A Marketer’s Guide to Local Lead Generation

As a marketer, your ultimate goal is often to win more leads and increase return on investment (ROI). With so many brands and ways to connect with consumers, it can often be challenging to stand out from the noise — especially as a multi-location business. Local lead generation can help.

Local lead generation focuses on local audiences and winning them over. Within this blog, we’ll dive into local lead generation, tactics your brand can use to gain more leads, and how to choose the right solution for your brand.

Let’s get into it!

Defining Local Lead Generation 

If you’re unfamiliar, lead generation is the process of creating consumer interest in your products and services to increase your sales. This often means getting the consumer’s contact information so your sales team can follow up with the leads.

Local lead generation is the same tactic but at the local level. It requires brands to identify potential customers in specific geographic areas — typically near a business location. Consumers crave a local connection, and local lead generation allows you to target potential buyers locally, providing them that connection.

Benefits of Generating Leads Locally 

Now that you understand local lead generation, let’s quickly explain why it’s essential.

Targeted Reach

Focusing on local lead generation allows businesses to connect with a highly targeted audience within their immediate vicinity. This ensures that your brand directs marketing efforts towards potential customers more likely to visit the physical location, leading to higher conversion rates.

Community Engagement

Engaging with local leads helps businesses build strong relationships within their community. These connections help  foster customer loyalty and encourage word-of-mouth referrals, which are invaluable for sustained business growth and a positive local reputation.

Cost-Effective Marketing

Local lead generation often involves lower marketing costs and less targeted campaigns. By concentrating on a specific geographic area, businesses can optimize their marketing budget and achieve better results with fewer resources.

5 Ways Your Brand Can Generate Local Leads 

Generating local leads isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula. To get the most out of your efforts, your brand should use several of the tactics listed below to collect local leads.

1. Engage in Local Social Efforts 

Local social is the social media arm of localized marketing. Leveraging social media at the local level allows you to connect your business locations with local consumers to build a sense of community, improve brand awareness, and generate more sales. Doing so can boost local lead generation. 

Data reveals that localized content performs 12X better than content not considered localized. Gen Z, in particular, favors social media platforms for local searches, with their top two local tools being Instagram (67%) and TikTok (62%).

If you post social content at the local level, you’re likely to get a higher engagement rate, which can result in more leads.

For instance, you could post a link to a guide with a form fill or a link to sign up for a local event, allowing you to generate more local leads. Below is an example of Nekter Juice Bar promoting a new smoothie they’re testing in select Austin stores.

For a more in-depth look at creating a comprehensive local social strategy that can generate leads, download our Localized Social Content Guide. 

2. Boost Online Visibility Through Local SEO 

Another great way to increase your local leads is through a robust local search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. If you’re unfamiliar with it, local SEO or local search is a digital marketing strategy that helps businesses rank well on search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant local searches.

As expected, ranking well in relevant local search results can help increase your leads.

Doing the above-mentioned tactics will help ensure your brand has a solid online local presence. You can even add calls to action (CTAs) such as “Book an Appointment” or “Order Online” to your local listings and local pages to help boost your volume of leads and customers. 

To learn more about building a comprehensive local SEO strategy that leads to local lead generation, download our Top 10 Things You Should Be Doing in Local SEO Now guide.

3. Leverage CTAs Through Local Ads 

Like local social, a local ad strategy can help your brand generate more leads. Today, Facebook boasts over 3 billion monthly active users and is one of the go-to social media platforms for social advertising. You will gain more local leads if your brand has a well-executed local ad strategy. 

On Facebook, advertisers can decide on the ad objectives and hone in on a target audience, allowing them to reach potential customers. You can even adjust your ad strategy by location, again allowing you to connect with local audiences.

For instance, how you speak to a potential customer in New York City likely varies from how you would speak to one in a rural town, and your ad copy and imagery should differ accordingly.

