How To Best Utilize Local Store Marketing

Learning how to best utilize Local Store Marketing is an important initiative for individual businesses and franchises. Local Store Marketing, also known as local marketing or neighbourhood marketing, is a marketing tactic that focuses on targeting consumers and customers around a certain radius of the physical location of a business. Its main purpose is to focus on marketing to drive sales and build customer bases locally and organically. Local Store Marketing can help you connect and build with your customer base in your surrounding localized area, identify approximate niches, potential opportunities and provide you with insights into the demographics of your community.

Local Store Marketing is cost-effective and usually quite fun and rewarding, as well. Local Store Marketing allows business owners and operators to be inclusive of those in their communities, gets staff and customers more involved within the brand, and has the ability to stretch your marketing budget further. If you have a brick-and-mortar store for your business, Local Store Marketing can help launch you further and create more foot traffic, which can help garner more sales.

Below you’ll find a few tactics that will guide you through How To Best Utilize Local Store Marketing for your advantage.

Local Store Marketing Strategies

To start utilizing Local Store Marketing, you first need to define your angle and strategy for your business. You need to start by determining your customer profiles, demographics, and capture guest information.

Ask Important Questions

Methods to do this include asking important questions that pertain to the operations within your business, and what information you are looking to capture while thinking about the end goal. Some types of anonymous questions you may ask your customer base are:

• What’s the demographic and psychographic profile of the population?
• What do people in the neighbourhood like to do?
• Are there any trends that are popular with the community?
• How much do they make per year?
• How much are they willing to spend on yours, or any given equals, products or services (daily, weekly, monthly or yearly)
• What is their age range?
• Do they live in the neighbourhood?

One of the main purposes of collecting this information, besides getting to know your community, is to encourage new customers to become more involved, and ensuring returning customers come back.

Conduct a Trade Area Analysis

A trade area analysis is a typical marketing tactic in which you map existing customers or existing businesses in relation to your store’s location or proximity within the community. This helps with calculating distance or drive times from customers’ homes or places of work, to your store location and helps you with determining the why for variables like geographic location, market penetration, competitive threats and relevance in your trade area that may impact your sales.

Local Store Techniques

You can ask these questions in person, or through a quick questionnaire on SurveyMonkey, TypeForm, etc. The answers to these questions will help you better define demographics within your business, and you can use the data and analytics of these findings to substantiate your marketing initiatives in and out of the store. With this information you can create specific campaigns or initiatives that appeal and involve your local community, creating a stronger customer base. You can use many different techniques and services to help elevate your brand and ensuring your local neighbours, or passers-by can find and engage with your business, some of those include Google Local & Google My Business (GMB), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and of course, Social Media.

Marketing Deployment

There are many deployment strategies when it comes to Local Store Marketing, many of which are quite cost-effective. These can be cascaded and executed from a corporate entity or can be created and launched in-store. The types of marketing initiatives you choose to use will be dependant on your customer base and the information you’ve collected. Some examples of initiatives would be:

• Bounce-back coupons
• Discount coupons for purchases made before or after certain times
• Loyalty or points cards
• Direct Mailers
• Hosting events within your business – creating community awareness
• Product upselling
• Analyzing peak time traffic patterns – foot traffic, drive traffic, above traffic, below traffic
• Educating customers on current promotions
• Seasonal displays – seasonal themed encouraging purchasing or offering discounts during that time
• Local neighbourhood discount (ie. 10% off)
• Influencer Marketing or campaigns
• In-store sampling
• Promotional in-store signage/ signage at point-of-purchase
• Experiential/Street Marketing (ie. coupon handouts, free samples, free swag)>
• Promotional digital menu boards
• Teaming up with other business owners
• Collecting emails at point-of-purchase

Embrace your research and get to know your target market. This will help you make a plan and carefully help you determine your objectives and tactics.

Content Visibility

Brand Awareness has much to do with visibility and exposure. Creating visibility within your community helps to grow your business, which equates to growing your sales. Growing your business larger also helps with ensuring you are the leader in that business sector and people think of your business as having the integrity to substantiate your brand as the authority.

Have you connected enough with your community to best utilize Local Store Marketing?

Utilizing Local Store Marketing has amazing benefits and really creates a sense of respect within communities across the board. Patrons that are neighbours or regulars usually feel connected and loyal to their neighbourhoods and geographical location, therefore making them want to stay in the area and support local businesses as much as possible. Using these specific marketing tactics can help you create fantastic brand awareness, which will increase your chances of taking your small business to the big leagues.

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