If you are looking to acquire more clients for your small business, there are simple but effective local marketing strategies you can implement, and start getting results immediately. You can get targeted and relevant eyeballs on your offers without a big marketing budget.
In this post, you’ll learn 10 tried and tested local marketing ideas to increase your revenue.
Engage With Community
If you run a small business then the first set of people you should market to are people or businesses in your local area. Before you take your offer to the national level, target your local community first.
Become known in your community. To achieve this, you must interact and engage with folks in your community, and demonstrate the value of your product or service.
Here are ways you can get involved and become people’s favorite in your area:
- Volunteer
- Offer discounts
- Attend/Sponsor local events and charities
- Join your local chamber of commerce
- Collaborate with other business owners
Hold Or Sponsor Local Events
One of the effective ways to have your business on the minds of your local community members is becoming visible and active. You can easily achieve this by sponsoring local events which help organizations in your neighborhood.
Sponsoring local events can boost your small business’s visibility as you get an opportunity to share your marketing materials, and gain extra exposure. Additionally, you can get free media mentions in local newspapers or radio announcements if your business was the lead sponsor of a community event. The interesting thing is you don’t always need to spend money to sponsor an event, you might be able to simply donate your products.
Partner With Other Businesses
Another effective strategy to gain visibility for your small business is in your community is collaborating with other businesses. When done right, this can be highly beneficial for every party involved.
When local small businesses partner with other local businesses, it can help create an incentive for customers to shop local. Collaborating with other local businesses can enhance effective product cross promotion, services swap, and hosting collaborative events where everyone involved wins. For example, a jeweler, a baker, and gift store can collaborate to create an attractive wedding package for brides.
Reach Out To Local Media Outlets
Media exposure is one of the effective ways for your small business to become well known in your local community.
To gain the local media’s attention, you must do something newsworthy. If you are sponsoring a local event in your community, you simply want to reach out to local media outlets for coverage. Another way to get media exposure is to send out a press release about your business, and it may get picked by local journalists and other outlets.
This alone will bring your business extra visibility, and people who otherwise wouldn’t have known about your business, will read about your product or service in the newspapers or hear about it on the radio.
Focus On Local Advertising
Invest in display advertising. This can help you get your business in front of consumers in your community and increase brand awareness. Display advertising is an online marketing strategy that displays ads directly on local news sites and other sites across the web, and drives local customers to your business’ landing page, where you can either collect their information or sell to them directly.
One strategy to get the highest ROI on your local advertising is using display ads to promote special deals or promotions relevant to your local audience.
Optimize Your Website For Local Search
One of the ways to drive FREE organic traffic to your business website is to optimize for local SEO. You can increase your chances of getting found locally by optimizing your Google My Business(GMB) listing, and enhancing content on your site that’s relevant to localized searches
Your Google My Business profile is a free local advertising tool that can get you found on Google via Google Maps, local Google Search, and Google’s Knowledge Panel.
Engage With Local People On Social Media
Social Media is one of the best ways to connect with local people in your community. Social Media marketing can be overwhelming, and without a plan of action, you can get lost in all the noise.
Don’t join multiple social media platforms at once, start with one and build a relationship with your fans and customers on the platform. One simple hack to grow quickly and build trust is to respond to people who engage or comment on your social organic and ad content.
One way to win on social media is to stay relevant by engaging with your audience, while providing value to your followers.
Loyalty Program
Although attracting new customers is essential for business growth, also is retaining existing ones. One of the effective customer retention techniques you can implement in your business starting from today is developing a customer loyalty program.
Wondering if this will be worth it? It sure will! The 80/20 rule states that 20% of a company’s existing customer base generates 80% of its profits! If done right, a loyalty program can effectively increase your bottom line and further engage your most loyal customers.
A customer loyalty program is a great way to reward your current customers and incentivize them to keep doing business with you. To get the best results from loyalty programs, you must be clear on the incentive you will provide customers, how often they can qualify for rewards, and how you’ll track their participation. A lot of businesses use a rewards card or some time digital-based system. You’ll need to decide what works best for your business.
Develop New Local Contacts
This is an expected outcome if you follow the marketing ideas shared so far in this article. If you begin holding or sponsoring local events, volunteering, being more active on social and in local search, and collaborating with other businesses in your area, then these things will begin to open you up to new opportunities and help make you more relevant to people and businesses in your area..
Share Your Story
Stories are powerful. People easily connect with, and are moved by stories. What’s unique about your business? What are your processes like? What is your Unique Selling Proposition? How can you help people in your location? Tell a compelling story that resonates with your target audience, and watch how people get drawn to your brand.
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