Every advertising campaign also needs a compelling call to action (CTA), regardless of the content type. A good rule of thumb is to be concise and bold with your CTA text. Keep your text short and concise to ensure viewers know what they’ll receive when they click the CTA. CTAs will allow you to collect leads locally and retarget them down the line.

Our blog on creating the best Facebook advertising strategy provides more detail.

4. Develop Relevant Local Content 

Content is a part of every marketing strategy. As mentioned earlier, local content performs better than more generic content, emphasizing the need for a local content strategy.

Some forms of content are made for gathering leads, which is necessary for your local content strategy. For instance, any content with a form is a great way to collect leads.

For example, if you’re a retail brand in Florida, you could create a gated downloadable asset around the “Top 10 Things You Need to Survive a Summer in the Florida Heat.”

Thinking outside the box, you can create local competitions or giveaways that customers must enter. Similarly, you could create courses for potential customers to download for free. Take Kumon Learning Center, for example, which offers virtual classes at some locations.

It’s important to remember that prospects will likely give out their contact information with something valuable in return, so get creative! When brainstorming lead-generation content ideas, always consider how you’re adding value to potential customers.

It’s also crucial to promote your local content. Even if the content is great, it’s only valuable if it gets seen by potential customers. You can share your local content through your organic and paid local social media efforts, which we discussed above.

5. Engage with Prospects Through Chatbots

If you’re unfamiliar, chatbots are computer programs or software that use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate human conversation. They can receive and respond to messages from online users.

Chatbots are an excellent tool for local lead generation. For instance, when a conversation with a chatbot begins, your chatbot can request a user’s name and email address in case the chat gets disconnected. Peloton is a solid example of a brand that is doing this.

Similarly, if a chatbot can’t readily answer a consumer’s question, the chatbot can collect the consumer’s contact information so someone from your organization can promptly follow up with answers. Lastly, you can also capture contact information by asking users to rate their experience with the chatbot at the end of a conversation and include their email for additional follow-up.

Remember, the more opportunities your chatbot solution has to capture contact information, the more leads you can convert.

It’s also worth mentioning that your chatbots must provide value. If a prospect had a poor experience with your chatbot, whether or not you got the lead, it would be harder for you to convert them to customers.

Our Localized Chatbot Guide provides more detail into how your brand can develop a comprehensive chatbot strategy at the local level. 

Start Boosting Your ROI Through Local Lead Generation 

As you can see, local lead generation is a must for multi-location businesses. Getting leads where your brand has locations gives your sales team a better chance to convert them into customers. Collecting leads across 100s or 1,000s of locations can seem daunting, but SOCi is here to help! 

SOCi is the CoMarketing Cloud for multi-location enterprises. We’ve tailored our innovative platform for intelligent omnichannel automation at the local level.

SOCi Genius is the AI brain and power behind our CoMarketing Cloud. It’s an AI automation layer on top of our platform that our products use to do the work of 100 data scientists and marketers. 

For instance, Genius Social leverages AI to allow multi-location brands to manage and deploy localized content at scale while maintaining brand consistency at scale.

Our social solution also allows you to reply to social media engagements at scale and include CTAs that can be leveraged to collect local leads.

Additionally, we have SOCi Ads PLUS, which empowers marketers to effectively manage local social ad campaigns across all of their local social profiles. Using our dynamic text and dynamic image technology, you can deploy a single ad that will auto-populate with local text and images across your locations.We also have SOCi Genius Reviews, which integrates our award-winning review response management tool with OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4. This integration transforms how multi-location marketers respond to reviews.

Additionally, Genius Search is designed to transform how your business tackles local search optimization. It does the heavy lifting for you, effectively doing the work of 1,000 marketers by delivering hundreds of thousands of location-based optimization recommendations — applied with a single click. 

As you can see, SOCi has all the tools your brand needs to generate more local leads and beat the competition. For more insight into how SOCi’s suite of products can help you achieve this, request a demo today!