Find out how best to target and promote to Kent businesses and consumers by using the internet and cost effective forms of online marketing.

Because of the very nature of the internet, with its open boundaries, it can be quite hard to carry out local promotion of a business online. Search engines like Google do at least filter their search results by country, based on the user’s IP address, but this doesn’t help if you want to target a specific county like Kent.

Yet many businesses actively want to use the internet as a promotional tool because of the lower costs associated with internet marketing, and the great degree of reporting and analysis which online provides compared to traditional promotional routes like press advertising, PR and adverts in telephone directories.

If you need to promote your business to consumers or businesses locally in Kent, but want to use the internet and your website to do so, here are some tips to help you achieve your goals:

Optimise your website for Kent visitors

If you have a website, and you want to target Kent, then make sure you say so on your website. This will help visitors know they are in the right place, and also help your site rank better in search engine results for local searches.

Pay particular attention to the page titles of your site and content headings, and try and include the service you provide, where you provide it, then your company name. If your business targets several areas through its website then you may want to create pages for each in the navigation. These could be for different counties; Kent, Sussex, Surrey etc., or towns within Kent; Maidstone, Sevenoaks, Tonbridge etc.

Target your Pay Per Click advertising to Kent

The most popular PPC program is undoubtedly Google Adwords. Within Adwords you can change Campaign settings to target specific geographic areas. There’s even a useful tool which opens up Google Maps and allows you to draw a geographic area that you’d like to target your campaign to. All the adgroups within the campaign should then only appear to users whose IP address is within your target area.

Then you should include Kent or the name of towns in kent in your adverts, so users know that you cover their area. If you are targeting lots of different Kent towns in your keywords, you should really associate each with an advert featuring the same town name, or divide them all into individual Adgroups.

However Adwords geo-targeting isn’t 100% accurate because not all IP addresses can be tied to the user’s location. If you want to target consumers more accurately you might get better results from PPC advertising on Facebook. This recently launched program allows you to show your adverts to users located in or near to specific towns, plus you can target by gender and age as well. The targeting is much more accurate because it uses the Facebook members address details provided when they signed up.

Get featured on Kent websites

Another way to capture traffic from kent users and also show Google that your website is relevant to Kent themed searches is to get your website featured on other Kent related websites. The quickest and easiest way to do this can be to advertise on a Kent related directory and listings site such as www.kentbusinessdirectory.co.uk.

Your listing will not only appear in front of users of the site from Kent, but if you upgrade your listing to include a backlink to your own website, this will help your own site’s performance on Google. Other sites you could try and get a mention on include websites for Kent press and media, business organisations such as chambers of commerce, or related websites from non-competing Kent businesses.

Summary

Follow these steps and you’ll better target local consumers, but by using the low cost medium of the internet. Of course online promotion can never completely replace traditional local promotional activities, but it can help you capture a piece of the growing web audience before your competitors act.