It’s no secret many small business owners have always had a hard time marketing their businesses.
Today it can be even more of a challenge as more companies start to add digital strategies to their marketing mix.
This of course is a great idea, but before you can worry about your online presence, or connecting with people on social media isn’t it easier to maybe come up with marketing strategies for your actual (physical) location?
Why not try to establish actual relationships with neighboring businesses and community?
We thought we take a step back today and not only deliver ideas and strategies to get people in the door, but come up with new local marketing strategies that you can start using today.
After all, we are all about simplifying marketing.
New local marketing strategy for a dry cleaning location
When it comes to local businesses, dry cleaners are as local as they get. Most of their customers might be from the neighborhood, and chances are they are located in a strip mall, large shopping center, or on a street with other local businesses.
In trying to get people through the door, you want to try to come up with something that is exciting, gets people talking, and makes people take notice. After all, you want people in the immediate area to not only do business with you, but to develop a loyal and lasting relationship with them.
One thing you can do to drive actual foot traffic is to run a contest. You can print some flyers and pass them out to all the businesses in the area, and the customers that are coming out of those establishments.
Let them know you are running a contest and the winner of the contest can get a certain number of items dry cleaned for free.
I think it’s important to make the offer sweet enough to get people to participate. This means don’t offer to clean three or five pieces of clothing.
If people can win free cars and large cash prices in other contests you can probably offer to clean 15 or 20 items for free.
Can you imagine the winner or winners at their office or job sites telling their coworkers how they are set and don’t have to do dry cleaning for a while because a particular dry cleaner made it happen.
For the contest you want to keep it simple. What you can do is get some clothing items and have them set up in a pile somewhere in the front of the store. Have people try to guess the number of clothing items that are in the pile in order to win.
It’s up to you if you want to award a winner for an exact guess or for coming within a certain range of the exact number.
The important thing is you target people and businesses in your area, and make sure you get as much buzz as possible. You can even turn this into a quarterly or annual contest.
How can you market an accounting service locally?
For this next one we will stick with the same type of strategy and run a similar contest. If you are an accountant with an office in a location similar to what was mentioned above such as a strip mall you can run the same type of contest from above.
The goal and outcomes for using this strategy are a little different this time. Once again what you want to do is to get people to take notice and start talking about your business.
Similar to the dry cleaning business, run a contest where you have people guess number of pieces of paper in a stack.
Like before, pass out flyers and get the word out to all the neighboring businesses and people shopping at or visiting the area.
Your primary target is the businesses in the area as most of your business might be B2B, but you still want everyone to participate.
To get the most out of your contest you can award the winner a voucher for free or reduced price services that they can use themselves or give to anyone they choose. This way if someone who doesn’t own one of the businesses nearby wins, they can still give it to someone else.
By doing this you are actively engaging with other businesses and potential customers in your area, and hopefully getting some new business in the process.
Is there a creative local marketing strategy for a residential or commercial cleaning company?
There are many cleaning businesses which either specialize in residential or commercial cleaning in many cities across the country. Like the two businesses from above these businesses also offer most of their services locally.
One way you can market to your local area is to offer a different version of your service to people in the shopping district, area, or neighborhood for free.
For example if you do residential cleaning, you can set a day or half day aside to offer free cleaning and vacuuming of cars to people who are nearby.
You can pick a slow day, where you might have extra employees around and get the word out that you are offering free car cleaning to anyone who wants it.
Of course you are not in the car cleaning business, but by doing this you are gaining exposure to many more people in your area that might not have known about you, or were hesitant to try your business.
Plus for some people letting someone in their house to clean might be a big step, so offering to clean their car allows you develop a relationship that makes it easier for them to do business with you.
One additional thing you want to do is give away discounted coupons for the services you offer to anyone that gets their vehicle cleaned.
This way, aside from the exposure people might be inclined to use the coupons which will result in more business for you.
How can you market a restaurant locally?
Restaurants are another great example of a business that might get most of its sales from a local market. It’s important to be part of the community and creative in marketing a restaurant to not only existing customers, but to take advantage of the all the people shopping or passing by the area.
One thing you can do if your restaurant is in an area with other businesses is to make an offer to all the customers of the other shops nearby.
For example say there is a supermarket or other high traffic businesses in the area. What you can do is put up signs near all these establishments with an offer such as buy one and get half of the second or a free soda if those shoppers come to your restaurant and present the their receipt from that business.
You can even take this up a notch and offer people monetary discounts on the distance a particular business is from yours.
For example if there is a supermarket that is about 100 feet from your restaurant, you can give people a $1 discount on any meal for every 50 feet they have to travel to get to your place. So they could potentially receive a $2 discount on a mean that you offer for $10.
As a bonus tip you can collect all the receipts and show them to the business nearby and proceed to talk to them about additional cross promotional opportunities.
Local Marketing Strategy for a Barber Shop
Our last local marketing strategy is for barber shops. Don’t worry there will not be any hair to count for this one.
Once again let’s keep it real simple and in line with what the business does while trying to attract customers from the neighborhood.
Since pretty much all you do is cut hair all day, why not try to get people’s attention by offering to cut something else that also grows routinely and people want to keep trimmed to keep up appearances?
What’s that you ask? Good old grass.
What you can do once again is start getting the word out. Pass out flyers. Tell all your customers. Let all the local newspapers know.
Inform everyone that since you are a part of the community, you want to give back by offering to mow the grass of any local homes or businesses (maybe first 5-10 to show interest) that want take advantage.
As much as most people probably dislike mowing their lawns, you might actually receive a lot of interest with this strategy.
You can even make your offer to specific groups such as senior citizens, single parent homes, or college students. This might increase your chances of getting better press coverage.
Once again don’t forget to give coupons or vouchers to anyone that you provide your lawn care services to. After all the whole point is to get new business right?
As you can see the five businesses we chose are local in every sense. Additionally all the local marketing strategies that were used are all cheap and don’t require a great deal of time.
Hopefully you can use these to get more people through your doors and those cash registers busy.
If you have any other ideas to market a local business let us know.
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