How you promote your business depends on where you are located. Local businesses are as unique as the communities they serve. They are inseparable from their local neighborhoods, providing employment opportunities, better service, and distributing money back to the area in which they are located. As a local business marketing agency, Clear Choice Marketing Group can work together with you to develop local business marketing strategies that increase your returns with action plans that demonstrate your unique strengths and increase engagement with more of your ideal prospective customers.
Successfully selling services and products to individuals would be a positive result of marketing to consumers.
With local consumer marketing, you may be promoting your goods and services to individuals in close proximity to your retail location or within the service area you have selected. Business to consumer marketing involves making your business attractive to individual buyers with your website, your advertising, your social media, and other properties.
When someone buys a product or service, they are a participant in a consumer market. They have decided how to spend their money and how they use their purchases. How active a consumer market is depends on how many people actively purchase products or services from it.
Marketing educates consumers on what buying options are available. A local company must let prospective customers know about the buying choices it offers.
It should no longer focus on audiences, media, and channels, but instead on personal messaging to your ideal prospects about the history of your brand, what preferences you address, and why you are unique.
There is a revolution in marketing. What matters today is speaking directly to your target audience about things that really matter to them, and especially what they were interested in when they typed in a specific search phrase.
A mission statement for your brand will explain what your company stands for. It can keep your marketing and sales groups directed toward what is important.
Consumer profiles may build on demographics, education, occupation, income, place of residence, personal interests, and product use. They then can define an example of a person with those characteristics: what they do on a daily basis, their age, gender, residential living area, and lifestyle.
How can you provide what your ideal customer needs, and why are you uniquely qualified to be their provider of choice? What is a tag line that you can use like a mini-mission statement? It can differentiate you or inspire and motivate your prospects.
As far as graphics are concerned, you may want to consider primary colors and fonts for your logo and other properties on your website, social media pages, ads, and print media. Or, you may want to use colors that are trending for the current year.
It’s necessary for consumers to have a place to go to learn more about your company and make a purchase. It is the face of your company.
Because most people will be viewing your site from a mobile device, it has to be “mobile friendly.” You will also want a method for tracking the visitors to each of your pages. And you will want to collect email addresses.
Linking to your social media pages will make your brand more recognizable, and you will want to attract followers and promote engagement on these sites.
Optimizing your website and your Google My Business listing can produce the most traffic over the long term, and it’s free.
But, if your website is relatively new you will probably want to drive traffic with paid advertising. Google’s Ads give you the opportunity to target specific keywords and phrases with the goal of appearing on page one of Google results. Facebook and YouTube can be particularly effective, if you know what you are doing or hire someone that does. You can also advertise on podcasts.
Once you have a customer list or a list of those that have opted into your lead magnet, you can set up email campaigns. An email marketing service, like AWeber or Mailchimp, will provide the automation necessary to send out a series of emails, composed of thank-yous, education, or sales offers.
Display ads, banners, and other advertising can be seen in the side bar on your website. They can be below or instead-of a lead gen opt-in lead magnet.
Local businesses that want to reach their ideal prospects can use the buyer personas they defined in their research to determine the best way to market directly to them. Working with a local printer can aid in pin pointing your choice of methods, such as coupons and flyers that can be sent by direct mail.
Business cards and flyers left with prospects you meet is another direct marketing method. Face-to-face situations present one of the best approaches for introducing your brand.
Ask yourself what concern or problem can be solved by using your service or product?
Decide who is experiencing this concern or problem most often or who is most affected?
Under what circumstances would they be using your solution and what benefit would it provide?
Could it resolve a different need for another group? Does this provide you with a second target market or market segment?
More explicitly, what pain points does it address?
It’s time to take a microscope to your target market to get more precise.
Is it B2B or B2C? Are your customers businesses or consumers?
Where are they located from a geographical standpoint? Most customers for a local brick and mortar business are within two miles of the store. Are they mostly people who live, work or vacation in my vicinity?
