Blog Marketing for Regional Growth
Your pizza is a hometown legend. You have about a dozen restaurants locally and you want to solidify your leadership in the market, further extend your brand and leverage your operation with a view of possibly expanding throughout a tri-state region. What should your website involve to achieve this?
Building a Site That Achieves Results
XML/RSS
A website written in XML/RSS incorporating blog site platform and RSS Publishing is the foundation. From there, this type of marketing project can be launched across several channels, with an emphasis on local search and with an ultimate objective of going viral in the region.
Blog Promotion
Optimized content with many local references. If you sponsor any local little leagues or soccer leagues, a good many posts should reference the teams, always optimizing local team names and town names. The content will consist of what you have become famous for.
Video
If Whole Foods finds profitability in chefs “vlogging” so might our pizza man. Make your presence known on YouTube, but also embed the videos in your site for the search engines.
“Whole Foods is the latest in a line of mainstream food businesses - from Food & Wine magazine to Kraft - now posting video, says Michael Gartenberg, a vice president with the internet analysis firm Jupiter Research. “They’re not wanting to be left behind,” he says.”
(source)
That is one of the reasons that online marketing is a perfect fit for the small business owner. They can afford to avail themselves of the same tools that the big guys use.
Social Media Marketing
You can evaluate the potential for social media marketing via FaceBook or MySpace. An interesting campaign was recently deployed by Socialflowers.com who developed a widget that allows a FaceBook member to send flowers to another member from their profile page. One of the many new business applications being deployed in FaceBook. If your city has a large presence on a social networking site, why not deploy a widget that allows a customer to order a pizza from their FaceBook profile?
Local Search Directories
Google yourself and make sure your listings in all local directories and searches are in order. Make sure your profiles in local search directories direct customers to your site and keep an eye out for bad comments.
Tags: blof-site-platform, blog, local_search, marketing_project, optimized_content, optimizing, search_engines, vlogging, xml_rss, YouTube