Unlocking Local CLIENT Success: 7 Essential Tactics

What's up, Believe Nation? Today I wanted to do a special video talking about something really practical. Let's get into the nitty-gritty of promoting the business, and I'm going to talk about the 7 ways to dominate a local market with your business. So I've gotten a lot of entrepreneurs writing to me saying, I have a local business, my market is not online, it's not YouTube, it's not internet sales, I'm trying to land local clients. I want people to come to my store. I don't want a client across the country, I want somebody who's right next to me. And so being the owner of the largest salsa dance school in the country, maybe in North America, I wanted to share some of my advice as well as seeing other entrepreneurs have success on 7 different ways that you could dominate your local market and hopefully it helps you guys build your local businesses. So number 1 is win at local SEO. This is super important. When somebody is trying to find a salsa dance class, a restaurant, a plumbing service, whatever it is, one of the first places they go to is online. They go to Google and they type in best salsa classes Toronto, salsa dance classes Toronto, whatever it is you want your content to show up. And it starts with creating really good content, right? So you want to create a website that has lots of content. You want a content creation strategy. So it's not just your page and the services you sell and your About page. It's a great start, but you need to have a content strategy. Google loves content, and you need to understand that now you've become a media company, right? You need to not just tell your story, but provide advice. If people see you providing advice, that you're friendly, that you're knowledgeable, that you know what you're talking about, that you can help, then they're going to come to you as a default place. If you can get that number 1 ranking, then people are going to click on it and give you the first chance to win them over. And so what I'd be thinking about is I want at least 1 new article up, 1 new 500+ word article on your website up every single week, ideally more than once a week, but I got it, you got a business to run too. At least once a week and share your expertise. And you might be thinking, well, how do I get enough content? How do I, like, I'm going to run out of ideas. Think about what your customers ask you for. Think about what are the common questions that people walk into your location, email you, or call you. What are they asking for? And then turning that into content that you can put up. Whether that's you typing it out, or if you'd rather be on video, you can make a video like this and then have somebody transcribe it and turn that into an article and put that on your website. Doing that makes a big, big, big, big difference because most businesses just stop at a basic webpage. Most local businesses just stop at having the About Us page, the services or products page, the homepage, you know, 5, 6, 7, 8 pages and that's it, where you want to create page after page after page after page and it'll help you win a lot of the long tail content searches, especially if you're a brand new site. If you've been around for years, you may not get the number one keyword yet, but you'll win at all the other long tail keywords, all the other more obscure searches. You'll get all of those and it'll lead to sales for you. So it's super important you have a content strategy and you win at the local SEO game. Number two is use local media. Using local media is massively powerful. I'd be connecting with Don't worry about the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and all that stuff. That can help, that can help with your branding. If you get into the New York Times, you can put that on your homepage and say, yes, featured in the New York Times. But if you want to get local business, you want people walking in your doors, then you want to look at the local media. And the good news is it's a lot easier to get those guys. They're always looking for stories. Understand that they are always looking for stories. If you have a good story to tell about why you started this business, about a new thing that you're coming out with, about the lives that you've impacted, not just a promotional piece, because they don't care about that. They want a general story that's going to help them. You're making the reporter's lives easier, right? That's their job. If you're giving them a gift of a story, then it makes their lives easier and it's easy to get a yes. So what I would do is make a targeted list of all the people who could be potentially interested in what you're doing. Don't just reach out to everybody. Make a targeted list. Understand the types of content that they push. What kinds of stories do they write in the paper? What kind of interviews do they do on their newscast? What kind of people they have on their radio show, and then pitch a similar story that involves you somehow, right? It could be, again, how you founded your business. It could be your expert advice on whatever is happening in your local area, right? Anything that's related to your industry, any, in any shape or form, you should be the default expert that they want to talk to and profile. You know, at TDS, we've done articles about some of our initiatives. We had a little library that we've brought into our