If you read my previous article about how to learn marketing for student and beginner, perhaps you develop start-up business now in order to learn marketing concept and test the concept in your start-up business. So, in this article I will share you how to advertise for local business. I explain only the basic and simple, may be you have known this, but if you implement it persistently with consistent monitoring and improving your strategy, you will find marketing strategy that result better achievement.

What is local business?

From businessdictionary.com definition, local business is a business that has product or service to local area or population or locally-owned business. Examples of local business are cafe, restaurant, branch of a bank to cover particular area, branch of hospital that provides health service to local or certain area, and so on.

I share advertise tips for local business because usually beginners develop a start-up from their garage, home, etc. And they usually provide product or service locally in their area. So, I hope this article help you to choose advertisement technique which is suitable for you.

Some advertisement practices you should consider for local business

You can do it in both two approaches, online and offline advertising. Because I write this article for the college student (read my previous article), I will give an example for selling a product to college student. Let we say, you are going to develop a cafe. Your target market is student. Then you build a small cafe near your campus.

You have known the step of practicing marketing knowledge, haven’t you? After defining target market and product you want to sell, you should choose one marketing strategy or tactic that is suitable for your condition. The condition includes marketing budget, dedicated time to do the marketing activity, your comprehensive understanding about marketing concept, and so forth. Afterward, you can implement the strategy, monitor it, evaluate, and make an improvement based on evaluation. For new reader in this blog, all the steps have been explained in previous article.

Here, I will give you some example:

Condition overview:

Your target market (target audience) is college student. So you build a café near college or school/university.

Sample of marketing tactics:

The first and main thing to do is inform your target audience about your existence and how you can give a value for them then make an action to attract them coming to your café. After that, you can work on sales process both pre-sales and post-sales.

Below are samples of the marketing approach:

- Create flyer/postcard/poster. 

You can test and implement your copywriting which has been learned in this stage. For attracting customer coming to your café, you should offer deals to student, such as: discount 20% if they show their student card, offer teacher or student meal special packages, etc.

Look for a contact person who responsible to manage school board magazine or bulletin board, and request him to publish your ads poster which contains your best offer.

Create a quality content, like an article and post it to campus magazine and insert your clear identity and message in your article.

- Develop digital marketing for local business.

a. Build landing page with quality copywriting. After that, join Google adwords. You must target a keyword contains your area and your product, for example: “cozy cafe near xyz school”, “familiar café in abc city”, etc.You can also do a SEO for organic search, so if people search these keywords in Google, they will find you in the first page of Google’s result.

b. Join Google service in https://www.google.com/business/

With Google My Business, you can manage your business presence in particular location or local area. Once you are verified, Google will may display your business in local search result.

c. Be active in social media.

For example: join yelp for getting review for your local business, subscribe to foursquare that provide personalized local search for its members. Encourage more people to “check-in” when they come to your cafe by offering them the best deals if they check-in at foursquare and show you about that.

d. Facebook ads.

Once you found your target audience and the demographics, you can put your advertisement on Facebook. The first step is creating Fan Page, and then developing quality content. Facebook ads can allow you to advertise only to people who are in a certain area or people who live near your cafe or live in the same city. In addition to this, you can filter to show ads only to people that fit to your target audience’s interest and background like education, gender, like a cozy cafe, and so on.

Graphic for sample strategy and ways to market your local business