In case you haven’t heard, Amazon Prime Day starts July 15th.  With deals lasting up to 36hrs, Prime Day has become almost as popular as Black Friday. Unfortunately, many brick-n-mortar stores believe that this event will deter shoppers from making purchases in-store. However, this isn’t exactly true.

Studies show that 23% of the time people will abandon their online shopping cart. In addition to cart abandonment, 34% of people choose to shop in-store to avoid waiting for delivery and 55% of people want to touch or try on the item before buying. Amazon Prime Day can actually be quite lucrative for brick-n-mortar business if they prepare ahead of time.

Via Amazon

How to Prep Your Local Stores For Amazon Prime Day

88% of consumers who search for a local business on their phone will visit within 24hrs. When 8 out of 10 consumers use their phones to shop, brands need to be prepared for an overflow of Amazon shoppers looking for same-day purchases. Prepping your brand to be found locally is one of the best things a brick-n-mortar store can do to compete with Amazon Prime Day.

Step #1 – Brand Audit

Start with an Instant Audit. Crush It Local’s Free Instant Audit tool will tell you how visible your brand is online in only a matter of seconds. See how your brand is performing in the search rankings, business listings, and reviews. Before you can begin working on the following steps you have to know where your brand currently stands – this starts with an audit.

Go ahead and give it a try right now, the blog will still be here when you finish.

Brand Audit

Step #2 – Listing Management

Now that you know what your listings look like, you can go through and clean them. This means getting rid of duplicates, claiming or creating missing listings, and adding any missing information. The most common forms of missing information are often business name, address, phone number, website, category, hours, and description (a.k.a NAPWCHD).

By cleaning your local business listings people will have a much easier time finding your business. Accurate listings not only help you rank higher in searches but it builds trust with the customer when the information you have listed is correct.

Step #3 – Review Management

Are you replying to all of your reviews? Amazon shoppers rely on reviews and ratings to know they’re getting the best deal and this is no exception when searching for a local business. Responding to reviews can impact your search rankings by 15%. Not to mention responding to reviews actually leads to earning more positive reviews.

Have too many negative reviews? That’s ok; when businesses respond to negative reviews, 33% of the time the reviewer will update their review to a positive one and 34% of the time they’ll delete the original negative review. Managing your review is an important step if you want to compete with Amazon.

Step #4 – Local Pages

Get your local pages up-to-date. Local pages are a great way to not only increase your SERP appearance, but they help connect consumers with local information straight from the source – your website.

Local pages are the perfect place to connect consumers with the location nearest them, share in-store promotions, and list the items you have in-stock. Local pages are a must-have for any multi-location business looking to convert online shoppers to in-store shoppers because those shoppers will be using product keywords to find your locations.

Step #5 –  Social Media

Ramp up your social media presence. Social media is a great way to get your deals and discounts in front of consumers, in fact, 72% of consumers follow brands on social media for discounts. Consumers are already looking online for great discounts on Prime Day, by utilizing location accounts on social media, brands can drive online visitors in-store.

For multi-location brands looking to compete with Amazon Prime Day by capitalizing the moment-of-need shopper, following these steps at scale may seem like a huge project. Fortunately, tools like Crush It Local’s all-in-one Local Brand Management platform makes it easy for small merchants to take control of the online presence of their brick-n-mortar stores.

In a recent study, 41% of companies said they had no idea whether or not their social media efforts were actually paying off. When it’s difficult to see or attribute the immediate return social media has, it could be hard to justify its importance.

However, make no mistake, social media has become a major element in the marketing and local search industry; especially when 97% of adults between the ages of 16-64 say they logged onto at least one social media platform in the past month. Even brick-and-mortar business need to go where the customers are and that means being on social media.

These are five reasons why social media has become a key ingredient to a profitable local SEO strategy.

1. Social Media Drives In-Store Traffic

This is the big one. At the end of the day, brick-and-mortars need to drive customers through their doors and social media visibility is incredibly important when attempting to increase foot traffic.

92% of all marketers indicated that their social media efforts have generated more online exposure for their businesses and at a time when 97% of customers are researching physical stores online, your social presence could be the difference between a customer choosing you, or choosing one of your competitors.

