Unless you’re a multinational corporation chances are you
are running a small business either in the city or in your local neighborhood.
If that is the case if you want to be marketing small businesses like yours
then you need to take a look at local business marketing in order to make your
small business grow.
It’s not just small business that will benefit from this.
That’s because with the proper adjustments medium and even large businesses can
make use of local business marketing in order to boost their presence in the
local demographic area. Done right it does have the potential to make a
business brand known such that it will attract attention and potentially,
customers.
Knowing how to do this is important because let’s face it:
as a small business you won’t be competing directly with any other business in
another geographic area. This means that if you live in Town-A you won’t be
affecting the business in Town-B that much. What this ultimately means for you
is that you need to focus on marketing yourself in your geographic area in
order to attract customers that don’t know you offer this or that service or
product within their locality.
A simple method of marketing locally is to have fliers in
other businesses around town that don’t compete with yours. This gives your
business some exposure that it otherwise wouldn’t have. Being active in local
community events can also help get your name out there in one form or another.
Having a business card that you can give away is important as it is one way
people will know who you are and what your business is all about.
Radio, TV and newspaper ads are also an integral part of the
marketing scheme. Same goes with having your business in your local phone directory
and yellow pages. They may seem outdated but don’t make a mistake – these are
still viable mediums of marketing and can still bring in the customers.
Of course, when you’re marketing small businesses you need
to look at having an online presence as well. You can do small business
marketing as part of your search engine marketing system for your business. The
thing is there are a couple of free marketing tools you can use online that
will greatly help you in this regard.
For example, signing up for and using social media sites can
give you an online presence to start marketing your business. You’ve probably
heard of Facebook and Twitter but you can also sign up for FourSquare, Yelp and
CitySearch. These sites can basically put your business on the map in the
virtual world of the internet.
Using these accounts you can share what you are about and
what your business is and what it can offer customers in either products or
services. You can share photos and such that will make you closer to your
target audience – your current and potential customers.
Combining both offline and online marketing strategies is an
important aspect of any small business marketing program. Even if you’re on a
budget there are a lot of cheap and sometimes free ways you can make use of the
many different marketing tools available. These are important if you want your
small business to grow and have a presence in your market.
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