How to Connect Locally

Successful businesses invest in their communities. This is true of both big and small businesses. The more a business can give to a community, the more the community will give to the business.
This relationship plays most true with respect to word-of-mouth. Locals can often be the best (or worst!) form of business advertising: it’s both cheap and powerful. Today’s post, therefore, is about leveraging the most you can out of local connections. As you will see, a business can achieve excellent marketing ROI with some inexpensive yet important local initiatives.

Before jumping into how to get the most out of your local community, please note that some small business models do not rely on local contacts, connections and customers. That said, even the most virtual business models can still gain from keeping close ties with the local community. Locals can serve on focus groups, help you advertise, or even become clients in an ideal world. This makes local connections important for any business.

So whether or not your business relies on local traffic, here are three ways to get the most out of your local connections:

1) Dialogue with Your Customers: Simply listening to your customer can go a long way. Many business owners cringe when one of their customers says, “You know what you should do…” Sure, everyone has an opinion and few know exactly how to run your business, but listening is more than just hearing new ideas. Listening allows a business owner to plug into the community. Listening enables a business owner to really tap into needs. Most importantly, listening allows the customer to feel comfortable. A comfortable customer is a happy customer and a happy customer returns with friends.

2) Partner with your customers: Businesses that succeed are able to partner with their customers. Partnerships can take on many forms. A rewards program, for example, is essentially a partnership program. If you can give your best customers something in return, they are more like partners and less like customers. Another successful partnership platform is to let the customers drive more of their experience. At Southwest, customers make their own reservations, check in on their own and manage their own accounts. Southwest saves on labor but more important, the customers are more engaged since they are, in effect, employees or partners.

Another way to make partnerships successful is to simply ask for it. Take your best customers and ask them to partner with you on your marketing. Get them to provide testimonials (very powerful) which you can then use on your marketing collateral. Even better, have them post reviews online on popular sites like Yelp or Citysearch. These online recommendations pop up in search engines and are extremely effective. Or get your best advocates to create a video and post it on You Tube. However, you sould be careful with this approach: choose only the best customers that you know would represent and communicate your brand just as you would wish.

3) Give to Local Associations: Notice I did not say “join” local associations. I frequently hear from clients “I no longer am a member of the local Chamber because I didn’t get any business out of it.” My first response to this statement is always, “Well, what did you give?” They invariable say “not much.” Simply joining a Chamber of Commerce or another local business association will not bring more business to you. To leverage the local contacts, you need to GIVE to those associations. Serve on the membership committee, sign up to host an event, write an article for their publication and generally do more than just attend. Attendance is not even half the battle. For maximum effectiveness, it’s all about participation.

Connect locally, even if your business is not completely reliant on local traffic. Develop local relationships and your marketing will succeed.