10 Strategies for Promoting a Local Business

For survival in the modern market, all local businesses have to learn about various ways of adapting to the new marketing methods. If you are observing a decline in sales, you must realize that it is time to mix your marketing strategy. Even when the small business is showing a profit at the moment, you must find ways of staying ahead of the competition to remain successful in the future. You must be able to analyze the current marketing trends and identify the buying pattern of the consumers. Here are some tactics for the local business owners to promote their marketing effort.

• Join local groups
• Post content that appeals to the local audience on social media
• Use a customer loyalty program
• Offer different discounts
• Partner with the local influencers
• Have a mobile app
• Improvement in customer service
• Set up and use customer referral programs
• Running contests
• Begin blog posting

• Join local groups: All local businesses need to be active in their communities. Join a local group, as it is a terrific way of staying connected with other business owners and residents. It is a good idea to join the local chamber of commerce. They will charge a small annual fee, but it will be worth it. Your presence in these meetings and their events will provide exposure for your brand among other businesses. If you are marketing food, groceries, and home services your competitors may be a part of this group. But that is more of a reason for being there. Keep in mind that most local businesses look out for one another and they try to support the local brands.

• Post content that appeals to the local audience on social media: Posting local content is a great method for attracting the local audience. You may take help from social media, use search strategies, or blog posts for this purpose. The key is that the content must appeal to the local audience. So, how to promote your business on social media? While posting on social media you need to be using proper hashtags related to your area and tag these locations in your post. If you are active on social media, it helps in getting a higher rank in search engines. Therefore, the more active you are on the net, the easier it will be for the local clientele to locate you. You can also use marketing tools for this.

• Use a customer loyalty program: When you are looking for quick ways of increasing sales especially for groceries and food items, you need to become aware of the methods of creating customer loyalty programs. The good part of using this marketing tactic is that you make extra money without actually getting a new clientele. The concentration must be on reaching out to the existing customers and getting them to spend some more cash. Two things are most important for any loyalty program. They are increasing buying frequency and an increased average buying amount. If you can accomplish these objectives, you will be able to drive sales growth.

• Offer different discounts: All customers are sensitive to the prices. As a local business, you must be able to identify and adjust the pricing suitably. Many of you will be a little hesitant to give discounts as it appears to lower the brand value. Apart from that, the current pricing may not yield sufficient profit to offer discounts. In such a scenario, you can consider raising the base prices and then offer discounts on them. This is more appealing to the customers psychologically, as it makes them feel as if they are getting a good deal. If you are selling groceries and food items it is useful to offer discounts and coupons to the buyers.

• Partner with the local influencers: For taking the social media marketing strategy to another level, you need to consider contacting the local influencers. These people belong to communities and have a huge social following. You may pay them for promoting your local business by using their distribution channels, thereby improving your outreach. The great thing about this strategy is that it is relatively cheap. Every post will cost you a couple of hundred bucks at the most. You may pay lesser if you are offering some free items as well. These influencers have great engagement rates with their followers and they trust the recommendations.

• Have a mobile app: It is immaterial what kind of business you have or the niche you are working in, it is pretty much guaranteed that the customers are using mobile phones for searching and buying. When you have sufficient cash available, you can think about having a mobile app for the local business. Most of the time spent on mobile devices is for using these apps. Most people use them for their online promotion because they are faster than websites. An app may not be required for the local business at the moment. But, it can be necessary for the future. Using an app allows you to personalize the customer buying experience.

• Improvement in customer service: Keep in mind that your local business such as groceries, must be able to give top-quality customer service. So, how to market your business by using good customer service? Remember, all prospective buyers will utilize several tools and platforms for reaching out to your business. They can read reviews on the internet, check out social media posts, and consult their friends and relatives before buying. If you are providing top-quality customer service, it is visible to the users online. So, the current clientele will keep on coming back and this is also useful in getting new clients to come through.

• Set up and use customer referral programs: One of the better ways of getting new customers is by way of implementing customer referral programs as you are not required to do much work. The main idea behind using this strategy is to get the current clientele to perform all the heavy lifting. This strategy concentrates both on customer acquisition and customer retention as they are the top retail drivers. For making the referral program a success, you need to offer incentives for the parties involved. Reward the current customers for every referral. It provides the necessary motivation for going out there and referring your business to local people.

• Running contests: Running contests is a terrific method for getting people excited about the local business. One of the better ways of running these contests is by using various platforms on the internet. You can leverage social media for using this strategy. Are you wondering how to promote your business on Facebook? You can run contests that will encourage user-generated content. For instance, ask your followers to post images that are related to your business. Then decide a winner depending on who gets the greatest number of likes for the image. The main idea behind running these contests is to raise the social media following.

• Begin blog posting: It is a fact that many consumers use the web for finding local businesses. It means you have to understand the fundamental principles of SEO if you are looking to raise the chances of being ranked near the top. It is estimated that almost half the clicks are from the top three ranked search results on Google. Blogging can help your business a great deal especially with the SEO strategy. You get increased website traffic and more followers with increased leads and all this will eventually translate into more profits. New blog posts mean that your site is updated with fresh content thereby giving a better opportunity to rank higher in the SERPS.

Conclusion

Keep in mind, as a local business, you cannot fall behind the competition. Take a close look at your existing marketing strategies and ask yourself if you are getting the results, you were looking for. It may be the right time to gear up your marketing strategies by using the right technology such as Jungleworks Yelo. It uses a powerful marketplace platform for streamlining your ordering and delivery process and it facilitates all kinds of businesses. If you are looking for new ways of promoting the local business online, Yelo is the place to go. Keep in mind that all these strategies cannot be implemented overnight. However, you can prioritize some of the tactics depending on the requirements of your business.