3 tricks to boost foot traffic to your physical business

3 tricks to boost foot traffic to your physical business

Many discussions here on SEOclerks talk about how you can help your website or increase traffic and sales, but not many help the people who are in search of help for their physical businesses.  Well, if you have a business that does the majority of your sales offline, this discussion is for you!  I've never owned my own offline business that ran out of a physical location, but I've worked with hundreds of companies just like that and know little tricks to get more foot traffic in your stores

Many physical businesses out there worry about how they're going to capture their next sale, and they tend to push money into the wrong types of advertising, even if those types of adverts tend to work for other businesses.  You need to know what to do before you get in a crunch time position and worry about how you're going to keep the doors open, so keep reading through this discussion and hopefully, it helps you gain a few additional sales

GEO targeted advertising
When you get into advertising, especially PPC campaigns, you will want to focus on a certain mileage around your store and not the entire world.  If you aren't setting up a specific area of where you want to target, you'll likely be targeting the entire world, and most small businesses don't ship overseas and that will just be a problem if you do get a sale in China or Korea lol   Another problem you'll run into, if you're not GEO targeting your ads, is you'll waste a lot of money on clicks that likely will never purchase from you online or ever walk near your store.

What you need to do is set up an ad that targets your specific town so you know who exactly is looking at it.  You can set up an age range and gender to target people specifically if you sell something niche specific if you sell something food related I would suggest just targeting people over 18 since they will likely have money compared to a 10-year-old on their iPads lol

Yes, this is a way to generate traffic to your website, but you will be showing them where they can go the next time they're out.  Since you're close to them, they will likely remember you if they come across your business, and they will stop by to see what you're all about

Google My Business
If your business isn't listed in Google's own directory, you're already missing out on a lot of potential foot traffic.  Google likes to have a thorough database of all the businesses out there, and that's why Google My Business came about, so go over there and list your business if it isn't already.

Be sure to optimize your listing as much as possible, don't just put "Clothing Store" if you sell kids clothes, because people will pass you over for the next listing that shows "Kids Clothing Store" and you're just losing a sale there.  Be sure to have your address, phone number, email, and high-quality pictures uploaded for everyone to see where they're going and what to expect when they get there.  This method works very well for food establishments because no one can ever agree on where to eat so they'll go online to check for "bar and grills" or "restaurants" and since you're located down the street you will be shown first by Google.

The more popular your location, the more likely you'll get people into your store, and if you're not in a busy area then don't worry because you'll likely show up within the top 5 listings and people can still find you

Beacon Advertising
This is an up and coming type of advertising that not many people are doing right now, mainly because there isn't a lot of information out there about it, but if you get in early it could pay out a lot. 

Essentially, this type of advertising comes in the form of a push notification to someone's smartphone.  The beacon is a small plastic device placed within a business or a certain area and sends out your message to anyone with blue tooth activated on their phone.  One of the problems with this is a person has to have a certain app downloaded in order to get the notification.  There are businesses starting to launch that allow you to pay per push notification and you can use beacon advertising without actually owning any of the software or hardware.  You just log into your dashboard, set up what you want your push to send out, fund your account, and watch the traffic walk in


In conclusion
Getting traffic through your doors isn't much different than gaining some traffic to your website.  You just need to know what to do, approach any campaign with caution, evaluate everything possible, then execute everything flawlessly if you want to be as successful as possible.  You can screw up along the way, it will just slow you down a little bit, but hopefully, you're not wasting thousands of dollars before you realize something isn't a good way to generate foot traffic


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Thanks!

Tommy Carey