Marketing is the key business process. Having a wealth of knowledge in the subject will get you as far as you wish the business to go, and knowing how to market yourself to the right audience will make more than your ROI. But when you are a small company, like a local business, even keeping afloat is a struggle, so why would you even have time to focus on your marketing? If it’s just you running your business, the task of running the day to day activities takes up most of your time, so how would you even find the time to get a marketing plan together? Luckily, there are some small changes you can make which have big results.
Registering Your Business On A Local Listing Service
By going onto Google Places or Yahoo! Local, you can register the business, so it pops up on local searches. Your target custom is going to be local people, so spread the awareness of the company online. If people are looking for a local shop to buy something, that usually means they need it urgently. Otherwise they would very likely go on a massive online marketplace and get it delivered. If your goal is to keep the business as local as possible, while yielding big sales, this is one approach that is very effective.
The Personal Touch
This is something that people tend to overlook in the age of the internet. It’s so easy to click and collect, or get it delivered, that all personality is thrown out of the window. By reclaiming the personal touch for physical businesses, it is helping the ecommerce industry buck up its ideas. We forget that there are people who like the personal touch, and there are those that don’t use the internet at all. Catering for everyone is important. A nice little way to add a personal touch to your marketing is to create business cards or trinkets, like keyrings. There are companies like vistaprints for business cards that can add a personal touch to your business in the smallest way. A key thing to remember in customer service is it’s not what the customer bought, but how the customer felt as they left the store. Use this to your advantage.
Get Blogging
This is a lovely way to add another layer of personality to your business. Blogging is a very common method of marketing now. But in doing it, you can start to show your business from the inside out, which gives people an insight into how you run the company. Doing a regular post doesn’t have to take a long time, and as you do more blogs and share them on social networking sites, more people will start to take notice. And the better you get at blogging, the savvier your posts will be, and you can start to implement SEO techniques. Blogging is one of the main way companies get business now, so by starting up a blog for your local business, you will get local interest and wider public interest, which means you can start to sell online too.