage of things like same-day shipping or in-store shopping. How do you target these clients specifically? Radio broadcasts and TV spots won’t do the trick. Generic online advertising to the GTA isn’t local enough. What can be done?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an excellent route, because you can use it to influence local behaviours. Imagine you’re a tea shop located in Don Mills. There’s someone living in Flemingdon Park who wants tea, but they don’t know where to go. They might make a search for “tea shops”, “tea shops nearby”, or “tea shops near me” – to search engines, these queries are all virtually the same. SEO can help ensure that when they make this search, your tea shop pops up.
Now there are a lot of ways you can boost your SEO in North York. Start by making reference to North York on some of your web pages. Let’s say your tea shop is right by the banks of the Don River – consider mentioning that on your home page! Perhaps you have a number of different tea shops scattered throughout North York. You could make location pages for each of those shops, so people know that you’re not just in North York – you’re in their part of North York.
Targeting North York specifically works particularly well in a large city like Toronto – you gain traction locally, and that traction can help boost your ranking in search engines, so when people outside of North York are looking for tea, they’re more likely to find your website. That’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves, though – learn more in our guide to local SEO.
SEO is one of many marketing strategies that you can use simultaneously to improve online and in-store traffic to your North York business. You might also opt to use online PPC advertising services, like Google Shopping or Facebook Ads. These services are handy because you can get incredibly granular about who you want your advertisements shown to – you could specify “tea lovers” in particular, age groups, or people who have particular postal codes. The risk here is getting too granular – you don’t want to miss out on potential customers because you’ve targeted too selectively.
Another excellent low-cost method of advertising your business is to get active on social media. There’s so much you can read about on our website when it comes to social media (and pretty much every kind of online marketing), but the skinny is that you’ll want to post regularly and use analytics to see what kinds of posts are getting traction with what demographics. You should also consider joining relevant Facebook groups. For our tea shop, the North York Region Entrepreneurs & Small Businesses group would be a great start. You might also get active on the Toronto Tea Festival page.
Want to build local cred, improve your community, and have fun? Volunteer for local charities. From North York Harvest Food Bank to North York Community House, there are plenty of worthy opportunities to give back. You might also donate to a local charity, showing up as a partner for charitable events. Pictures and videos of your staff volunteering can do very well on social media, and business buzz and links from trusted sources can really help your SEO.
As you can see, there are a lot of ways you can market your North York business and get incredible return on investment. It turns out that a lot of localized marketing costs less and is more effective than traditional wide-net marketing – and that’s great news for your business.
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