Promoting a local business can feel like an uphill battle. When you read advice online, so much of what’s there applies to larger businesses with much bigger budgets. What you need to do instead of throwing money at the problem is make good use of your relationship with the local community.
To give you plenty of food for thought, we’ve put together 4 ways that you can promote your business in the local area. Ideal if you want to be able to improve your revenues by connecting with new customers.
Host an Event for the Local Crowd
Hosting an event may sound like a daunting prospect, but if you approach it the right way, it really doesn’t have to be one. The great thing about events is that people will flock to them in their droves. Ideal if you want to be able to connect with hundreds of people in a single afternoon.
If you want to ensure that everything runs smoothly, then you might want to consider hiring an event planner. That way you’ll be able to enjoy the day whilst someone else takes care of all the hard work. They can also suggest a creative themed event you can host, that will help you get in touch with your local community.
Stage a Giveaway in the Town Centre
Giveaways are a great idea, and they have the added advantage that you don’t need to have a captive audience for more than a matter of seconds. Eateries have a great opportunity to give away free samples to passersby — something which is guaranteed to have people coming your way.
Of course, not every business offers something of this nature, so why not think about what you can give. It could be a cup of coffee and a business card, a couple of Christmas cards, or anything else you can dream up. Just make sure it’s something that can be related back to your business, and that from the consumer’s point of view, it’s worth crossing the street for.
Start a Leafleting Campaign That Will Catch the Eye
Leafleting may sound like a throwback idea, but it’s still talked about because it works. In the age of the internet, it can be tempting to go down the route of developing an overly complex content marketing plan. For a local business, this will often be prohibitively expensive, and not to mention very difficult to get off the ground.
A better approach is to condense your offering into an eye-catching A5 flyer, and then to hand hundreds of them out on a Saturday afternoon. You’re not expecting everyone to get in touch, but if even 5% of people contact you over the next couple of months, you could be looking at dozens of new customers. Not only that, but if they rate your services, then they’ll tell their friends and family all about you too.
Advertise a Discount Coupon in the Local Paper
The local paper is a great place to advertise because it will likely only be read by potential customers in your local area. Offering a discount coupon, preferably on the legend of the front page, is a great way to catch the eye.
Simply by getting your name out there, you’ll become a topic of conversation in town. Ideal if you want to see an increase in your footfall so that you can grow your business. The tricky part is in offering something that sounds good, but not too good to be true.
Simple deals like buy one get one free, or 20% off at the checkout are tried and tested winners. Stick with whichever one makes economic sense for your bottom line, and it’ll be obvious which way you need to go.
Implement a Bot Onsite
If you are looking for an online strategy too, why not try implementing a clever bot to help you reduce customer churn. There will likely be visitors who come to your website but fail to complete an action. Manually reaching out to all these people would take ages, and would not leave you much time to do anything else, which is why a bot can be useful.
You only have to implement it once, and after that, it will do its job and make sure your customers are refocused and ready for the next step.