How Local Area Marketing Helps Boost Your Business Opportunities

How local area marketing can take your business to the next level

It doesn’t matter whether you are a florist, a beauty salon, a tradie, child care centre or real estate agency. There is an abundance of opportunities and marketing strategies available at your fingertips to help boost your marketing presence, drive customer acquisition and take your business to the next level within your local area. This is what local area marketing is all about.

Here are some clever strategies to help you boost your business presence in your local area, acquire new customers and also help you to retain existing customers.

Think about your approach

It may sound like a cliché statement, but it downs come down to how you approach your overall marketing effort and how much time you spend on marketing your business. We are not just talking about dollar spend either, but how much time and focus you as an owner, or a marketer, are spending promoting your local business.

If you are a small business it doesn’t have to cost you the earth, you just need to put some smart simple and measurable strategies in place that will increase your business profile over time. It won’t happen overnight! There is no point doing something once, expecting a huge return, and then not doing anything ever again. Consistent messaging, a regular approach to marketing will ensure you get your business name out into your local area and start building a profile over time. With this in mind it’s important to plan your approach in advance. Remember plan to succeed don’t plan to fail.

Build a clear picture of your target customer

Knowing who your customer is or what you would like your customer to look like is such a critical aspect of marketing. If you’ve done your initial research, you will already have a good idea what your ideal customer looks like. You will need to consider the nature of your business. Do you need to target your marketing towards businesses, or does your business service customers walking in off the street? What are the traits of your customers? Are they mothers or housewives? Are they home-owners? Consider the demographics of your target group so you are able to target carefully crafted key messages to these audiences.

Stand out from the crowd in your local area

We have entered into an era where the new generation of integrated multi-channel marketing approach has become vital for business success. There are so many great vehicles available to help promote your business and selecting the right mediums that may be suitable to reach your target audience and targeting the right message at the right time comes down to the multi-channel approach you decide to take.

Whether it’s through a direct marketing method that includes leaflet/flyer distribution, digital direct response through email campaigns, using various means of social media such as Facebook or Twitter to promote your business, it is important to create a highly engaging piece of material or content that will grab your audience’s attention. We live in an era where there is so much advertising clutter out in the market that only way to stand out is to have creative that is cut-through, impactful with clever messaging tailored for your audience.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

There are many ways you may decide to communicate with your target audiences.

Firstly, you should start by building a contact database so you can communicate directly with your existing customer base. It’s a fantastic way to build repeat business, encourages word of mouth and referrals and ensures your business remains top of mind.

Follow some simple advice to help build a solid database that ensures you are communicating with your target audience on a regular basis.

Tip # 1: Don’t forget to start collecting your customer’s email addresses. If you collect these email addresses, you may also consider developing a regular enewsletter for your customers. Newsletters are a great way to communicate special offers, new products or services, and are also a fantastic way to encourage click through to your website.

Tip # 2: Do you have special seasonal offers or promotions you can offer? An example of this may be a business such as a beauty salon that may want to promote their services and products leading up to Mother’s Day, or a retail store that is promoting a clearance sale leading up to the end of a financial year. Leveraging seasonal and promotional offers are a great way to provide customers with value added services and may even serve as a call to action and repeat business from some of your regular clientele!

Tip # 3: Is your local business doing some great things for the community? If so, don’t forget to promote this through your local newspapers. Do you have a Facebook page where you can promote the wonderful things that your business is doing? Are you leveraging your website? These are some great channels that may be used to ensure you get your message out into your local area.

To support any local area marketing strategy, it’s important to try and capitalise on all opportunities that set out to positively promote your business and communicating with your customers on a regular basis. These are all key success ingredients that will ultimately boost your business presence in the market and drive a return on investment on any initiatives you implement.

How can GDR help?

GDR have the expertise and experience to fuel your business growth through a range of local area marketing solutions.

We know how to deliver an all-encompassing marketing strategy that can take your brand to the next level.

We can deliver a local area marketing strategy for your business which will:

• Increase brand recognition and reach in your local area
• Tell your business story to customers and convince them to buy from you
• Track return on investment