"Local marketing keys: community involvement
"This neighborhood-first mantra suggests a heavy dose of community involvement in your local marketing efforts. For example, here are three community-related marketing strategies:
- Good grades equal good customers: contact local school principals to offer incentives of free products or services to students who achieve high grades. When someone brings in a good report card to your business, give him or her the reward.
- Surveys equal more customers: regularly check the pulse of your customers with an attitude profile survey. You’ll collect useful data, learn what they like and dislike, and demonstrate your concern for their opinions, all at the same time.
- Complaints are your best friend: nine out of ten unhappy customers never complain — at least not to you. Instead, they don’t come back and then they go tell their friends. Your business needs to invite criticism so you can address the problem and turn it around."
Read more at http://www.startupnation.com/business-articles/1133/1/AT_Go-Local-With-Marketing-Message.asp#CphFy0UfmmxBeEFT.99
Reminds me of that college computer professor with the complaint web site about a certain franchise which will remain nameless. Fantastic story. That was the class in university where I first learned how to make a simple web site. He made a complaint site about the company. They threatened him with a lawsuit to take it down. His dad was a lawyer and told him to ignore all the letters from them. Then he saw that his site was doing very well, and that the company was frequenting his site to take note of the complaints and people were reporting that their local branches of the store were actually implementing changes in response to the comments! I think in the end he took the site down but I'm not sure. This was before the advent of social networks as you can tell. It's probably funny to hear this story now considering what the internet has become since the mid-90s.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the grade-incentive thing is interesting but there is much more that can be done with that, budget-permitting. Schools put on productions and canvass for business-card type advertising in programs. Doing that is a good way to build a relationship with the community as they ask people to patronize their advertisers. Then there is sponsoring other school and community activities to get your name out, like newsletters, scholarships, etc. Corporate philanthropy is a whole topic by itself.
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