As a small business, you can expect most of your customers to be from your own town or city, including your friends and acquaintances or people who heard about your business from them.
Making these people, as well as other members of your local community, the focus of your marketing efforts is an excellent approach to growing your business. You understand their needs and pain points, so marketing your business to them will be effective and budget-friendly.
Let’s take a closer look at ways you can promote your business locally:
Create engaging social media content
Having an active and engaging social media presence is essential for growing your business. This way your target market can find out and remain updated about your business. It is also a great tool for communicating with prospects and customers and building a community around your brand.
Here are some ways you can leverage social media to promote your business:
- Join local Facebook groups where your target market is. Use your membership to not only post about your business but also to offer helpful information and content to members of the group.
- Conduct giveaways in collaboration with other local businesses. Ask your followers to tag three friends, who should follow the accounts of the businesses conducting the giveaway, for a chance to win.
- Post edutainment content about the operations of your business. For example, you can create an Instagram reel that takes the audience behind-the-scenes to show them how their orders are made and packed or a “meet our stars” video introducing your staff.
With PosterMyWall, you can create engaging content for your social media in no time. Browse through our small business social media post templates, select the ones that closely resonate with your brand’s personality, and customize them to convey your messaging. Then you can publish your designs to your social media accounts directly from PosterMyWall.
Partner with local influencers
Influencers, especially micro and nano influencers, have highly engaged audiences on social media who trust their opinions because they find them more relatable than celebrities. If they promote a product or praise a business for its services, their followers will also be interested in it.
Send some of your products to local influencers to try out or offer them a free service. If they like it, they will endorse it to their followers. Make sure to provide them with important information like the benefits/use cases of your products and the links to your social media accounts and website.
Give them an exclusive discount code for their followers to further incentivize their followers to shop from your business.
If you have a physical location, e.g., a store or a cafe, invite them to visit you there and share their experience with their followers on social media.
Run ads on social media
Paid ad campaigns on social media platforms are one of the most efficient ways of reaching out to potential customers. As social media algorithms favor paid content over organic marketing efforts, you will be paying for the undivided attention of your prospects.
What’s even better is that you can narrow the audience of your ads based on demographic characteristics (such as age and location) as well as the interests of your target market. This way your ad is shown to the right audience, which is most likely to engage with your social media profiles and eventually shop from your business.
Participate in local trade shows
The purpose of trade shows and fairs is to help local small businesses reach out to their target market. People attending these shows hope to find good quality and reasonably priced hidden gems in their area; your products could be just what someone has been looking for!
Sign up for local trade events, distribute your business cards to your stall’s visitors, and ask them to follow you on social media for new products and exciting deals from your business. Incentivize them to purchase from you by offering event-only discounts or discount coupons for their next purchase.
Invest in print marketing
Print collateral, including flyers, banners, and posters, is still highly effective for local marketing.
Design eye-catching print material, with bold colors and fonts, that clearly convey what you do or offer, and contain all of your contact information (including your phone number, social media handles, and website). Then you can pass out your flyers in local neighborhoods and put up your posters in popular public places such as malls and coffee shops.
Final thoughts
Local marketing is much more cost-effective than broad, national campaigns. You pay significantly less and are still able to reach out to the relevant audience.
In its essence, local marketing is all about connecting with and catering to the needs of the prospects and customers near you, the people who are most likely to shop from and support your business.
By following the tips mentioned in this article, you can strengthen ties with your community, increase brand visibility, and drive sales.