Grow a Small Business Utilizing Local Business Marketing
Small businesses depend on local consumers or excellent marketing to gain profitability. However, it is often seen that small businesses keep low budget for marketing. One of the best ways to ensure you are maximizing your marketing potential is to use local marketing sources and develop relationships in your local business community. There are many ways you can do this; so you should choose the ones that best fit your business model. In order to provide your marketing efforts, you should identify the demography of your customers. This article will tell you how to grow a small business utilizing local business marketing.
Contents
Steps
Preparing for Marketing
- Make sure you are almost completely set up before launching a local marketing campaign, if you are starting a new business. It is a great idea to research avenues and plan up to 6 month advance while you settle a lease or get your business license. However, you should be within about 1 month of your opening before getting your name out in the public, or else they may search for you and see that you are unavailable.
- In some cases for small businesses that are already set up, you may consider re-branding your business. You should consult a professional graphic designer or web developer to make sure your materials are of professional quality. The investment will pay off in the long run.
- Set up a website. Even if you are trying to market locally, most people look for local businesses online, using Google or other search engines. Have a website with details about your services, contact information and directions to your store.
- Consider building a native app. Mobile app provide a new and more interactive shopping experience and can be beneficial in growing a customer base and improve customer retention. With a good app, you can provide:
- In-shop navigation. Beacons give you the possibility to track the in-store “journey” of the client, sending notifications with information regarding specific products within their reach. It can really help a local business engage with its customers in a non-invasive yet convincing way.
- A loyalty card. Traditional loyalty cards are turning into a thing of the past. Adding yours to a mobile app can play a major part in increasing profits, while serving as an incentive to get clients to visit your store again, turning one-time visitors into returning customers.
- Club card for exclusive privileges. To nurture most loyal clients, a club card allows for membership levels with different privileges. Such a feature is perfect to introduce a VIP dimension, for night clubs, yacht clubs or even movie theaters, etc.
- Coupons. Coupons are powerful promotional tools to include in an acquisition and client retention strategy. Here again, a mobile app can be a successful way to deliver special offers, to make sure they never miss a deal.
Using Free Local Business Marketing
- Take advantage of free online marketing. Sign up for a free Google places account where you can list your address, telephone number, a link to your website, a description of your services and even a picture. There are a number of places outside of Google where people may look for your business details.
- Sign up for a LocalTabs, BookMyCity, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Yelp and CitySearch accounts. You should set up a business account on Facebook and suggest to your friends that they "Like" your account. You may want to appoint someone to update these regularly. They are great tools when used regularly to share photographs of your work, your patrons (with their permission) and any promotions you are offering. Include your Facebook address on all of your printed promotions.
- Write a blog, if you are fond of writing and you feel you have something to share about your craft or your locale. You may offer tips, photos, videos of your business in action or any other information about your business that might be attractive to a potential consumer. Remember that successful business blogs are ones that give out something more than just promotion for a business. They offer insights into a craft or locale. A regularly updated blog will gain followers and it can be linked to your website, Facebook and Twitter.
- Get to know your local reporters in the business section of your local newspapers. They can be the keys to local promotion. You may first inquire about paid advertising and then ask if there are free business listings on the newspaper's website. Network with them whenever possible.
- Encourage customers to refer to your business and to write reviews on your website, Google Places or Yelp. Not all reviews will be good, but if most are, then it will attract business. In a referral scheme, some salons offer $5 to $10 off haircuts to people who refer customers.
- Email local bloggers. Invite them for an extra discount at an opening to encourage them to write about your store. If you have your own blog, develop a relationship of linking to each other's blogs. Perhaps you can be a guest blogger on another site to help draw business from the same demographic.
Having a Grand Opening
- Have a grand opening or make over your business and have a grand re-opening. You can attract people to your business by offering a sale over the first few days, refreshments or a drawing for a large gift certificate.
