It would be naive to assume that local business are not competitive. As a matter of fact, local markets can prove hard to break into, especially when the right strategies aren’t put in place.
This article discusses four main tips that you can apply in your local business to have an accelerated business expansion.
1. Cultivate Good Relationships With the Local Community
Clients for a local business comes from the immediate community. In order to realize any meaningful growth of your local business, rapport with the local community is mandatory. You realize that business reputation is a primary determiner of how successful business can be, and a good relationship with the community is the surest way of improving your business reputation.
There are many ways through which you can create a good rapport with the community. To begin with, you should always create time to take part in community events and to engage with community leaders in your locality.
Secondly, creating internship and employment opportunities to the area residents will guarantee your business a positive reputation. You can go an extra mile to partner with local institutions of higher learning to be providing your business with graduates from different professions.
2. Use The Social Media to the Advantage of Your Business
Having social media accounts may sound pretty obvious. However, having a Facebook or Twitter business account is one thing and using it to the benefit of the business is a different thing altogether. To effectively benefit from the social media, you must ensure that your account gains as many followers from your locality as possible. With the followers in place, you then must make sure that the kind of posts you update are relevant to your business; make your local brand popular in the social media. Keep your followers updated regarding any offers or upcoming events in your business.
Besides having followers, following local competitor businesses’ social media pages can also help you to grow your business. This is because you can learn from them about the prevailing trends within the local market, which you can even copy some of their online marketing strategies.
3. Using a Local SEO as a Marketing Strategy
Having a local SEO package from a reputable local SEO company for your local business will give it an upper hand over the local competitors. Technology has evolved in a way that clients start by searching for brands through online search engines, like Google, before making purchases in physical stores.
A local SEO optimizes your website in the search engines, diverting the attention of potential clients to your brand. Consequently, most of these potential customers will end up becoming your long-term customers.
Paul Granger advises that an SEO campaign is a process that involves several stages. The first phase of the campaign is to have your business website equipped with local keywords that are attached to regional identifiers. This ensures that you attract as massive local traffic as possible to your site.
The second stage is to place your business blog on local listing websites so as to cast your net and capture potential clients visiting those sites. The third stage is to review your business website and to create local content so that after potential local customers visit the site, they find the content they can easily identify with.
4. Client Recommendation
This is the easiest of all. It entails encouraging your existing customers to recommend your brand to their family members and friends. A good recommendation scheme is where you introduce a reward system where you give, for example, free shopping vouchers or discounts for every new client recommended.
For a local business, clients’ recommendations are more useful than in national businesses since the clients are inter-related either by blood or by association.
If you apply these four tips in your local business, then you can be guaranteed of increased business visibility and an eventual business expansion.