The main purpose of marketing for small businesses is to increase local brand awareness and generate higher sales. While there are many ways you could approach this task, some methods work better than others, and a few are completely essential. Here are three tips on how to improve your local brand awareness.
It can be hard to find the time to run social media accounts alongside your business, but they provide the most direct way to engage customers, and there are some quick ways to get started. For instance, instead of crafting your own posts, you can begin by reposting relevant content from other people, attaching hashtags and links back to your website or social media page.
You can also try to engage with key personalities and influencers in your field to increase your reach. If you can catch the attention of someone with thousands of followers, a well-timed share or retweet could get your posts in front of this large and enthusiastic audience absolutely free.
Posting well-edited photos on Instagram on a regular basis can engage and entertain new customers. If you are selling a particular product like food or cars, there are likely to be a large number of collectors, hobbyists and aficionados who will respond positively to any good quality content, provided you’ve inserted the most popular and relevant hashtags. Check what hashtags are being used by the most prominent Instagram accounts in your industry and start using them right away.
If you actually take the time to build a rapport with individual customers online, you can quickly increase local brand awareness for zero cost. If time is a struggle, there are a whole host of tools available to help you manage your social media, and you can find information on some of them in our article Tools To Manage Your Social Media (And Time).
If you are a local business, it’s vital that any potential customers are able to easily find you when they search for things online. According to Google, 50% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a shop within a day, so you really want your business to be visible to your local community in their search results. Few things are more critical for your local brand awareness!
The first thing to do here is create a Google My Business listing. Businesses do not automatically appear on search engines without a very effective web-presence, so if you don’t list yourself in the Google My Business listings section, your business could risk becoming almost invisible online. Google My Business is a completely free tool with a potentially huge impact on how many people find your business. Just make sure that all information such as your phone number and any website details are correct and up-to-date. Read our step-by-step guide on how to claim your business on Google My Business to learn more about this crucial service.
Online advertising allows you to swiftly boost your profile among a precisely targeted audience of a size of your choice. While older forms of advertising relied on blanket coverage in the hope that the right people would encounter the ad and take action, internet marketing can reach a pre-selected, carefully filtered and purchase-ready niche instantaneously. From location, age, income group, gender and even personal interests, your ability to build a bespoke audience segment is near-limitless. This level of targeting means the money you spend on marketing is used efficiently, instead of being potentially wasted by broadcasting to people who may never even need your products.
Advertising online also gives you uniquely advanced feedback, so you can really keep tabs on the value for money you are getting, and improve your marketing reactively.
A well-developed strategy for building brand awareness is the groundwork of any push for sales. Start with these three easy steps and you’ll be a known name in no time.
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