- Consider getting a local promoter involved, if you have the budget for it. At the launch of a business or campaign, it may be important to look for outside help. Later on, you may be able to fully rely on free online promotion or email blasts. This is an important step if you are just breaking into the local area. If you don't know a local promoter, you can try MatchLocal to set you up with local marketing solutions.
- Send out a press release to all local newspapers, and use any connections you have made to local newspaper writers in your business section. While it may be very hard to garner a section in a large city's newspaper, smaller towns often enjoy writing a story about a new business.
- Set up a sign-up list to receive e-newsletters from your business. This will help you grow your email list. Ensure you tell people that you will not share their information and you will let them know about local promotions and new products.
- List your event in all the newspapers in your area, beginning a month in advance. Also, create an event on Facebook and send it to your followers. Call local radio stations and ask if you can get listed on their announcements. Ask local businesses if they would be willing to trade promotions so that you can put up a flier in their store.
- Get a listing in your local phone book. This is important especially if you cater to an older demographic. Many people still have a book in their home or in their car that they reference. A regular listing may not cost very much, and you can pay to put your listing in bold or list it in the yellow business pages.
- Get listed on all online search engines you can find. This can include Google Maps, Bing Local and Yahoo local. There are a number of online yellow pages where you should submit, such as Merchant Circle, Web Local, Yellowpages.com, Local.com, Bizjournals.com, Insider Pages and Super pages.
- Submit your business listing to major data providers, such as Localeze, infoUSA and UniversalBusinessListing.org. These companies sell or share local listings and you may find your business listing in places before you request a listing.
- You may need to pay for some of these listings. You should weigh the cost against your total marketing budget. Google, Bing and Yahoo, however, are essential steps in local marketing and should be done no matter what.
Using Paid Local Business Advertising
- Consider some paid advertising in your area. This should be done when you have completed all of the free paths. However, some of the following avenues are tried and true advertising campaigns that work in local areas:
- Buy an ad in the most popular local newspaper for your demographic. Remember to haggle. Ad salesmen at papers have the ability to give a little, so see if you can get 2 ads for the price of 1, or a month of ads for a promotional article.
- Buy radio ads. Time them so that they come out when you are having a big promotion. Radio ad sales people are also allowed to haggle. See if you can get a bulk ad rate or a free promotion during a commuter time radio show.
- Buy a billboard. This is often a large expense. However, if your main demographic is commuter traffic and you can place it in their path, it may pay off.
- Do a bulk mailing card to your local addresses that includes a coupon. This is often called direct mail. You can send a card promoting new products, and it is more likely to be saved instead of thrown away if it has a coupon.
- Do a Groupon. This new way of advertising allows you to give people a chance to buy a service or product at a large discount, as long as a certain amount of people buy it. Many newspapers and local services are now offering discounts this way, so research it well.
- Remember to make sure your discount or gift certificate is profitable. Not only will your products be discounted, but the advertising entity will also probably take a percentage of your profits. Go over the figures and consult a financial adviser to make sure it will not prove unprofitable. This is a strategy best taken if you need a lot of new customers.
Getting On Page One
Search engine traffic is highly valuable for local businesses. There are three main sources of search engine traffic that can lead to a boon of new customers for businesses that service their local community. Having your website on the 1st page of Google leads to over 90% of all website traffic.
- Build organic search listings. Organic SEO is the natural promotion of your website through resources that the search engines find valuable. Organic listings in the search engines are highly trusted and often visited by potential clients.
- Aim for local search listings. Local listings in the search engines are what you see next to those "map bubbles" with the A, B, C, D, etc.
- Consider paid search listings. Pay per click listings or as the industry refers to it as, CPC listings. These search engine results are paid listings and appear before and to the side of the organic search results.
Tips
- Set Google Alerts for the leading local business and follow what they are doing locally.
- Track each of these campaigns as well as you can by asking people how they found out about your business. This will help you track your return on investment (ROI).
- Pay attention to how your successful competitors promote locally. Copy the ones that seem to work best for them.
