How Local Businesses Gain Strength in Numbers
From Nathan’s, Galaxy Cookies and other local businesses you can glean three proven ways to get more people to walk in the door of your business – including forging partnerships with other businesses that serve the same kind of customers that you do. In the Wall Street Journal, Maureen Scarpelli suggests that you:
1. Host a signature event at least annually.
Sponsor a contest, let people sample in new ways, get an expert to demo your product and answer questions, invite avid customers to show how they use your product – anything that gets people to interact with your product and each other. That in-person experience warms up possible customers, provides bragging rights on current customers and give people a fresh reason to buy while they are happy and at your place of business. As Scarpelli notes, Nathan’s annual Hot Dog Eating contest has become a popular tradition.
To leverage the value and visibility, find local businesses like yours in different towns and co-launch (see #2 below re power of partnering) versions of the same contest across the country. Imagine if the locally-owned grocers had launched their version of the cause campaign “Ready Set Bag.”
2. Forge partnerships with complementary (non-competing) local businesses.
See how adjacent businesses, Galaxy Cookies and Four Brother’s Pizza generate more profits for each other.
3. Join or start a grassroots business alliance.
French bistro owner Lisa Boet formed an alliance with 25 other locally-owned restaurants and dubbed it Naples Originals. Together they become a bigger magnet for local visibility and they can create a web site and collective offers. That way their promotional costs goes down as their credible contact with customers and prospects goes up. Of course, the creator of the alliance is often the go-to person to be quoted when the media seeks a story, as Scarpelli did.
Next you can boost the effectiveness of any of these three customer-attracting methods to build on our desire to buy local with the adept use of Twitter as these businesses do.
