While it can seem as though having a local base is less important than ever in the age of digitized business, that’s often far from the truth.
Having people who can support you as a local business, understanding what the people situated near your business need, competing on that scale and doing your best to serve the community can only help you grow, and become more popular, and gain grassroots support as a business.
For that reason, it’s important to also prioritize your local area, no matter how wide your ambitions may be. Small steps, as they say. However, many businesses often neglect this approach and then wonder why they’re struggling to gain traction in this area.
It’s unlikely that this is you. Those who care about being seeing their local area aren’t simply going to ignore it, and so by virtue of reading this post, you’ve likely already tried a couple of methods. By why aren’t they gaining the traction you’ve intended? Let’s consider:
Failing To Market Locally
Marketing locally is more than just putting up a few signs or making a Facebook page for your business. It’s everything that goes along with that, including local promotions, ensuring that you have relevance in search engine results by using firms that can offer the best local SEO marketing, and ensuring you curate a proactive and consistent social media presence. If you hit on all three of those topics, you’re much more likely to begin making waves in your local area, or will at least start to find yourself on the map.
Performing Little Outreach
Of course, we cannot expect people and firms around us to take heed that we’re operating if we’re not here to promote ourselves – that much is obvious. But how much outreach have you actually been doing?
It can be worth attending trade shows when they open up again, taking some time to deliver merch to get the word out, or perhaps simply offering introductory offers to brands around you, if hoping to curate some B2B connections. Having salesmen hype up your product, or becoming more of a force in the local scene by sponsoring events could also be welcomed. In that respect, you’re working at being noticed, not only expecting it as standard.
Servicing Their Needs
It’s essential for us to service the needs of our local communities, but first to understand what those needs are. Keeping up with your market research can be quite important here.
For instance, you might find that during your research, it’s mostly men in their thirties to sixties that are coming in to purchase your fishing equipment. Can you curate your marketing to keep them around? Or might it be that asking why twenty year olds and women aren’t that interested in your products? How can you appeal to them? Might it be making the advertising a little less aggressive and open, totally welcoming those with a budding interest in fishing can help you flourish and offer a service hard to find elsewhere? In this respect, you not only expect your presence to be noticed and aren’t solely focused on outreach, but you’re adapting to what your audience may actually want from you.
With this advice, we hope you can become more of a force in your local business environment, which is a great step to becoming even more well known and appreciated.
