Ep 79 - How I Reach Local Clients On Social Media

Access frameworks for local businesses to reach target clients on social media inside their community. 

This episode is packed with actionable steps to get your content to clients in a small radius of your business.

Topics Covered:

• 3 Local Business Content Pillars: Education, Social Proof, and Community (and when to post)
• The local callout strategy to get attention from audiences
• Using local hashtags to improve discoverability
• How to boost posts to reach local customers on social media
• Building community trust and credibility to become the go-to business in the city

Call to Action:

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Join our Free Course: "The 3-Step Local Business Social Media Strategy" at contentonly.au

Transcript

Let's talk about a social media strategy for local businesses where the clients are in a fixed radius of the location. Very different to a business that has customers anywhere in the world. So there's two frameworks that we're going to run through today. One is when to post, what to post and how to come up with your content. The second is how to ensure that it reaches target customers in your local community. Because if we just rely on organic reach and very general content strategies, we can reach people anywhere in the world, which is not ideal when we need our customers to come into our shop or our location to transact with us.

So if you're new here, my name is Aaron Witnish, she, I'm a co-founder of Content Only. Our agency creates in the region of 500 original videos and posts for our clients every single month. You can also download a free course, the local business social media strategy at content only au. So we'll dive into the first framework, which is how to create your content when you're a local business. And what we've tested with businesses is a three times a week posting cadence. On Monday, we post educational content on Wednesdays, we post social proof content, and on Fridays we post community content. So I'm going to walk you through each of those three pillars. So Monday is where you are adding goodwill. So you are solving problems, answering questions for your target audience, showing subject matter expertise. And if you go back to some of the early episodes, I'll talk about how to come up with content ideas.

So you've got questions that your target customers are searching online using tools like the people also ask section on Google and Vid iq. But we're going to put some Mayo on this strategy with the local callout strategy, which you're going to learn a little bit later in this conversation. So that content's going to showcase your expert gap with other solutions in the local area so you can stand out and people trust that you know what you're talking about and what you're doing. So you post that usually on the evenings on a Monday because if your target customers are, say moms and dads, that's when they're going to have time and space to be scrolling on their phones. They're not at work. Dinner's done, kids are in bed, et cetera. And that's when you're going to post your content, generally speaking throughout the week. Or you can do it earlier in the morning so people can catch it on their commute way into work, et cetera.

The Wednesday pillar when you're posting the social proof content is where you're showcasing that your products or services work. So it could be demonstrations, it could be meet the team behind the scenes. Here's the projects that we're working on in client or customer success story. So if you're posting that what you're doing is showing other people in the community that what you do works for other members of the community. So it's really good at establishing that certainty that if they come and engage your products, your services, that what you do will work for them. The third pillar is the community piece. And this is where you get to share your journey in connection with the community. So how long have you been living there? Where do your kids go to school? What's the brand story? What are some of the client stories inside the community?

What are some of the local organisations that you've collaborated with and support? Now the reason this is so important is because when people see this particular part of the content process on social media, they'll connect it because they're also in the same community. So by combining these three pillars, one, you're educating, adding value so people see you as the expert in what you do. Number two, you're showing that it works on Wednesdays with the social proof. And number three, you are building that knowing from the audience in the community that you're there. And as soon as people start to familiarise your business, word of mouth gets out very quickly and you become the destination solution in the local service area over other providers. So that's the three content pillars. And like I said, you're probably going to post that in the evenings. Now, just posting organically and not following this next framework, which has three steps is just leaving it up to chance.

And you're probably going to find that your content goes out to people anywhere in the world. So step one that we do when we post content as a local business is we do what's called a call out. So you actually put the location in the headlines and the hooks of your posts. One of our clients is a blonde hair salon owner. And rather than saying, here are some blonde hair tips for summer, it'd be Tamworth ladies, here are some blonde hair tips for summer. So if you lived in Darwin, it could be Darwin homeowners. And then you go into your hook. If you're in Sydney, it could be Sydney moms and dads. And then you go into your hook. And this little tip is what actually gets the attention of your target clients in the feed, but also tells the algorithm who this content's for.

So I imagine if I'm on social media scrolling and I see a video and it says Box Hill dads or Box Hill business owners, it's going to get my attention. I'm going to stop and take a look at it so we can actually influence getting the right eyeballs to stop and pay attention to our posts in the local community. Step two is hashtags, and we want to use a local hashtag. So we come up in any searches where people are looking at local hashtags. So if you go to the tool best hashtags.com, you can search for your city, it'll give you a list of the popular hashtags people are using for you to choose from. And then each time you put up a post, make sure you include one of those hashtags so you can get discovered by people following those hashtags locally. And then the final step, which is the most important step, is boosting the content to target customers in the local community.

If we just leave it to chance and organic reach, it's going to be really challenging to control the performance of our social media strategy. But if we invest, let's say $5 a day in boosting the content and we put a 17 kilometre or 20 kilometre radius around the business, so people that live in close proximity, and it could be people aged over 30, so they're established likely to be moms and dads, homeowners or professionals or whatever age range your target clients are. And if you need to specify the gender, you can do that and you hit that boost button. You might reach 500 to a thousand of these target clients in the local community every single day that you are boosting your content. Now, if you've been following those other steps that we talked about where you are calling them out and saying, box your moms, and you are showing your connection to the community, you're showing how your stuff works, and you're also educating, adding value, it's not going to take long to become famous in your local service area on social media by following these steps.

So they're the two frameworks that you can follow if you're a local business to dominate social media and drive business into your location. It's also something that we help with and we execute this strategy for business owners. So again, if you head to content only au and you want done for you, that's also something that you can take a look at and we'd love to have a chat about doing this for your particular business. Other than that, if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you hit subscribe so you can catch all new content marketing podcast episodes on demand. And if you're able to leave a five star review on the platform you're listening on, it helps more people discover the show.