Hyperlocal Social Media Strategy for Local Businesses

With well over 2.3 billion users of social media all over the world, it is has become a necessity for businesses never to ignore social media marketing. These days, people spend a lot of time on various social media platforms, which is a big plus for business owners. By engaging the use of social media marketing, many big business houses are already increasing their leads and revenue. In this article, we shall be looking into best practice for hyperlocal social media strategy for local businesses.

The various popular social media websites has been helping these big businesses to reach millions of people in their target market, which help them to gain more exposure, generate more leads, and make more money. However, there are many local businesses as well, and the local shops are the place where people build personal relationships, which is the reason the social media outreach must be done for them as well. According to the statistic, there are around 3.8 million retail establishments in the United States.

What is Hyperlocal Social Media Marketing?

Local search is important, especially since 69% of digital traffic is through organic search and local, with over 22% attributed to local traffic alone. It’s crucial not to underestimate the potential of social search. Social media is the place that users go for product discovery. Regardless of generation or demographics, 57% of users report jumping on social media platforms to learn about a brand, product, or service.

Hyperlocal social media marketing is a strategy whereby social media platforms are engaged in bringing in consumers based on specific geographical location. It is best for small and local businesses such as cafes, hair or nail salons, restaurants and independent bookstores.

For example, a brand with multiple local stores might focus on a specific location and post it by geotagging that city while also providing local options for delivery. Alternatively, it may also use hyperlocal marketing to announce a new opening in a neighborhood.

Many people see social media as a way of attracting attention across larger populations, usually for a major business or an online brand, but that isn’t always the case. The more hyper-specific your marketing is, the more awareness your business profile can generate

For local businesses to get more customers in their local stores, the hyperlocal social media marketing is specifically engaged. Hyperlocal social media marketing is a marketing strategy that is aimed at reaching potential customers within certain areas.

The brands must think global and act local, and their social media marketing strategy must be modified accordingly. Because of the growing importance of local level marketing, the private social networks like Townsquared and NextDoor have emerged, and even the Google is now changing the Google Maps into more of a social app.

Hyperlocal Marketing on Various Social Media Platforms

To figure out which social media platforms work best for you, here’s a rundown of how each site offers optimization options for hyperlocal marketing.

1. Facebook offers a slew of features targeting options for specific demographic areas. You can also get closer to your community by creating groups or connecting with and promoting via local groups and events pages.

2. Instagram is a platform for multimedia content like stories and reels for brand awareness. It’s also a great place to connect with local users through localized tagging, hashtags, and location tags.

3. Twitter (recently rebranded as ‘X’), while not the go-to platform for local businesses, does offer the opportunity to use hashtags, location tags, and advanced search features to reach the right audience.

4. LinkedIn allows you to reach out to other local businesses or businesses in the same location and join community groups and events. Learn more about LinkedIn marketing.

5. Pinterest enables you to optimize your profile and posts with your location and local keywords so that they meet the right audience. Create boards linking to other content (blog posts, etc.) or engaging videos. With Loomly, you can schedule and auto-post videos on Pinterest.

6. TikTok includes settings to target audiences in specific locations and geotagging and locale-based hashtags.

7. Google Business Profile offers a free profile for your business so users can find you on Google, show what you offer, and improve keywords.

Getting started

The task of getting started is not as easy as you may think it is. There may be a lot of internal hurdles that should be cleared before you actually start hyperlocal social media strategy. Here are some of the steps to get started.

Assess your situation

It is very vital that you should talk with the management team to know their views on the hyperlocal social marketing strategy before you actually develop and implement your strategy. Sometimes, there could be a need to argue with them on why you should implement hyperlocal social marketing strategy. Do some research and convince them on why it’s so important to have a hyperlocal marketing strategy.

Devise a plan

Before searching for the third party outside of your organization, you should search for the team inside your organizations, who are working on similar projects. Have a discussion with the retail team, IT team, social media departments, and others to develop a plan to help you out. After dealing with the people inside your organization, you can search for influencers, who can carry out influencer marketing campaign on a local level along with technological partners.

Develop your hyperlocal marketing strategy

After convincing the management team and devising a plan, you are ready to develop your hyperlocal social media marketing strategy. Here are the steps to develop a strategy:

Determine the metrics for success and get approval from your management team. Present your strategy to all relevant stakeholders. It is important at this point to carefully choose the relevant technology partner that has the capabilities of keeping up with the trend and changes in the social media platforms.

Train up

Communicate your plans with your local partners, and tell them about what roles they need to play in order to achieve a great result from the campaign.

Implementing your hyperlocal marketing strategy

Here are some of the tips for implementing your hyperlocal social media marketing strategy effectively.

In Conclusion

Hyperlocal social media marketing is essential for every small business to increase foot traffic. Almost all social media platforms listed above include many opportunities to target by location (for free!), and using them can only push your campaign forward.

Building a hyperlocal social media marketing strategy is a vital key to reducing your ad spend and improving your relationship with your community. This means using neat hacks like personalizing and geotargeting your content to your local audience.

It is never complicated as you thought. With a well automated tool like Loomly, keeping up with your social media content strategy is now very easy, Loomly can be used in creating, planning, and optimizing your social marketing content.