If you want your local business to survive then it’s vital that you adapt to modern marketing techniques. If you are seeing a decline in sales, then now is the time for you to mix up your strategy overall.

Sure, your business might be profitable right now, but you do need to stay ahead of your competition if you want to be successful in the future. If you want to help yourself here, then you need to analyse the marketing trends while also recognising buying behaviour.

It’s important that you learn how to make more money from the customers you have right now. Studies have shown that only 33% of businesses are able to reach the 10-year mark. If you don’t want to become another statistic then you can find out what you need to know, right here.

Set up a Free Listing

Think about it, how are your customers finding you right now? If you are old school then you may be relying on word of mouth, print advertisements, direct mailing and more. This is fine, but 97% of customers are now using the internet to try and find local businesses.

Positive online reviews can also encourage your customers to find your business as well, so you have to keep this in mind as much as you can. When people use the internet to try and search for something, they usually start with Google.

Setting up your free Google listing will make it very easy for consumers to find you whenever they search for terms that relate to your business. When you create your listing, you have to make sure that you include your hours, directions, a link to your site and your address too.

When you create a profile, you can also add photos as this will give your customers a much better understanding of the way that you operate in general. The great thing about this is that customers can add photos and they can also post reviews about your business so that other people can see them.

Your star rating is quite possibly going to be one of the defining factors when it comes to your customers rating your business, so make sure that yours is as high as it can be and that you also address any customer concerns where possible.

Blog When you Can

Consumers are always using the internet to try and find local businesses. This means that you have to understand the basic principles of SEO as this will help you to get ranked with ease. 47% of clicks end up going to the top three positions of Google and if you blog, then this will help your SEO strategy to no end.

After all, small businesses who have a blog end up experiencing 55% more traffic, and all of this can easily lead to increased profit. Publishing new blog posts also means that your site will be updated with fresh content and this will boost your search ranking even more.

Join a Group

Local businesses have to stay active when it comes to their local community. If you want to do this then it helps to join a local group, that involves both residents and business owners. This will expose your brand to other businesses, and it will also help you to really get involved.

For example, if you make t-shirts for a living then you may find that your local sports team have a big event coming up. A fantastic way for you to get involved with this would be for you to provide the team with free t-shirts to mark the big game.

Little things like this can help you to put your business on the map and you will be helping a good local cause as well.

Give Back

If you are charitable then you can’t be shy about your involvement. Your consumers want to know and hear about your local business and they also want to help your cause too. Research has shown time and time again that 90% of customers want to know if their company is supporting a charitable cause. 

91% of customers would be willing to swap brands if it meant that they were able to support a charitable cause. 85% of customers would have a way more positive image of a business if you did support a charity as well, so it’s a worthwhile investment that is not worth overlooking.

If you want to help yourself here, then you might want to ask your community or even your customers which charities they think you should support. 39% of people would want to help decide the charity via a voting system so if you are able to embrace this then it can really work in your favour.

You should note that charitable work doesn’t always mean donating money. You can help out in other ways if you want, for example, if you own a local restaurant then it’s possible that you can provide food for local high schools and graduation events.

The best thing about this type of charity work is that it keeps students safe and sober on graduation night, as they will be in your restaurant and catered by your staff for free. If you want to promote your business locally then having a company car can also help you out, along with cherished number plates.

Contests

Contests are another fantastic way for you to try and get people excited about what your local business has to offer. The best and easiest way for you to run contests would be for you to do it through an online platform.

Leverage your social media pages and also make sure that you run contests that involve user-created content. For example, you could ask your customers to share photos of your business that they have taken. When they do, you can then give a reward based on the amount of likes or shares they get.

The idea of this is to grow your social media following, but at the end of the day, you can also increase your exposure and the chances of staying up to date with your business.

Customer Loyalty

If you are trying to find a fast way to increase sales, then the best thing that you can really do is create your own customer loyalty program. The benefit of doing this is that you can easily make more money without having to get new customers.

Your focus will be more on trying to get the customers you have right now to spend more money. The great thing about a customer loyalty program is that it can help you to increase the frequency of your customer purchases and it can also increase the amount that your customers purchase as well.

If you are able to accomplish these two factors, then you will soon find that you are able to drive growth much more and that you are also able to generate much more profit as a result. Studies have shown that 82% of customers are much more likely to shop at stores which have their own loyalty program.

You really don’t have to do anything complicated here, in fact, your loyalty program can be something as simple as a punch card. When your customer visits or purchases from you, they can then get a reward, and this will help you to really connect with your customers.

If you want to set up something a little more in-depth then you may want to reward your highest-spending customers instead. Either way, you can easily connect with them on a higher level when you take the time to reward them.