How To Promote A Local Business Effectively
Do you own a local business? Finding your customers and finding more customers is the secret to sustaining and growing your business and unless you own a monopoly you will need to reach but to your potential customers. You need to give them a reason to come to you. Simple as that. If you are competing with similar local businesses then you need to find what separates you from the rest and focus your promotions and your marketing on that. The important thing in this day and age is to distinguish yourself from the rest. The days of sitting in your office and having people knock on your door is over.
You need to actively promote your business. Its the key to getting more customers and growing your business. The challenge is how? How can you promote your business locally and do it effectively and with a small budget. Advertising is the obvious solution but with so many advertising channels available, it can take a lot of trail and error before you find something that works. One of the most cost effective ways to buy advertising is with smaller local newspapers. Your ad is very likely to be seen by the right people and because these newspapers are so small, the advertising is still quite cheap.
We’ve all heard about online advertising and its probably been beaten to death several times over. The fact remains that online advertising is not ideal for local businesses – unless you can target your customers. Some of the more advanced advertising platforms will allow you to geo-target. In other words your ads will only display to people from a set town, city or neighborhood. this can be very cost effective as your response will be quite high.
Local business listings is and has been a great source of promotion for years now and the Yellow Pages is a prime example. With it being online now it can seriously boost your exposure. The Yellow Pages is not the only or the best though. Google allows you to add your business to their local listings and it will pop up on their maps if someone was to search for a business in a specific area. Yelp.com is another online listing that can give you great results as it puts your business in front of people who are actively looking for your products or services.
You need to track your responses as much as possible. You need to find out what type of promotion is working for you and then put 80% of your advertising and effort into that. Spend the other 20% of your effort and budget on trying out new forms of adverting and promotion and try and reach more and more of your target market.
