How Your Digital Marketing Agency Can Win Big by Selling to Local Businesses

Imagine… a bustling main street, where local businesses are thriving, and customers are pouring in. Now visualize every corner store, cozy cafe, and boutique shop becoming a digital powerhouse…! Well, by adopting the right approach to selling digital marketing to small and local businesses, your marketing agency can contribute better towards harnessing the limitless power of digital technology to elevate a flourishing local business scene to new heights.

But there’s a difference between aspirations and reality! Being existing players in the game you’re most certainly aware of the stiff competition in the digital marketing domain targeting small, local businesses. In fact, it’s precisely the vastness and complexity of this landscape that often make it a challenging sell for agencies despite its boundless opportunities for growth.

The question is, can you bridge the gap between your aspirations and reality with your expertise, strategic moves, and vision? Today we’re here to talk openly, acknowledge market truths, and understand local needs. While building trust and demonstrating the tangible benefits of digital marketing are key to winning over local small businesses, you won’t quite be able to materialize your triumph unless the facts about pitching digital solutions to local SMBs get hardwired into your marketing and sales system.

Your Digital Agency Reality: Communication Challenges with Local Business Owners

Your business is ambitious, armed with a skilled workforce, confident about offering significant revenue boost, explosive growth, exceptional ROI, and probably everything a customer could ask for! Even so, your growth chart seems unfulfilling to you. In that case, let’s take a step back, and try to understand the actual scenario. Far apart from the idealized success stories often depicted in industry narratives, here’s a candid look at this nuanced terrain:

• As local SMBs often operate on razor-thin budgets, convincing them to allocate funds to digital marketing can be a daunting task for your agency.
• It’s very common for many local business owners to have a limited understanding of digital marketing concepts and metrics, making it difficult for your reps to communicate the value proposition effectively.
• High expectations, quick results, such perceptions of SMBs clash with the reality of how digital marketing works.
• The rising number of digital agencies in each local market has made the field crowded. Agencies tend to lose direction and originality in coping with in-between rivalry.
• Trust issues… yes, small businesses have them. And it might not be because of mere skepticism but a bad, past encounter. Sharing a real-world anecdote for you.

A digital agency once promised a local auto repair shop that they could guarantee a significant increase in website traffic and sales within a month. However, the competitive aspect in the automotive industry was fierce, and the agency struggled to deliver on these lofty promises. This misstep not only damaged the agency’s reputation but also strained the client relationship.

And there are countless more examples of agencies misaligning target audiences, neglecting local SEO, failing to set realistic expectations—leading to utter disappointment and reluctance towards investing in the digital marketing practice.

Effective Communication Can Build Bridges of Understanding Throughout the Buying-Selling Journey

Small and local businesses are looking for partners more than just vendors who can understand their unique challenges and translate complex digital strategies into plain, actionable language.

In a landscape teeming with competition, the ability to articulate and demonstrate the value of digital marketing services with clarity and empathy is imperative—it’s the power of clear and persuasive communication that sets an agency apart.

When a digital marketing agency accurately puts across how it will drive results, demystify the intricacies of SEO, PPC, and social media, demonstrates a clear handle on their SMB customer’s current digital journey, and showcases a genuine commitment to its local SMB customer’s success, it not only gains trust but also demonstrates its worth as a service provider.

But that was just one instance! 

Selling Digital Marketing to Local Businesses with Hyper-personalization

As an agency, you have to firmly believe that your local business clients are not just mere numbers in the database, but rather valued partners with whom you’re building rewarding relationships. In today’s realm of local small businesses, relationships are made, retained, and flourished exclusively through hyper-personalization.

Hyper-personalization allows your agency to speak directly to what matters most to each potential customer, showcasing not just your services but your deep understanding of their business.

Through bespoke messaging, data-driven insights, and a relentless commitment to surpassing expectations, your agency, too, can communicate its value in a way that resonates profoundly. Truly, nothing fosters trust and cements the agency-client relationship better!

Effective communication, enriched by hyper-personalization, not only shows a deep appreciation for local SMBs, individuality but also establishes trust and genuine rapport. But the digital marketing as well as the local small business space is constantly evolving with new platforms, technologies, and trends emerging regularly. SMB owners may feel overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of options and unsure where to allocate their resources effectively. So how does such a level of personalization come into effect while pitching to local businesses or how do your digital agency sellers and marketers execute these mind-blowing strategies to sell confidently, at scale?

Read our next post in this series where we have laid out for you the most potent and practical course of action to pitch to your local SMBs, following the leading SMB marketing trends.