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Queens tends to get a bit an unfair shake in the comparison of the boroughs. It is not as chic as Manhattan or as hip as Brooklyn. But, there are great places all over Queens if you know where to look. Bayside is one of them.
For single people, Bayside might not have as much of an appeal than to young families. Good schools, low crime, good housing market. This is not the place to go for nightlife. However, it offers a lot in terms of restaurants and parks. Cars start to become a necessity. It’s not as easy to get around with mass transit.
For business in the outer boroughs further from the mass transit hubs and foot traffic, you have to do a little more heavy lifting to drive customers to your door.
In a gentrified neighborhood, your challenge isn’t so much in targeting as it is in standing out. An amazing web design is perfect to get your message out.
Over 50% of people will open an email if it has a compelling headline as reported by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
We believe that there are three essential elements to a good headline:
Headlines are very hard to write well because there is a lot of information to squeeze in a 55-60 characters. This is why we narrowed them down to 3.
Of the three, utility is the most important. Making it clear that this email is worth reading is job number 1. If your title doesn’t make it clear to the reader what is in it for them, rewrite it.
Many people can write the headline so the utility is clear but the headline is too long, which leads the next point.
This is where it gets even tougher - how to condense your utility in 3 or 4 words. This is where keywords can be helpful. People are searching every day for information about your topic, so you can leverage those searches to see which terms they use most often. They are generally a very good predictor of which words will work best.
Now, we come to our last point, urgency. Of the hundreds of emails a person receives in a day, we need to convince them as to why they should read ours now. We’ve become so desensitized to “now”, “today”, etc. that they have lost their impact.
Real offers with deadlines do still work. Deals or other incentives or limited access to an event still deliver.
The last thing you want after creating a great headline to boost open rates is to lose them with poor design.
Email design follows the same principles of web design. Communication is messy, and design helps aid in getting our intended message across quickly and efficiently.
An email is an intrusion. We need to recognize this fact. Therefore, we need to make that intrusion as brief and clear as possible by sticking with one clear message.
We cover email design in great detail in our post on small business email marketing. We will just touch on the high points here.
Using color remains more of an art than a science, even though we have studied it since the ancient Greeks.
The challenge with color is context. Some colors, such as blue/green, are seen as pleasing when in an environmental setting, but as disgusting when on bread as mold.
Therefore, the first thing we need to consider with color is context. The next is harmony.
Color should enhance, not detract or compete with your message. Color used well can be attention grabbing, which used poorly can be overwhelming.
Tools like the color wheel can help. The color wheel is based on the harmonics of different wavelengths of light. Just like music, some notes sound better together, while others sound like noise.
According to Best Designs, original graphics are the most successful.
“Original graphics make up 40% of all successful visual content that accomplishes marketing goals, but 43% of marketers struggle with the consistent production of captivating visuals.”
Since we are communicating one message, the artwork that supports it must work very hard to support the message. This is where local market know-how can really help. Original photos and images of your business in Bayside interacting with your neighborhood can add value.
It also helps with when your calls to action focus on local events in and around Bayside or at your business location.
Every email, no matter how trivial, should have a call to action. This is where all the hard work above pays off. If we omit one, we just wasted resources that could have been spent more cost effectively.
We cover email list building in great detail in our post on small business email marketing. Again, we will just hit the highlights here as it pertains to Bayside. Every neighborhood has summer fairs. While these were severely impacted by COVID, in our post COVID world they should roar back with a vengeance. It would be smart to see if you could piggy-back off one or more of them.
Incentives, deals, free trials, and samples are all great options when developing your calls to action. See if you can partner with your neighbors to create a shared promotion. This way one shopper in Bayside has two or more places to visit while out in the neighborhood.
In a gentrified neighborhood, your challenge isn’t so much in targeting as it is in standing out. Local digital marketing can help you get your message out.
When building a list, the worst thing you can do is use SPAM like tactics. It can harm your credibility and damage your brand. However, it is good to be aware that others will and do, so it is alway important that we focus on our value.
There are two main tactics that we have seen work time and again.
As we mentioned, one of the beauties of email is its low cost However, there is a hidden cost, which is the caring and feeding of your list.
How you go about list management depends on how much of the steps above you plan to do in house.
As a small business owner, it is hard to dedicate the time to do all that is suggested.
Full disclosure, ProStrategix is a full service digital marketing agency, so this is what we do. Therefore, it will come as no surprise that we advocate for the use of a knowledgeable 3rd party.
That said, there are many software programs and marketing automation tools that can help manage your email marketing campaigns. You would have to invest the time and energy in writing and developing the emails, but the tools could manage the campaign.
In closing, I hope you see how these 3 email marketing email marketing hacks can help. To review:
If you're thinking about finding help in Bayside for your small business, here are some things to keep in mind.
Aside from all the general tips above, here are some specific actions you can take based on the three key elements of local search algorithms:
All of this assumes that you have completed your keyword research and developed your keyword list. If you have not, this section will be more effective once you do. Please see our previous post on digital marketing in Bayside and then come back.
Go through your keywords list and select those which are good descriptors of your business. If it were me, I would use something like “digital marketing agency”, “seo services”, for example. Then make a list of the regions/towns you service, for example “seo services bay terrace".
Now comes the harder part, that is frankly a bit tedious. For each combination, see if you can create a somewhat unique post that’s 500-1000 words for that keyword. For us, it is a post like this. I try to write a post that helps my potential clients learn something or do something they didn’t know they could.
Now, this is the good part. If you do write quality posts for these keywords, you will be raising your prominence. Google knows that all these neighborhoods are in Bayside. So, for each good post you write, you help raise your prominence on a given topic in a given location.
Prominence is also helped by the basic techniques I mentioned earlier, such as being a part of local business groups. Please see the Greater NYC Chamber of Commerce or Queens Chamber of Commerce for listings that might pertain to you. Any local listing helps.
This is why I like the blog technique because it hits all three key areas. If your keyword is a descriptor of what you do and the neighborhood is one you serve, it is highly that you will score points on relevance.
Finding the right SEO for your small business in a neighborhood like Bayside can be a crucial way to get your company noticed online.
The same tips would apply if you were wanted to go more broadly, for example, the city level with Local SEO NYC
See more about Small Business Marketing in Bayside. If you are more interest in the borough, you can see our Small Business Marketing in Queens. If you want the full city, you can see our Small Business Marketing in NYC.