location and got that in the media. We put acts of kindness on the TV. We have a retail store at the front. We showed people doing acts of kindness, and that got picked up by media. We've done charity events I'll talk about later on where we had a dance-off that we raised money for a charity, and that got 2 TV crews into our space. So always thinking about the story. They don't care about your promotion. They don't care about your offers. What's the story that you can bring by looking at other stories they've done, model those, and then pitch them. If you do a good job, again, you're making the reporter's lives easier. And a tip to help you with your SEO, every time you get featured in the local media, always, always, always, always, always ask if you can get a link back to your website from whatever story, because those websites can carry a lot of authority, and having that link back can really help your SEO. [MUSIC] Number 3 is host events. If you have a physical location, I would strongly encourage you to host events to bring your customers together in some shape or form. Do workshops, do classes, host a party, connect with other associations and have them host their event at your shop. It's such a fantastic way to one, get people into your store, but also as a way to connect people to each other and then share that online. So at Toronto Dance Salsa, we sell classes. You can come and learn how to salsa, bachata, kizomba, whatever you want to do. And then we'll have parties and host events multiple times per week. And when people come out to the events, they obviously get to meet each other, they get to see the studio, they get to learn about our business. We'll also take pictures, we'll post it on Facebook, people will tag themselves, people will tag their friends. And what ends up happening is you take this great picture of somebody who was smiling, having fun dancing, And then the next day they go to work and their friends have all seen it and they say, "Wow, you look so happy. Where were you? What were you doing?" "Oh, I was at Toronto Dance Salsa. We had a great time. We had this amazing party." And so that spreads rapid word of mouth through social media. So it's getting people into your space who may not know, may not have known about it before. It's about giving people a way to connect with each other. And then if you're taking pictures and put them online on Facebook, it's an opportunity for them to be able to get some exposure to their friends and to learn about your business in the process. So I highly recommend you having regular events on your off hours to get people in. Number 4 is give to local charities. I find this really valuable. One, just as a— listen, it's a good thing to do, right? Like, be a part of your community, give back, contribute. If you have products or services that you can give in kind or do workshops and help people, I think it's just a good thing to to do. At Toronto Dance Salsa, we will give away classes for people who are trying to raise money for silent auctions. So any charity that's trying to raise money for silent auction, we'll give them 2 free classes for people to bid on, and so it helps raise money for them. We get featured in the pamphlet, in the brochure, on the table where people go to those events, and so it gives us some exposure. Again, you can try to ask for a link from the website. Of the charity to link back to you because it carries a lot of weight as well. It's just a good thing to do, right? The other thing we'll do is sometimes we'll go and do performances at charities. Sometimes we'll do classes. If it's a fundraising dinner or event, maybe we'll get up there and teach people how to dance. And again, gives us some exposure, lets people know about what we're all about. Maybe people see that dance and say, "Oh, maybe we should go do that, you know, as our New Year's resolution or as our date night, or I want to try something new and meet somebody." you know, make some new friends and maybe meet somebody special, then that's a great opportunity to be able to introduce ourselves. And so it's a mix of doing the right thing, giving back to your community, but also giving some good exposure for your company. Number 5 is collaborate. Here we'd be looking at how can you collaborate with other businesses that are in your area that serve the same target market that you can have some kind of relationship with. So For us, we partnered up with local restaurants where we've done collaborations where they might promote us in the restaurant, we'll promote them in the studio. It can be a dinner and dancing kind of occasion. We'll partner up with nightclubs where we'll go and use their space and bring people, bring our students to their space, and they bring their people to the space. And so, you know, the people that they bring may not have ever heard of us, and so that is an option to do classes. Even for me, when I think about my role here and running EvanCarmichael.com and my YouTube channel, now owning the dance business as well, I try to film a lot of my videos out of Toronto Dance Salsa. I want to bring my community to know about TDS. I talk about TDS on my channel, not strictly just for promotional purposes, but because I think it adds value to the conversation because I run a large retail shop and people can learn from that. And so I purposely try to bring Toronto Dance Salsa into the mix of what