If you’re a small business with a very local focus, then you have to find a way to stand out, especially if you’re in a crowded niche. People have so many options these days, and you may be competing against other small businesses in your community, as well as major brands and franchises, and online retailers/service providers. Unless you have some sort of strategic advantage, you won’t be able to get by if you’re not great at marketing. And, if your competitors are great at it, then you will either start losing market shares or get driven out of business entirely. Let’s take a look at a few simple things that you could do to up your business’s profile locally.
Sponsor Events
One of the best ways to market yourself and establish your brand in the community is to host meaningful events. You could start a festival, hold a one-day concert, or organize a yearly picnic. Sporting events can also work there. Or, depending on your business, you could organize contests with local schools. You can then use these events to not only raise awareness for your brand but introduce your products and/or services to the public as well. You could have kiosks, for instance, or have people give away goodie bags with your promo material and merchandise.
An added benefit of these kinds of events is that they will allow you to get more visibility and brand mentions in local news outlets and on social media, which will eventually boost your local SEO. This brings us to our next point.
Work on Local SEO
Local SEO and SEO in general should be a priority for your business. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and local businesses who don’t take the steps to have the highest visibility possible on local search results will often get outshined and outperformed by those who do.
The very first thing you should do right now claims your Google My Business page if you don’t have one already. If you do, then you might want to look at your “from the business” description and see if you could integrate some high search/buying intent keywords naturally to make things easier for search engine robots.
Next, look at your NAP (name, address, phone number) information and make sure that it’s congruent across all online real estate you own or have control over. This means your blog, website, social media pages, and any directory where you have control over your contact info.
Next, you need to generate positive reviews as the number and quality of reviews will have the biggest overall impact on your visibility in the local pack.
Now would be a good time to set up some sort of loyalty program so you can collect your customers’ contact information. You could also prompt people to sign up for your newsletter after purchase. This will allow you to follow up through email to encourage people to make reviews. Also, try to encourage people in your store to review your business by adding it to your packaging or mentioning it on your invoices.
Use Branded Vehicles
If you’re using vehicles for your business and they’re not branded, then you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. Branded vehicles are one of the most efficient and time-tested ways to promote your business. The best part here is that you only need to make a one-time investment and you will get dividends every time your vehicles are on the road.
If you’re located in Gloucester city and you’re looking for a good supplier who will brand your vehicles for a good price, you should check out a vehicle branding service like Sign Man in Gloucester. They also offer signage so they could help revamp your image and give you signs that match your branded vehicles.
Offer Special Deals
One of the simplest ways to get people to your business is to give them some sort of special deal. Distribute coupons to people in your neighborhood either directly or through the mail. Also, use coupon codes and deal services like Groupon.
Groupon can be a very powerful tool for getting people to discover your business. And, since you can offer group deals, you can introduce your brand to multiple people at once who will usually come from the same area. You will then be able to benefit from all that good word-of-mouth marketing if you offer them a good experience.
These are marketing techniques that any small business can and should use to spread its brand locally. Most of these methods do not recover that much of an investment either, so see which ones would work the best for your business.
