Your Local Marketing Hub
Your local marketing hub, is the core activity around which your marketing activities circulate. It is the main thing you do well that other marketing activities feed into.
It is true national or global marketers can make choices about their marketing strategies. However, alternatives to using the Internet, such as advertising through television or hoardings, conferences, etc can be very expensive. So, in practice the small non-local marketer has online approaches available and little else. Online marketing’s dynamic is different and so I will cover online marketing hubs in a future post.
There are many approaches available to local marketers and they can easily fall into two mistakes. One is to take on too much, to attempt several approaches to marketing and not specialise in one. The other is to be unaware of the possibilities and so overlook the best focus for their marketing strategy.
Choosing Your Hub
Usually organisations choose one main marketing activity as their hub. They are likely to have secondary activities that feeds into the hub. For local marketing, online activities usually take on this secondary role.
It is worth being aware of these possibilities because marketing strategies evolve. Some activities naturally grow out of other activities and so awareness of the possibilities allows movement to new strategies as the older ones open new possibilities.
The first step is to name your local marketing hub. Below I list some possibilities, which will help identifying existing methods and possibilities. It is likely I’ve missed some. People have been marketing locally from long before the Internet. Most traditional methods still work, when applied appropriately. Some benefit from online support.
Sometimes local businesses and organisations make the mistake of dashing for a website as a fix for their marketing issues. They do not look at their marketing hub and ask whether there is any value in
- replacing it with a website that might be a distraction,
- supporting it with a website designed for that purpose, or
- focusing solely on their marketing hub because they do not need online support.
Identifying your hub does not commit you to it forever. It tells you what your present primary focus is and from there you can develop a marketing strategy. Your strategy may include improving your performance using your current hub or it may include development into a new hub.
Shops and Market Stalls
For traders one of these is likely to be your marketing hub. Traditional approaches such as window dressing, special offers, etc, to draw people into your shop may be all you need. I know one shop in the city centre that employs a barker, an activity usually associated with market stalls!
Online support for a shop might build an email list for customers. Occasional emails detailing special offers or new lines may be beneficial.
Community Buildings
It depends on their use. Some community buildings simply hire out rooms. They will advertise locally but perhaps mainly promote their offers through people who use the building.
Some community projects put on events and these can be a sound basis for marketing. There may be plenty of opportunities to promote other events when someone books or attends an event.
Another use, which can work in shops, is an unstructured meeting place. A coffee shop, for example, could publicise other activities or products through notice boards or table-top leaflets. In less formal environments, make announcements or use stalls to promote offers.
Local Media
This is unlikely to be the hub of your marketing campaign because getting into local media at all, let alone regularly, is not easy. Local media may in its search for copy, approach a business. The problem is a good article will appear in one edition and then it needs to be read, remembered and stored for reference if someone is likely to use it.
Some businesses such as restaurants display reviews in their windows and so can benefit from a positive review for some time. Some papers put articles on their website and you can link to them from your website. But these are minor ways to gain some extra support from a fortuitous piece of good publicity.
Advertising is another possibility but it is likely to be expensive.
Flyers, Business Cards, Etc
These may be effective and certainly many organisations use them. They can be left on your premises, so that people take them as an aide memoire or to give to friends. They can be handed out on the street or put through letter boxes. You may be able to enhance their effectiveness with a link to a good website and so they can be used to grow your email list.
Referral Marketing
Informally, this is sometimes called networking. It is particularly effective for business to business (B2B) marketing. Networking is only one part of the approach. To do it properly you need to bring together several techniques, eg an elevator pitch and one-to-one meetings. The idea is businesses agree to refer potential customers to one another.
Look at it this way. You enter a room where there are 10 business people. Whilst none of them may be interested in your offer, they will each know perhaps 300 people. This means there are potentially 3000 people in the room!
Also, if you can meet regularly with those 10 people, they will understand your business and so act as unpaid marketers for you. In your elevator pitch you need to be clear about who your market is and what you offer them.
Presentations
Here you present an interesting topic to a group of people who are likely to be in your market and encourage them to talk with you if they are interested. You must not use the presentation to directly promote your business. It is an opportunity to prove your command of your subject and enthuse your audience.
The hardest part of this approach is finding audiences prepared to hear your talk. So, this may be an approach to combine with referral marketing. It might start as a secondary marketing activity and as your reputation grows and you find more opportunities, it could become your main activity.
Other Local Approaches
There are other specialist approaches suited to some businesses. Many can grow out of building alliances with other businesses and then working together to promote offers.
Online Approaches
I shall consider these in a future post.
Are you aware of any local marketing approaches I’ve missed? If so, leave them in a comment. I’d be happy to research any approach and write a post about it – just let me know what interests you.