You might have a good product, but are you actually able to sell it? This is the question that should be asked of every business owner regardless of the size of their business and the type of service they offer. Without proper marketing in a large place like Florida, your competitors might beat you out of the game and relegate you to working only with long-term customers.

With the internet getting more and more popular each day, marketing is done online now more than ever. To successfully market your local business online and get people knowing and talking about it, you’ll need the right strategy, and to have the right strategy, you’ll need to know how to make use of the tools at your disposal.

Ways to market your local business online

 Google AdWords: Google is how customers looking for your type of business on the web will reach you, so it stands to reason that its AdWords feature should be the first on the list (although not necessarily the most important one). After you launch the campaign, Google will show your paid-for ad at the top and/or bottom of the first page of search results(based on keywords you chose yourself). What’s great about AdWords is that you can have two listings of the same website on the same page of results and only pay for visitors that click on the paid-for link. What’s not so great is the payment and its type: Google will charge you on a per-click basis and couldn’t care less whether someone left your site after 10 seconds or became your customer. To know how much you’ll pay, ask yourself the following: how many Florida businesses of the same kind use the AdWords service? If the answer is “a lot”, you better have a good budget.

Facebook: It might sound creepy for your local business to be on the timeline of complete strangers, but it’s actually a great way to let people know you exist. Everyone has Facebook these days, so you have the chance to have a greater impact using Facebook ads than those on Google since the former also lets you include a picture. Facebook charges on a per-view basis (called impressions) – you’re generally charged for each thousand views no matter how interested the people are in the ad. While this might sound brutal, Facebook ads tend to be much cheaper than AdWords ones.

Backlinks: We mentioned you want people talking about you – aside from getting more recognition, this also helps create more backlinks to your site, which will improve your search engine standing and make Google more likely to show you on the first page of a variety of searches. The best backlinks are those that Google likes most – coming from content-rich sites where actual people talk about your product. These are the ones that will improve your standing the most and also stand to attract a few customers on their own.

Social media presence: If you’re a business owner, you hardly have a lot of time to spend on social media, but a few extra minutes (or hours) can go a long way towards establishing you. For example, you can use hashtag wizardry and a couple of shout-outs by people with many Twitter followers to great benefit – people will see you in their feed even if they weren’t looking for your service and might remember it in a future time of need.