Let’s be honest, opening, running, and maintaining a small local business isn’t as easy as it sounds. To achieve your business goals, you need to understand how to grow local business. That doesn’t mean that you can’t sustain local businesses, as small businesses have some major advantages over big brands and supply chains.
Unfortunately, the odds are stacked against small businesses as almost all small businesses tend to close up after a few years. That can definitely change if you know how to expand your business locally. In this article, we will be sharing how to grow local business, follow the local business guide we have mentioned below for achieving your business goals with ease.
The Economic Impact on Small Businesses By Covid-19
The current economic climate doesn’t suit small businesses as things are incredibly unpredictable. The major reason for that is the Covid-19 pandemic, even the best strategies on how to grow local business can fail in these times.
While large business chains can survive the closing of gates for a few weeks by suffering losses, the same cannot be said for small businesses. If small businesses end up closing the gates for a few weeks, then the losses can be catastrophic. To survive the impact of Covid-19 on markets, you need to understand how to expand your business locally. You need to understand how to grow local business and implement these strategies to save your business operations.
The Local Business Guide To Grow Local Businesses
There are a lot of things you can follow on how to grow local business, all you have to do is follow the strategies we have laid down below.
1. Content Strategies for Local Businesses
All you need is a well-thought-out content strategy, which is more than often a cost-efficient way to grow the reach of local businesses. Here’s a list of content strategies that you can follow to gather more customers:
- Building a local business website, having a business website is the first step on how to grow local business.
- The second step is to create a blog. Having a blog helps your business to stay in touch with potential customers.
- Create an instructional video. A video is a next step on how to grow local business and increase sales. It is known that videos attract more customers than written content.
- You should also build e-books and case studies, these will help in showing potential clients the way your business works and how it can benefit them.
2. Strategize Email Marketing
All the best marketing strategies have email marketing in one way or another. Email marketing helps in building relationships with potential clients, and all business owners should use the best email marketing strategies for their benefit. The best Email marketing strategies can play a vital role to grow your local business.
Email marketing is really cheap if you wish to learn how to grow local business. You can stay in touch with your potential customers, using email marketing. Here are the best email marketing tips that help you understand how to grow local business:
- Create a newsletter notification on your website to gather as many email addresses as possible.
- Increase email sign-ups by offering a free incentive or anything that can encourage customers to provide their email addresses to you.
- Create an automated email list that automatically sends the email to your clients and potential customers. The emails should state why they should use your company. It is a vital step in the local business guide on how to grow local business.
- Create a newsletter that allows you to stay in touch with your customers and keep your business in your mind.
3. Local SEO Strategies
Local search engine optimization is a great way to optimize your website for a higher ranking in search engine result pages. Having a local business profile and following the right SEO techniques can help in bringing a lot of local visits to your business. If you wish to learn how to grow local business, then you need to follow the right local SEO strategies.
- You need to make sure that you have published the right business name, address, and phone number across all local directories.
- You should build local citations.
4. Strategies to Drive Local Foot Traffic
If you want to know how to grow local business, then you have to know how to keep foot traffic coming. If you have enough foot traffic, it can help to keep your business sustained in this tough economy. There are some businesses that rely completely on foot traffic.
Local business owners need to have the right amount of foot traffic. For these people, they need to stand out and gain more and more people’s attention. Here are the best tips to increase foot traffic to your business.
- Team with other local businesses in your area that can refer customers to each other.
- Hire a catchy sign holder to catch the attention of people you want to attract to your business.
- Offer free WiFi & charging spots. That definitely will help in bringing more traffic.
- Live music bands are catchy.
5. Learn How To Improve Sales Conversions
No business can survive without enough sales, if your business doesn’t have enough sales then it is nothing less than a hobby. If you want to know how to grow local business, then follow some of the tips we have listed to improve sales conversion.
- Use online chat tools. Small businesses can profit a lot from online chat tools. Use these web chat tools to talk to customers on your website directly.
- You can also use sales tracking software to keep a record of who your customers are and where they are in the whole sales process.
- If you don’t have the time to stay tied up to a desk all day long, then you can even use a mobile CRM phone app to manage your business from wherever you are.
- You can reward your existing customers by setting up a customer loyalty program. Implement the program to keep your customers keep buying more products and services from you.
6. Promote Business Using Local Communities
Apart from social media, you can even use your local community to promote your business. Any business is a big part of a local community. To learn how to expand your customer base and to understand how to grow local business, you can take advantage of these communities. You have to build relationships with people in your area and keep your business on top of their minds. Here are some top ways to get your business promoted with your community.
- You can team up with other businesses who share local customers, these businesses can recommend customers to each other.
- Join a local business group.
- Become a part of the community by donating to local charities.
- Become partners with local influencers, news stations, and content creators.
- Attend well-known trade shows and local events to keep potential customers aware of your business.
7. Local Facebook Marketing Strategies
Small businesses can benefit a lot by using social media. Facebook is the biggest social media platform right now, it receives over 2.32 billion users monthly. Even if you can snag a bit of users from the huge user base, your small business can earn a lot of profit.
If you spend any amount of time on Facebook, you may have noticed your friends, family, and neighbors asking for the local business recommendation. Your business needs to have a presence on Facebook that allows you to stay in these conversations. If you want to learn how to grow local business, then follow the top tips for growing your business on Facebook:
- Optimize your Facebook business page for local customers.
- Get as many local reviews as you can on Facebook.
- Promote your Facebook reviews.
- Make sure to showcase the Facebook reviews on your local business website.
- Report fake Facebook reviews on our Facebook page.
8. Get Reviews From Customers Online
One of the best ways on how to grow local business is to get as many positive reviews. As we’ve mentioned, reviews on Facebook, Google, and other platforms matter. In today’s time, it is so much easier for customers to share their good experiences from a business. That’s why online reviews have become so important in the world of business and marketing. Here’s how you can get reviews from customers online:
- You need to start by asking your customers for online reviews, according to reports, almost 70% of people will leave a review if you ask them to.
- You can also use reputation management software to monitor all your reviews.
- You can respond to positive and negative reviews from the comfort of your home.
- Using all the email IDs you have collected during Email marketing strategies, you can send a customer satisfaction survey to your existing customer. If you receive a positive response, you can use the reviews to show off on our website.
Final Take: How To Grow Local Business?
This was it for our list of tips on how to grow local business using marketing tips. You can grow your small business by using these tactics efficiently.