When thinking about marketing strategies for your company, it is quite easy to overlook the audience you have right on your doorstep! So in this article we’re going to discuss local marketing ideas.
There is a ready-made target audience within the locality of every shop or business. And, for larger businesses with several outlets or physical premises, that means lots of different areas to target with marketing materials! Whatever the form of marketing, it pays to be consistent, so your business is constantly at the forefront of any prospective customer’s mind. Although postage costs have increased, this shouldn’t prevent businesses from being clever about marketing and local marketing ideas in 2023, i.e. targeting specific local areas with marketing collateral, as a way of building a local loyal customer base.
Aren’t local marketing ideas just for small businesses?
The answer to this question is, no, they aren’t! Local marketing ideas are useful, no matter what size of business and have been used by large chains to increase footfall in shop premises. Local coupon mailings are very effective in driving footfall to local supermarkets, for example. Sainsbury’s use the Nectar Card loyalty programme to send targeted offers within the locality of each store to get customers to visit the shop in person.
However, this doesn’t mean you have to be a big retailer with lots of resource to produce an effective local marketing campaign. Local marketing ideas can be successful for any business or brand that has a physical location, where sales mainly happen in person at their place of business, as opposed to online sales – where customers could be anywhere. Whether your business is a restaurant, hairdresser, ironmongers – any company with bricks and mortar premises can benefit from a local marketing campaign. It helps to build relationships with prospective customers within a locality.
How can businesses take advantage of local marketing ideas?
The first thing to do is to decide is how far a customer is likely to travel to visit your retail shop or business premises. How long a journey do you think they would make to buy your products or services? 5 miles? 20 miles? 30 miles? If your product or service is quite specialised, customers may travel a bit further. This will give you the geographical area you can target with local marketing activities.
Next, you need a partner like Gecko. We can help you with direct mail campaigns, digital printing, data planning and processing, postage options, and marketing services to help you optimise every touchpoint and aspect of your local marketing campaign. We can also help you with the design of your collateral if you do not have a design resource in-house. Furthermore, if you are worried about the carbon footprint of printed materials, we offer you the choice of offsetting all the carbon used to produce your marketing collateral. So, how can Gecko help your offline local marketing campaign? Contact us today to talk through all your options and find out how you can increase the footfall to your business premises via local marketing ideas throughout 2023.
What are local marketing strategies?
Here are some of the most effective local marketing techniques:
Optimise your presence online
There are several ways of doing this including:
Making sure you are listed on Google Maps
Asking for Google reviews in your after sales communications
Mentioning your location in online directories
Including your location on social media pages and in posts
Making use of local SEO throughout your website
Using landing pages to link to local promotions or collateral given or sent to customers
Most of the actions outlined above can be even more effective when linking them to local activities or promotions, which we are going to outline with the following local marketing ideas.
Get involved in your local community
Joining local community activities is a good way of raising your company profile, boosting your reputation, and making sure the name of your business is in people’s minds. There are several ways of doing this, such as:
Supporting a charity that aligns with your company beliefs
Sponsoring local sporting events or local sports’ teams
Connecting with local celebrities or spokespersons
Participating in local business networking events
Making sure you have plenty of marketing collateral to hand out at every opportunity
Looking into mutual or joint promotions with other local businesses
At Gecko, we can help you with:
General printed marketing materials to hand out at events, have as ‘leave behinds’ or to use as local door-drops, which we can also manage for you.
Any large format print via our large format and wide format printing machines, including signage, banners and large POS.
Quirky POS to hand out at events to raise awareness of your social media channels and activities
QR code panels to drive people to a website landing page (See our work for the MIND garden at the Chelsea Flow Show),
Branded selfie frames (social media frames), detailing your event and any branded hashtags
You can find out more about how offline marketing can help to drive more people to your website in our blog ‘How printed materials can drive website engagement.’
Door-drops
Another very useful local marketing idea is the door-drop, which has the advantage of not needing addresses. Instead, an agency or partner posts leaflets through letterboxes within a defined location. It is a proven method of advertising for local businesses, but chains use it too – think of Domino’s, Farm Foods, Hillary’s Blinds, etc.
Door-drops can target households in your preferred location. For example a certain mile radius of your shop/place of work. Or we can create a partially addressed mail (PAM) campaign for you.
PAM is a targeted acquisition mailing tool allows your business to see where your current customers live and targets look-alike customers in the same street. It’s GDPR compliant giving you peace of mind that you’re getting your marketing in front of new customers who match your buying customers demographic and therefore have an inclination to buy into your brand.
Gecko can create engaging on-brand printed leaflets for your local marketing campaign that are cost effective and maximise your ROI. What’s more, we can even help you to offset the carbon used producing them!
Direct mail campaigns
At Gecko, we can help you stay in front of your current customers by running regular customer direct mail campaigns. Don’t forget your current customer when running any promotions.
The Gecko Client Services Team can provide you with advice on data, strategy, design and creation, production/print, even mailing and postage services!
Our printing machines provide any number of options for personalisation across unlimited variables for your direct mail campaigns and we can enclose C6, C5, and C4 envelopes. You can add items to the pack, and we have even produced a campaign enclosing bags of seeds! There is absolutely no limit on Gecko’s capabilities for direct mail campaigns as part of your local marketing ideas.
Build local awareness
There are any number of advertising activities available for local marketing, including:
Roundabout/signpost sponsorship with the local authority
Banners and billboards on roadsides, round your local football/rugby pitch
Sponsoring local sports teams
Bus or taxi adverts
A-frame advertising near your premises
Advertising in local directories, maps, tourist information etc.
Local press releases
Printed inserts into the local press
Using some or all of the above will raise your profile and encourage word-of-mouth-marketing (WOM.) At Gecko our specialised machines can print both large and wide formats, so we can undertake all types of POS for both indoor and outdoor marketing. Talk to us today to find out how Gecko can help you bring to life your local marketing ideas.