I'm doing, and I get stopped outside TDS by fans and they want to take a selfie or, you know, talk business or whatever it is. And now these people get exposed to Toronto Dance Salsa as well. And so thinking about how you can collaborate with local businesses or use the people on your team and their influences to bring more exposure and business to your company. Number 6 is Facebook ads. I'm a fan of Facebook ads. It's not our number 1 way to bring in clients, but if you're looking at spending any kind of advertising dollars, I think that's the best bet. If you know that your demo is, you know, 25 to 35-year-old men who love the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, you know, you can, you can target those people and you can show them a specific ad. Whatever it is that you're selling, especially for a local area, right within 10 miles of this address, you can target specifically those people. I think if you have a good idea of who your audience is, if you have clear demographics on them, then Facebook ads are a great test to be able to go after. I wouldn't go all in on it. I would test it out. Find what you think is your strongest target market, test a couple of different creative pieces against it, and see if you can get results. The good news is that it's pretty measurable, right? Especially if some kind of conversion page, whether it's a— ideally it's buying, so for us we can track all the way to a sale, but maybe it's just to the Contact Us page, or maybe it's the Register page. You can see how far people are going along the process, and if you can prove that the ads lead to sales, you can ramp it up. So if I had to spend any money on advertising, that's where I would spend it. And number 7 is provide remarkable experience. There's a lot of different ways to grow a business, and when I sat down with Alex, who helps me run Trundle Salsa, he's the operations manager, I gave him a list of 10 different ways to grow the business. Here are 10 different things that you could do to grow this business, and I want you to pick 2 of them. And the first one he picked was being the face. So he's out there creating content, being the celebrity on Snapchat, on YouTube, you know, being the guy, being the friendly person people can ask questions to. I said that has to be there because you're great at that. and that has to be one of the things you do. The second thing that he picked though, that you got to choose, was provide a remarkable experience. At the end of the day, if you are selling, and especially a local product or service, people talk. If people come to your restaurant and they have an amazing dining experience, you can bet they're going to talk to their friends the next day and say, yeah, we went to this place. They're going to take pictures and post them on Facebook and Instagram and spread the word for you. People come and have an amazing time in our dance studio, half of our business comes from word of mouth. They just have an amazing time, they tell their friends, their friends see them having a good time, and they're curious, they wanna find out about it themselves. The thing is, doing a good experience is not enough. It has to be remarkable. Remarkable means you're willing to make a remark about it, you're willing to talk about it. That's what remarkable means. I think most entrepreneurs provide an okay experience. It's a good experience, right? Like you're helping your customer, your customer doesn't feel upset, they feel like they're getting value for their money, they had a good time doing it, you gave them a result, but is it so good that they want to go and tell their friends about it? That's the difference. Is it so good, and not just the product or service, but the experience of dealing with you everywhere from the website to the email to the first contact to the phone call to the coming into your location, Is all of that such a great experience that they have to tell their friends about it? Because your customers have opportunities every single day to spread the word for you. Every single day they could be out spreading your message for you, and they're not. And it's not because they don't like you, it's just they have a million other things to do. Think about your life, how many things you have to focus on in your life right now. I'm sure you'd love to be able to help refer some of your entrepreneurial, you know, businesses off to your friends. You just don't think about it. You got too much else going on. And so that's your challenge. You need to break through the clutter and the noise that most people have going on in their day-to-day life of the 1,000 things that I need to get done today. I can't wait to tell your story about what a great time I had in working with you because you were so amazing. That's what you need to get to. So providing the good experience isn't enough. It has to be remarkable. So those are my 7 ways on how to dominate a local market. I hope you guys enjoyed. I'd love to know what did you think? Was it valuable? What was your favorite tip? Leave it down in the comments below. Also, if you feel like I'm missing some, you want an 8, 9, 10 that you want to add to the list, put it down in the comments. I'm going to join in discussion. Thank you guys so much for watching. I believe in you and hope you continue to believe in yourself. And whatever your one word is. Much love, guys. I'll see you soon.