As businesses slowly move away from being local and adopt a more national and international approach, they leave a gap which local businesses can fill up. The thing to recognize is that the way you approach marketing for local businesses is quite different from the way you approach marketing on a national level. This goes into the ways you can use techniques to boost your local presence and revenue.
1. Register Your Business in Local Listings
Local listings are one of the major ways people find about your local business – they’re getting exceedingly popular and people are relying on them now more than ever. That’s why you must register your business in local listings at the soonest chance possible – come up with catchy phrases and attractive photos to increase the chances of customers noticing you.
You should start with the most prominent local listings – on the internet, this honor goes to Google Places and Yahoo Locals. It’s possible that there are specific listings for your particular location – look them up and add your business on there too.
2. Talk About Your Business on The Internet
Another way of letting people know about your business is by joining relevant communities on the internet and talking about it. If you like your business, you’ll absolutely love to talk to others about it, share your ideas, and explore the ideas of others:
- Although slowly falling out of favor, blogs are still a huge force in propelling businesses to the top. Being passionate about your business, you’ll have a lot to tell about the minutiae of your business and how you organize everything, and better yet, there are a lot of people online who love to listen. With informative and interesting articles, you can create a community of interested and trusting customers that will help you advance your business through word of mouth and direct patronage.
- There are various social media platforms that connect local people with various interests together – it’s most likely you’ll find a community that’s interested in the niche your business fills. Joining these groups and being active won’t just bring more attention to your business, but it’ll also connect you with other business owners in your sector. It could be a good opportunity to start networking and share ideas with them.
- Aside from joining others on social media, it is paramount for your business to have its own social media profiles across all major platforms. You need a way to quickly connect with your regular customers, and social media is the best way to do that. Ensure your business is easily accessible to your customer base and regularly interact with them.
- If you want to go the extra mile, you can hire a custom software development company to develop a special platform just for your business. Having a beautiful bespoke website will leave an impression on your clients and drive sells up.
3. Hold Discounts and Other Events Regularly
To build a brand, you need to be super active – in today’s world, it is extremely hard to stay relevant and to make your customers remember you, and periods of inactivity will sometimes spell the death of your business. You can combat this phenomenon with various strategies.
Regularly hold discounts – don’t let products remain in your store for too long, and use some method to detect which products should be discounted and post it all over your business’s social media. Offer discounts for the first one hundred customers, use another gimmick – just make sure your store stays relevant in the minds of your customers.
4. Professional Marketing and Search Engine Optimization
The online space is more clamored than ever, and you need to be really well-informed on marketing principles to see good growth and name recognition. Most businesses don’t even consider professional marketing – they think that the business is too small to benefit from it and it would cost too much. These are misconceptions that don’t take the changing landscape of marketing into account.
Currently, SEO is the hottest form of marketing that can add value to businesses of any size:
- There are various approaches and methods used to tackle marketing – this means greater flexibility in the budget and approach of SEO marketing. It’s extremely affordable.
- It provides multiple new ways to specifically tackle local marketing that means you’ll get more out of every penny you spend on SEO than traditional marketing, especially if you hire an experienced agency like Neadoo Digital SEO agency.
- As things are moving to the internet and cloud at an ever more accelerating pace, SEO marketing will probably be more relevant in the future, and this means you’ll get a headstart in this area compared to the businesses that don’t adopt it.