The Five Places Method for Managing Your Local Online Marketing

[Linda Buquet]

I just read an article that I thought would be so helpful to your busy SMB clients that get confused and overwhelmed with online marketing.

This is such a beautifully simple concept!

By Damian Rollison from UBL - published at Street Fight.

<a href="http://streetfightmag.com/2015/02/18/the-five-places-method-for-manageable-local-marketing/">The ‘Five Places’ Method for Manageable Local Marketing | Street Fight</a>

What I’m calling the “five places” method is a simple way to organize one’s efforts based on an inventory of what matters most for your business. The key here is that active participation on the part of the business owner or a trusted representative makes a huge difference in marketing effectiveness. You can delegate some activities to an agency, such as designing your website or building citations on local directories; but at some point the business must put in the effort to build audience.

So the idea is to choose five places where the types of customers you want are most likely to find you online, and make sure you’re doing something every week on at least one of those places to show loyal and potential customers that you’re interested in gaining their attention and winning their business. The five places will not be the same for every business, but you’ll want to try to fill in something for each of these categories.

It gives you just 5 places to focus your attention on. Your own site of course is #1, then a local search site like G+ Local, a social site like Facebook or G+, a review site like Yelp and a niche site - one hopefully where your potential patients hang out.

Now of course that really over-simplifies things because each one has numerous aspects to it. Your site - well the possibilities and challenges there are endless. And G+ Local? I've written thousands of pages of advice, tips and troubleshooting on that part, so there is a lot to managing that one piece.

But I still think this is a helpful simple strategy to help an SMB focus their time and effort.

What do you think?

P.S. I keep forgetting to add into to our 101 section, so thought this was a good one!