What are the demographics of your perfect customer? What is their gender? How old are they? What is their approximate income? What level of education do they have? What is their marital status? Is there any other aspect of their makeup that can be discerned?
From a psychographic point of view, what is their personality? What are their values? What opinions and attitudes do they hold? What are their interests. What is their lifestyle?
What generation were they born in? Are they baby boomers or millennials?
What kind of groups are they part of? Can they be categorized by how they were raised? Can they be organized by the industry in which they work?
What is their predominant stage of life? Are they getting ready to attend college? Have they recently graduated from college? Are they newly divorced? Have they had a child in the recent past?
What behaviors do they frequently exhibit? Do they get their nails done once a week? Do they wash their vehicle once a month? Do they vacation twice a year?
Now that you can better define your target market(s), do they fall into sub-niches?
Investigate which of your offers are in the biggest demand by your target market.
What is the most important need they satisfy?
What are the most substantial pain points they eliminate?
Who in your refined target market would receive the largest benefit?
Check up on your main competitors to see whom they are targeting?
Evaluate their customer base to see if there is an area of the market they are not servicing.
By this time, you should have already well defined your market and probably found the sub-niche you can dominate. But, you may be able to narrow it even more or break it up into more than one group, geographically, demographically, or based on behavioral factors.
What marketing strategies will be most effective? Are you interested in a large quantity of leads in spurts or do you want a slower and steadier flow of consumers?
How can you measure the value that individual would receive from your offerings? If you can do it effectively, you will be able to pin point your target customer to the extent that you can speak their language. This allows you to relate on a significant level.
If prospects are going to make a purchase from your business, it makes a big difference if they can relate to your message if it comes with a tone and wording that feels right to them. You make a personal connection and they trust you.
The medium you use to communicate with a micro segment of your target market is likely to be different than that of another. Selling something to working mothers may best be done advertising on a social media platform, like Facebook. To reach retired people, print ads in magazines that they might read are probably more appropriate.
The critical needs your products or services can resolve are a good place to begin. Whatever your business does best is what you want to focus on selling to consumers. Then hone in on your microscopic target market as previously discussed..
Pay attention to how well your promotional methods are working. Monitor your sales, customers you are bringing in, information requests, inquiries by phone, walk in and web traffic, and those that are clicking through. You can outsource this task, but be sure to perform it.
Customers who repeatedly purchase your goods or services are known as your customer base. These customers are one of your company’s primary sources of revenue.
Your customer base consists of a lot of confidential data. It is a primary consideration in valuing your company for sale. It can also be sold on its own. Most importantly, it gives you insight on preparing your marketing messages.
In the beginning, a business has no customers. A start up often begins with an idea that evolves into a product or service. When these offerings are purchased, they create customers. Customers satisfied with their purchases buy repeatedly and become core customers. The base is established.
In many cases the initial products are lower cost and, over time, are improved and become more valuable. As their purchase price rises, they become a greater source of income.
This process of developing more profitable customers is called up-streaming.
It is essential to keep your core market complete as long as possible. Customer awareness can be learned by doing research on your buyers. They will help you improve your current products and develop new ones.
As your customer base grows, you will get better at satisfying them and they become familiar with the way you perform tasks for them. As they grow continually happy with their purchases, they make it a habit to buy from your company.
They are important for advertising your expertise. Satisfied customers express their pleasure to others, while dissatisfied customers can damage your reputation. Your core consumers will benefit you the most from word of mouth proclamation.
Eventually, even the most satisfied customers can lose interest and cease purchasing altogether. Customers that bought your lower end products may not move on to the more expensive offerings, but instead to alternative sources of supply.
It’s natural to lose some of your old customers as you gain more profitable consumers. Chasing customers that are more profitable to you is a natural progression.
Continually market to your Customer base. The more you learn about them, the better a relation you can build with each. Keeping them engaged will mean more referrals. The best advertising comes from them talking about their great experiences with people you don’t already know.
Clear Choice Marketing Group
5540 Centerview Drive Ste 200
Raleigh, NC 27606
919-205-9269
