How to Promote Your Business in the Community – When you are running a business, you want your brand to become known in the community. You want people to recognize your brand when it is mentioned, read about it when they do their research, and buy it when it is mentioned in their searches. For most small business owners, this isn’t something they think about until after the products are in the stores or online for sale.
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Defining the Scope: Make People Aware of Your Business
Promotion is letting people know your business exists. Converting those people into customers is something else entirely.
Many small business owners get overwhelmed by promotion because they view it as converting strangers into customers. Generating more customers is the more overall goal of marketing; the specific objective of promoting is merely making people aware of your brand.
All you need to do is to communicate the name of the business and what problem it solves to people who were previously unaware.
People cannot engage your business if they do not know it exists, and they cannot use your product to solve their problem if they do not know it is an option. Making them aware of your brand and what problem it solves is always the first step.
Let’s take the analogy of dating. Would you walk up to someone you did not know and tell them all the reasons you are the best person to be in a long-term relationship with? Of course not, you would be shut down because you would make them uncomfortable by overwhelming them.
Promotion of a business is akin to the first stage of dating where you meet potential partners. The best you can hope for is that the attractive person you are crushing on acknowledges you and you strike up a light conversation. If they liked what they saw, they would follow up, and you can have a more in-depth discussion later, maybe on a date.
Set up your free listing with Google
How are new customers finding you?
If you’re old-school, you may be relying on word of mouth, radio promotions, print ads, and direct mailing. But last year, 97% of consumers searched the Internet for a local business.
Furthermore, positive online reviews make 73% of consumers trust local businesses.
That’s why you need to make sure your local business is listed on Google.
When people use the Internet to search for something, they start with Google.
Setting up your free Google listing makes it easy for consumers to find you when they search for terms related to your business.
Your listing will have all your information:
- address
- phone number
- hours
- directions
- link to website
You’ll be able to add photos to give people a better understanding of the way you operate.
Customers will also be able to add photos. They’ll write reviews about your local business for other people to see, which will have a major impact on your successful.
You need to learn how to get your customers to recommend your brand to others.
Your star rating is the number one factor used by consumers to determine whether they’ll buy from your local business.
In fact, 94% of customers will use businesses with a 4-star rating.
Target Audience
A target audience (or target population) is the group of people, defined by demographics, who would be interested in your product and service.
Unless you sell the air we breathe, you have people who are interested in your product or service and people who have no use for it. There are a subset of people who need your product, whether it be a matter of age, income, taste, or circumstance.
Defining your target audience can help you figure out whether a promotion opportunity will be effective or a waste of time or money.
To take the example from the Impressions section, sponsoring a golf tournament with 6800 attendees may be the better opportunity over an ad in a local newspaper with a circulation of 24,000 subscribers if the tournament is a better fit with my target audience. A Cadillac dealership may do better sponsoring the golf tournament because we can assume the golfers are affluent. A discount grocer would do better with the newspaper opportunity.
You can do some mental math. What is the percentage of people who see the promotion are within your target audience? Then multiply the impressions by that percentage.
If the Cadillac dealership defined their target audience as people with a household income of over $120,000, then let’s ‘guesstimate’ that 80% of the golf tournament attendees fit that definition. 6800 x 0.8 = 5440. Let’s assume that 20% of the newspaper subscribers are in the income bracket. 24,000 x 0.2 = 4800. So 5440 is greater than 4800, so the golf tournament is the better promotion opportunity for the Cadillac dealership.
The idea is not to be too precise, just to scrutinize the opportunities because every promotion we run as a small business better be VERY worth it. Whether it is free or paid promotion, there are always costs; your time is valuable.
What media does your target audience watch or read? What places or events do your customers attend? Are there opportunities to promote there?
Plan out your process with a marketing strategy template.
Before you spend any money or develop any creatives, take some time to document your steps, budget, and expectations with a custom marketing plan. Starting here will help you think through any possible roadblocks and organize your plans more concretely.
Instead of starting from scratch, try using HubSpot’s pre-built Marketing Plan Template, which you can download for free and start working with immediately.
Audit Your Online NAPs
NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone number, also often referred to as citations.
Out of Moz’ top 6 “Foundational Ranking Factors”, (for search engine ranking), 3 are related to NAP quantity, quality, and consistency, and out of the top 13 “Competitive Difference Makers,” 6 are about NAP quantity, quality, and consistency.
If you’ve listed your company on Google My Business, you need to make sure the details there are the same for all your online listings.
Image Credit: Moz
If any of the details elsewhere are not the same as it is listed in Google My Business, then you might not be “rewarded” by search engines and it could also damage your search ranking.
A suggestion is to keep an Excel spreadsheet of all your listings, to make it easy to keep them consistent.
Moz offers in-depth information about NAP audits and how to do them.
Channels
Marketing channels are the pathways in which your messages can make it to customers
I extensively covered marketing channels in an article called Classes of Marketing Channels. I shared my extreme views on “spam.”
The messages from your small business are going to go through channels like your street, social media networks, search engines, or media.
You have to keep in mind that not all channels are created equal, and some channels will work fantastically, and others will be flops. The effectiveness of channels will change over time, for example, Facebook fan pages were beneficial five years ago, but Facebook changed their algorithm, and non-sponsored posts now receive almost no distribution. You cannot be too dependant on any one channel.
Ryan Holiday outlines in Growth Hacker Marketing makes the case that small or early-stage business should look for one or two highly effective channels, and should concentrate on those.
BMB’s most effective channel is Google Search, so we are doubling down on SEO at the expense of social media. For local businesses, the most effective channel right now is nearly always Google Maps.
You can find free promotion for local businesses in unique or neglected marketing channels. So be creative; think about what channels have lots of people in your target audience but are underutilized. Are their to cross-promote with other local businesses? Can you hand out coupons at a local event? How about putting some chalk art on the sidewalk outside your company?
Start blogging
As you’ve just seen, consumers use the Internet to find local businesses.
That means you need to understand the basic principles of SEO if you want to increase your chances of getting ranked as a top result.
Roughly 47% of clicks go to the top three positions of Google search results.
Blogging will help you tremendously with your SEO strategy. Just look at these numbers:
More website traffic, more followers, and more leads will ultimately translate to increased profits.
Publishing new blog posts means your website will be updated more frequently with fresh content, which will increase your chances of getting a higher search ranking.
Plus, your posts are a great place to add keywords prospective customers may be searching for when browsing online.
Once you’re able to establish a steady group of readers for your blog, they’ll visit your website on a regular basis. The more they visit your site, the greater the chances you’ll have of getting them to convert.
Join a local group
Local businesses need to remain active in their communities. Joining a local group is a great way to stay connected with residents and other business owners.
I suggest joining your local Chamber of Commerce. There will be a small annual fee, but it’s worth it.
Attending these meetings and events will expose your brand to other businesses.
Will your competitors be part of these groups? It’s possible. But that’s even more of a reason for you to be there.
Let’s say you own a local t-shirt company.
Another local business may be hosting an event in town and need custom shirts made. Rather than ordering the shirts online, they’ll be more inclined to use your services if you both belong to the same local group.
That’s the whole idea behind joining. The businesses look out for one another and always try to support local brands.
Conclusion
Well, when people ask me about strategies for promoting a local business in a community, I often feel like the famous answer from Seinfeld where he is asked, “What’s your strategy?” and he responds “Just sit there and make money.” Unfortunately, the same thing is true in this case.
Take a look at your current marketing campaigns, and ask yourself whether they’re generating the results you’re looking for.
I’m not expecting you to implement all these strategies overnight. But go through the list, and prioritize some of these tactics based on the needs of your business.