Transcript

Hi Marie, I loved the video you did on local business marketing.

I thought your advice to the Beth, the owner of the Taste Selects cupcake bakery, was excellent.

Especially the tip about offering a free cupcake on customer’s birhtdays as a way to get them on the list!

I just wanted to give Beth a couple more no-cost or low-cost ideas for how to market her business locally.

I’m a local business owner myself – my husband and I own a martial arts school in Brooklyn, NY – and I also have a video blog about local business and local marketing at CarmenSognonvi.com.

First, a lot of neighborhoods nowadays have their own dedicated blog.

You should find the one in your town and strike up a relationship with the blogger.

Comment regularly on their blog posts, send them announcements about events and promotions you have coming up, and don’t forget to thank them every time they post about your business.

Along the same lines, a lot of neighborhoods also have email listserves (yeah remember those?) where families from those towns share resources and tips.

Join these listserves and get involved with that community.

Find out what their policies are on commercial postings.

Many lists will allow you to post a couple announcements per month – just don’t go overboard and spam everyone.

Finally, don’t underestimate the power of flyers.

I’m a big fan of rack cards, which are flyers that are printed on 4×9 card stock – kind of tall and skinny.

The great thing about these is that if you put them into a plastic holder, they don’t take up a lot of counter space, but still make a great visual impact.

You should go around to different businesses in your area and ask if it’s ok for you to leave some rack cards near their cash register, and ask if there are any flyers they’d like to display in your store.

For our martial arts school, we have our rack cards in over 100 different stores around our neighborhood, and it’s like having a hundred little billboards all over town, only we don’t have to pay for advertising space!

Also, printing is really cheap nowadays.

If you use an online printer like GotPrint.com, you can get 1000 rack cards for about 60 bucks.

And the rack cards holders are about a buck a piece.

Just make sure you or a staff member stops by each of those stores every week or two to refill the rack cards or replace them – sometimes a store manager will throw it away.

But once they realize you’re coming to check every single week, they’ll leave it alone.

Hope that helps, Beth, and please keep us posted!

If you’ve been in business for 6 straight years, that’s a sign you’re doing something right.

Get free local marketing tips from Carmen

If you found this video useful, enter your email address below and click “Yes, Send Me Tips!” to get free tips from me on how to run a successful local, bricks-and-mortar business:

Music Credit: