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Millions of words have been written about using the internet to market and brand your business, but these often seem a little inappropriate for certain small business owners. If you have a location-based business that serves a narrow geographic area, it might seem a little silly to put your name and reputation out there for people who will never get within one hundred miles of your store.
Indeed, many companies overextend their time and resources marketing themselves on the internet with no success. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. A new crop of web applications make it easy to find and reach customers in your own neighborhood. Here are a few of these useful web tools.
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MeetUp.
MeetUp is specifically designed to bring the internet into local lives, so it is an ideal tool for small businesses looking for a way to ‘meet up’ with local customers. If you buy a membership at less than one hundred dollars per year, you can organize a Meetup on the topic of your choice. People in your area who select this interest when they join the website will then receive information and emails with information about your group and its events. Because Meetup is relatively new, you can hold a virtual monopoly in your topic within your geographical area. However, it is not so new that you won’t find interested customers; the website currently has half a million new users every month.
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Twitter Search.
If you haven’t used Twitter Search, you are in a dwindling minority. This search engine is the second most used search engine on the web. However, most of these users don’t notice or use the Advanced search option. This option will allow you to select and search tweets in your area from people using terms related to your business, identifying potential customers in one easy search.
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FourSquare.
FourSquare may be viewed as a game, but it is one with growing popularity and a huge presence in local markets. Players visit local businesses and use their cell phone to “check in”. The player who checks in the most at a location is named the Mayor. While it seems like a simple and not exactly entertaining premise, more and more businesses are catering to players simply because they comprise such a quickly growing group. Best of all, you can see who is checking in at other local stores, giving you access to your competitor’s potential customers. If you reach out to these people, you just may tap into a whole new customer base. Even if you don’t follow the game that closely, you can offer incentives and special deals to FourSquare users, who tend to be users of other social networking sites as well.
There are good reasons to market your business on the internet, one major one being the hundreds of millions of people using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. These tools make it easier than ever to sift through these people and reach out directly to the ones that matter, increasing the return on your investment in internet marketing. You may not be able to outspend the big guys, but you can reach out to them in a way that is all your own.
