How to Improve Your Marketing Strategy For a Local Business By Increasing The Awareness?
Creating a huge business is not about targeting a massive audience all the time. You need not target the millions when your business plan is best suited for a local area. For example, if you are starting a restaurant, your first priority should be to make it popular in your immediate surrounding rather than making it a nationwide popular thing. This is where improving your business through the awareness part comes in. You need to come up with plans to increase the local awareness about your restaurant.
If you ask what a local business means then simply put, it is a business venture when you deal with your customer face to face at one or more physical locations.
With a broad perspective, one can divide the local business into three main categories.
Brick and mortar businesses –This is where you do not go around and instead the customers come to you. Restaurants, hotels, salon, retail, church, school, etc. are some of the top examples of this type of local business. You need to setup a base for yourself for this and provide services from there itself.
Service area – This is where you yourself have to go to the customer and provide the services asked for. You can surely set up a base for you where multiple servicemen are working but more often than not, it is you who will go out and serve. It can be an electrician, plumber, the cable guy, cleaner, and personnel for lawn care, medical services and much more.
Professionals – Providing professional help to someone by having a base at one or more location also comes under local business. You can be a chartered accountant or an attorney or a financial planner or a real estate agent or a lawyer or a doctor and so on.
You must have noticed how you find pins on the Google or Apple maps when you look for a local business that belongs to the category of brick and mortar but nothing under the other two areas. This is because the first category has a permanent address and the second two need not have one.
To better understand your customer, here is a life cycle of a customer in general.
1.Aware- This is when a customer gets to know about your business. This is the best area to capitalize and get the customer to your side.
2.Evaluate- Once the customer gets to know about your business, he/she evaluates the place and only then will think of getting to the next stage. This is where reviews come in to your rescue.
3.Engage- Now is the time when the customer engages with you and makes a deal that is beneficial for you. Here, it is your services’ qualities that will determine the success.
4.Purchase- If the service provided is good then the customer will make the deal or purchase the goods and services.
5.Refer- If the customer likes your service a lot, he/ she will definitely refer your work to somebody else as well. .
To improve your Awareness campaign, there are several things that you need to include immediately.
Citation – Use citation in your content. Give credits to the posts and websites if you are using their information and content. This will improve the SEO backlinking and thus improve your ranking.
Reputation – Building a good reputation is the key to improving the chances of awareness of your business. The mix bag of online reviews and word of mouth reviews is what makes any business successful.
Website –Always create an attractive website for your business to improve your presence on the internet. Customers must get all the information they want from your service on the website.
Email marketing – Use email as a tool of marketing. Come up with relevant posts and content that you can mail to your customers. However, make sure that you do not spam them with regular mails.
Social Media – Not having your presence in the social media circuit in this day and age is the biggest mistake you can make. Create infographics and content to bring in the audience. Announce giveaways and discounts through social media sites to garner more audience.
Advertising – Advertising is another key aspect of increasing the local business. Target the surrounding areas and spread the word there rapidly. Target maximum growth in a small time in this aspect.
Once a customer has a knowledge about your website or business, the engagement part will automatically increase.
