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If you have recently set up, or are running an independent business, you may find it difficult to break into the industry fully and see your profit rising without first attracting loyal customers from the community around you. When it comes to being independent, you really do rely on your customers for your success, so it is important to focus on your reach from the get-go. Below are some tips on how you can best heighten your presence in your local area and begin to grow in popularity and success.                                      

Get Out In The Community

Make a real effort to get out in your local community and talk to people about your brand and the products you offer. In such a commercialised, corporate world, potential customers are very much drawn to independents who need their support to stay afloat. Putting a face to the social media and marketing campaign will only work in your favour. Customers like to know they are valued, so explaining how their support will help you in the industry and listening to their advice and constructive criticism will help to show you are driven to succeed and care about your customers and their needs. There may also be a gap in the market which customers are aware of that you were not, and you could potentially fill that gap with your business if you have the means.

Team Up With Other Local Businesses

Although you may be in competition with other businesses in your area, it is a good idea to make yourself known as an ally to the other independent businesses near you. The owners will not only be able to give you some advice to have a successful startup and launch, but also recommend you to their customers if you do the same for them. Teaming up will also be beneficial as you can run independent nights, or group discounts that run across all the stores, to entice customers into shopping independently. You have to give your customers a reason to shop with you rather than with a competing business chain.  

Cater Your Marketing To Your Community

When it comes to marketing your business, you will already have a well thought out campaign in place for the online side of your business that heightens your local SEO campaigns. However, if you have expanded to a local store, it is important to make potential customers aware that your shop is there. Simply taking a few hours a day in the week leading up to your opening to give out flyers and put up posters will get people talking about it, and word of mouth will do a lot of the legwork for you. You could also plan a launch evening for your business with a free glass of prosecco and a percentage off everything in store to get people through the door and experiencing why your business is better than your competitors. Taking down email addresses of everyone that turns up and signing them up to a loyalty scheme, or fortnightly newsletter, will mean you can keep in contact with your customers and keep them up to date with new product releases and sales.

Hopefully, this has given you some food for thought on how you can grow your presence in your local community, and continue to strive for the success your hard work deserves.

There was once a time where social media was considered to only be a temporary blip on the business horizon. As with crimping hair, it was seen as a fad, not to be taken seriously and really, just something for kids. Businesses couldn’t see how they could benefit from social media websites full of opinion and pictures of people’s dinner. Oh, how the sceptics have eaten their words over and over again. For every new social media app or website that crops up, businesses benefit. They’ve become the best way to help businesses to contact their customers for free – mostly – and businesses are finally waking up to how social media could change things for them.

It doesn’t take an IT support company to make you see the light about how social media could help your business, but it does take a good support company to help you harness the power of social media, so your business can benefit. Social media is the one thing that can generate massive amounts of data so that you can learn exactly what your customers are looking for from you. If your company is willing to engage every single day with your social media sites, and listen carefully to what people want from you, then your business is going to benefit massively. Gauging what the customers want is how you are going to learn how to do more for them, and social media can give you that.

While you’re online and setting up your own social media sites for your company, think about the increase in brand awareness and loyalty that you are creating. You want to make it easy for people to connect with you, and if you do this you can increase brand awareness and loyalty to your brand. Social media allows you to be in the faces of the customers who click through to your website to see what it is you can do for them, and if you make a point of interacting with people on social media, they can be secure in the knowledge that you are a company that actually cares. You can provide a proper, rich customer service simply by being online and being present for your customers. If you aren’t on social media, you are missing out on customer expectations of you and you are losing customers by staying offline. People want a fast response and they want to access that response every hour of the day. If you are a company that will deliver that, you will win over your competitors every day of the week.

Social media can have a hugely positive impact on your business, and with social media monitoring happening regularly, you can see what your competitors are up to and while you don’t want to copy what they’re doing, you can learn how they are successful over you and adapt accordingly. Sharing your content is far easier with social media backing you up – so don’t miss out. Let social media be your business hero!