How to Promote Your #Business Locally

Small businesses often start by reaching out to the local community and not to a national stage. Promoting locally is usually nowhere near as expensive as trying to get a foothold nationally. Newer businesses with limited marketing budgets must start small and build up as their sales increase to gradually expand city by city until they cover the whole of the UK.

Here are a few ways to effectively promote your business at a local level.

Sponsor an Event

Event organisers are always on the lookout for corporate sponsors that are willing to cover some of the costs of holding the event in exchange for the prominent display of their branding at the event and in promotional materials like print flyers. In many ways, a local business is likely to get far more play than a big brand at local events because people naturally want to support people employed nearby.

There’s also an opportunity to have staff on-hand at the event handing out print leaflets promoting a product or service that the company is offering. Given the low cost of online print leaflets, it’s not expensive to promote in this manner. Just make sure that the offer is likely to reach a receptive audience because if it’s too random it won’t be successful. For instance, promoting a discount on basketball gear at a local basketball hoops event makes perfect sense, but for some other events, it wouldn’t be suitable or well received.

Local Business Listings

Depending on whether you’re interested in promoting the business as a whole or promoting a special offer, taking out a paid listing in the local classified section for your business is worth considering. Not only will the listing appear in their publication but it will also show up on their website, which will be indexed by Google. Getting into websites like Yelp can be appropriate in some cases and if so, be sure to respond promptly to any comments by customers to ensure your brand reputation stays intact.

Social Media Networks

Social media networks aren’t just for national or international exposure. They work pretty well for businesses wanting to target local towns and cities within their catchment area too. With Twitter, be sure to use the appropriate local hashtag to confirm your general location. Photos shared on Facebook and Pinterest can be marked up with the company’s location and a caption added to further confirm it.

In terms of Facebook, there are plenty of Facebook groups that centre around specific interests or locations. Whether that’s a small business group where informal networking goes on for new clients, or a home improvement group where helpful posts from a qualified plumber would be appreciated and could lead to new customers who bite off more than they could chew with a plumbing repair; it all works well to find a receptive audience. In these circumstances, it’s best to offer free help first and not expect anything in return. Quite often, people will respect your business because of the proven expertise from your previous responses and that’s enough to secure their order when they’re ready.

Optimising Your Website for Local SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of helping to rank higher in Google for targeted search terms that your potential customers might use to find a suitable provider.

With local SEO which focuses on business within a certain area, an SEO worker who specialises in helping companies get into local search results with Google UK is a good bet. Your business should show up in the listings of similar companies in the area related to the search term and ideally, the location should be pinned on a map too, making it easier for the searcher to find your premises.

Local SEO is a specialisation in its own right, so it’s best to find someone who only works for local businesses and has several years of experience in this specialisation.

Promote at a Trade Expo

When your company is marketing business-to-business, then a trade expo that covers the right industries is worth pursuing. Whether your business can afford to hire a spot, have a booth designed and promote directly or it needs to be done in a subtler manner is a matter of how established the company is.

For companies that lack the resources to have a booth at several trade shows, it certainly should be possible to use flyer printing for handouts during the show. Cheap leaflet printing makes it inexpensive to get hundreds of leaflets ready and hire college-level students to hand out leaflets for the day.

Promoting local businesses isn’t the same as going national. You’re trying to develop a reputation locally for quality products or doing good work. Getting the initial word out and then letting positive word-of-mouth spread often does the rest of the job for you.

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