What is the best way to advertise your business locally? There are of course several ways to advertise your business locally. Here are just a few of the best ideas. Please check out my recent articles: local search marketing services and how to promote local business online.
- Word of mouth – Of course word of mouth advertising and having a great reputation for offering a superb service are the best forms of advertising. Being personally recommended and building your business through personal contacts takes time however, but shouldn’t be overlooked. You can also network with other local businesses to get the word out about your business.
- Posters and banners – Make sure you are using your your premises to the best of your ability with banners and posters to let passing trade know who you are and that you are open for business.
- Shop signs – Have a highly visible sign outside your business premises ideally which can be seen from the road.
- Shop windows/post offices – Depending on your business you may want to place adverts in shop windows locally to catch more passing trade.
- Newspaper advertisements – Placing an advert in a local newspaper is one way to be found by the local readers. You can also run events to let your local community know about you and this is another way to make the papers.
- Flyers – A popular advertising concept of door to door leafleting or simply handing out flyers letting passers by know of your business presence.
- Online advertising – This can take many forms and we will look at some of the most popular and effective methods.
Online advertising is a great way to reach your target audience and is particularly useful with local businesses because you can specifically target people in your area through advertising. Take a look at this article “online marketing for local business” for more info on targeting your customer base through geo-targeting online adverts. Here are some basic online adverts which you should definitely be employing in your marketing campaign:
- Facebook advertising. Target specifics which relate to your perfect target audience. The closer you get (to your perfect customer) the less you pay since you won’t be catching people outside your audience.
- Google Adwords. Using Google Adwords you can also target specific areas and the radius around those areas in order to spend more conscientiously on your target audience only. Here are two videos which explain more how this is done.
Adwords:
Facebook:
Place a running advert on both Adwords and Facebook which you can simply ‘set and forget’. Set your daily budget at an amount which you can manage over the long term and as results improve increase your budget.
Website
You should have a website for your business which is optimised for your best keywords and which comes up in the organic Google search. Use Google’s keyword planner to decide on your best keywords and plan your website around those if you don’t already have one.
Email capture
An email capture allows visitors to opt-in with their email to your newsletter. You may want to include offers and discounts to subscribers to encourage them to opt-in. See capturing email addresses from your website for more details, and what is a successful lead generation strategy. Collecting leads (subscribers) by email is a great way to keep in touch with existing and would-be customers and you can send them your discounts and special offers by email to encourage them to make future purchases.
Learn more about advertising methods online and/or begin your own online lifestyle business. Learn more here.