When customers are researching online, they value transparency and have updated, relevant content on your social media accounts demonstrates that. They look through your Facebook page, your Twitter feed, and Instagram stories in order to validate their decision to choose your business.

In the event they check your social media accounts and the information is out of date, or dare I say…non existent, they will begin to question the authenticity and even the existence of your business. Keeping your content updated and relevant to your unique services builds trust with customers and shows that you are active and engaged online, which has become a prerequisite for customers looking to make a trip to your physical location.

If you have already implemented social media into your marketing routine, another reason it should be valued is the invaluable information it provides.

2. Social Media allows for in-depth Market Insight

It was found that, of those with at least 1 year of experience using social media, 69% or more found social platforms provided deep marketplace insight Social Media has become an amazing opportunity for companies to understand exactly who their market is. When you’re using this to your advantage, you see the pool of customer information is at your disposal.

Marketplace insight is incredibly vital if your business wants to grow and target the right customers. It’s essential to gather all information from your community to find out what is working and what needs to change with your products or services.

We understand that social media has become this huge opportunity to mine data, but within its vastness, it’s difficult to separate all relevant data from useless information. However, using Crush It Local sentiment tool and geofencing social media capabilities located on our dashboard, mining all this information is much easier.

The market insight you’re able to uncover is endless. You’re able to measure:

• Sentiment towards staff, new products and services, each location and your brand as a whole
• Customer satisfaction
• Users experiences
• Regional trends
• Possibilities for expansion to new cities

Not only does listening to customers allow you to harness that feedback into profitable results, but it’s also a great way to show customers that you care about their relationship with the brand.

3. Social Media Builds Stronger Customer Relationships

Nowadays you follow the brands you trust because they have come through for you. When customers follow your social media channels, they begin to feel a greater connection to the brand.

Many brands make the mistake of using their platforms just to market and that is a rookie mistake. When building and maintaining your social media accounts, you need to go in with the objective that customer relationships are the most important.

However, when building stronger customers relationships on social media, it’s not enough to just post content; the interaction is key.

By simply commenting on someone’s post or “retweeting” you make a huge difference with your community. In fact, customer churn can increase by up to 15% if businesses fail to respond to customers over social media. Brands need to actively join the conversations online.

Platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are allowing for great opportunities for open dialogue with your online community. Just like any relationship, you need to take the time and communicate with your audience. Maintaining this relationship causes them to become loyal and continue giving you their business.

4. Social Media Increases Customer Retention

What is another word for a loyal customer? Customer Retention.

“In a study, it was found that Loyal customers are 5x as likely to repurchase, 5 times as likely to forgive,

4 times as likely to refer, and 7 times as likely to try a new offering than non-loyal customers.”

Social media platforms were made for increasing retention because its a gentle reminder to customers of their great experience and an invitation to come back.

Using social media effectively can have some great ROI opportunities, more than 50% of marketers who’ve been using social media for at least three years report it has helped them improve sales.

They aren’t going to follow you on social media when they have a terrible experience, which means that customers following your accounts are probably just looking for another reason to come back. Posting new products, and recent offerings will be received well and get them in the store more often.

5. Social Media Boosts your Organic SEO ranking

More than 58% of marketers who have been using social media for one year or longer improved search engine rankings because it caused a bump in traffic to their websites.

Why is this important?

A higher Organic SEO ranking is the number one correlating factor to strong local SEO performance.

The higher your business lands on the search engine ranking, the better chance they choose your business over others. It’s crucial that on all your accounts, you have your website somewhere in the bio so customers can easily visit your website. Your social media is essentially a second home for your content and when people are searching for your accounts, that raises your search engine visibility.

In the end, it’s all important

Increasing your business traffic comes right down to customers choosing you over your competitors and having an online presence is a large portion of that. If you’re not playing the game, then customers will continue to walk past your business and into someone else’s; especially when 9 in 10 companies in the United States are using social media for marketing purposes.

It’s clear that competition is stiff and its no longer a choice to have a social media strategy, but rather a necessity. It’s clear that there are many major ROI opportunities when you choose to use social media, strategically.