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20 Fall Marketing Ideas That Will Get Your Business Noticed

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Sourced from Square Up

Fall is an ideal time to promote your business: people are back in town after vacation, kids are back to school, and everyone’s ready for a fresh start. Take advantage of the season’s opportunities with these marketing ideas.

1. Launch an Instagram photo contest: Invite customers to post pictures of themselves engaged in their favorite fall activities (apple picking, flag football, etc.) with a designated hashtag. Choose a winner and offer them a free gift, and re-gram the photo on your account.

2. Hold a “can-do” event: Email customers offering them a discount when they bring in canned and other nonperishable food items to donate to a local food pantry.

3. Put your name on it: Ditch the paper or plastic bags (at least temporarily) in favor of reusable shopping bags featuring your business’s name. You could also encourage customers to carry it by offering a discount when they bring it into the store.

4. Sponsor a team: Support young athletes in a way that fits with your business. For example, if you sell women’s clothing, maybe partner with a girls’ soccer team. Or if you run a restaurant, make your establishment the official pregame coffee spot for parents or postgame hangout for players.

5. Advertise on local blogs: Identify the most popular blogs in your community for news, style, food — whatever best aligns with your business — and advertise special promotions for readers. Not only are the rates less expensive, but you can more easily reach your target market.

6. Hit the festival circuit: Chances are that organizations in your area host a fall fair or Oktoberfest, so find out how to set up a booth or get involved in sponsoring the event.

7. Host a social IRL party: Invite all your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram followers to meet up in person at your store for a shopping party with special promotions and giveaways.

8. Offer an appealing deal: Entice people in by offering a discount. You can promote your sale via window signage, social media posts, or Square’s email marketing software.

9. Lend your space: Reach out to a favorite local charity, like an animal shelter, and offer them your shop for a fundraising event.

10. Celebrate new holidays: Halloween and Thanksgiving get all the glory, but you can make your business stand out with fun, social media–friendly holidays unique to your business, like a “Sweater Weather Saturday” sale or a “Pumpkin Spice Appreciation Day” event.

11. Start a deal-of-the-week email: Send targeted messages to customers with Square’s email marketing tools offering special discounts on specific items or services.

12. Team up with local businesses: Work with other neighborhood shops to pool your resources (and social media reach) to throw an autumn-themed weekend event with food, entertainment, and lots of special promotions.

13. Bring in the experts: Identify common problems among your customers (home organization, wardrobe ideas, hair updates), and designate a day to offer the expertise of your staff and outside consultants with free in-store consultations.

14. Throw a “treat yo’self” party: Email your best customers (it’s easy to identify them with Square’s tools) and invite them to a special event with complimentary manicures, chair massages, and makeup application along with cocktails and appetizers.

15. Spend now, save later: Holiday shopping season is looming, so tempt your customers with a deal: if they spend a certain amount now, they’ll get a designated amount off their purchase after Thanksgiving.

16. Get media savvy: Reach out to local TV news, radio shows, and podcasts to pitch seasonal stories that relate to your business, like fall fashion updates, seasonal recipes, and more.

17. Hire fresh talent: Need new photography, graphic design, or social media help? Reach out to local high schools, colleges, and design schools for talented young employees who can give your business a fresh perspective (and audience).

18. Donate to local auctions: Fall is a huge fundraising time for schools and charity organizations, so reach out to some of your favorites and offer goods and services for raffles and silent auctions. You’ll raise awareness about your business and be a good neighbor.

19. Host a swap party: Create a Facebook invite and ask all your fans to bring in one good-as-new item for a clothing or home goods swap and shopping party. Donate any unclaimed items to charity.

20. Get some, give some: Promote your store’s personalized Square gift cards for preholiday shopping by offering a deal for buying in multiples, like get a free $15 gift card for every $100 you spend on gift cards.

Sourced from Square Up

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Highly Effective Local Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

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By Alyssa Gregory

Using local marketing in a small business is all about targeting potential customers in your town or region with your marketing activities, through both digital marketing and traditional offline marketing tactics. Local marketing can help you focus in on a specific geographic area, and when it’s done effectively, it often translates into attracting the shoppers who are likely to become customers. The initial reason for this may be because your business is close to where they live and it’s convenient for them, but the reason they stick around is because you are offering something they really need and want.

This is why local marketing can also help you build credibility for your brand, develop a positive reputation and foster customer loyalty over time.

If you are ready to get started with local marketing, pick a few of the marketing ideas listed here and try them in your small business to see if you can grow your local customer base.

1. Focus on Local SEO

This first tactic should be considered a marathon instead of a sprint because it is not something you can do overnight. Instead, you can plant the seed for future web traffic by beginning to target keywords that are specific to your local business. For example, if you have a business named Smith Dry Cleaners in Walpack, New Jersey, you may want to develop content on your blog and website that focuses on targeting the keyword phrase: Walpack dry cleaners. This will draw in potential customers who live in your area and are searching for local dry cleaners.

2. Use Location Targeting With Adwords and Facebook

Once you have content developed that highlights your local keywords, you can get even more eyes on it by using location targeting with AdWords. This allows you to have your advertisements shown only in the locations you select, helping you focus your marketing investment on the areas where you’ll find the right local customers.

Similarly, you can use location targeting with Facebook Ads to refine your audience for your local campaigns.

3. Create Landing Pages for Each Geographic Area

It is possible to have more than one local marketing keyword that you are targeting in your business. Perhaps there are a handful of other towns in your local area, aside from the one your business is located in. This means you might have 5-6 keywords to use, each targeting a different town. One way to ensure the marketing content is relevant for potential customers in each of these towns is by creating a few different landing pages that has content specific for each location. You can use each page as the destination link for your advertisements and marketing campaigns that target each local keyword.

4. Use Yelp

Yelp is all about local marketing, so it really is a must-have if you are starting to execute local marketing campaigns. The first step is claiming your Yelp Business Page. Once you have your page claimed, you can update the contact information listed for your business, view and respond to customer reviews, post content like photos and special offers, and view your visitor activity. Yelp is often the first result that pops up when searching for local businesses on Google, whether your reviews are monitored or not.

This is why Yelp should be a piece of the marketing strategy for any local business, regardless of any other local marketing tactics you employ. Social Media Examiner has an excellent article with more tips for using Yelp to market your business that is worth checking out as you get started with Yelp.

5. Try SMS Marketing

SMS stands for short message service and refers to what we refer to as text messaging. Have you ever gotten a text message for a sale at a local retail store, or an update from your dentist that it’s time to schedule your next appointment? That’s SMS marketing. This type of local marketing is a great fit for brick-and-mortar businesses who want to ramp up store foot traffic, service businesses who schedule appointments on a daily basis, and any business owner who want to reach potential customers in real-time.

6. Sponsor Local Events

Depending on where your business is located, there may be a lot of local events every year organized and run by other local organizations. In many cases, these organizations are looking for fellow businesses to support their cause, either by teaming up to organize the event, or just by donating money in exchange for being mentioned in their program and website. Both of these options are an excellent way to get your business in front of local patrons. If your business is in a more rural location, there is no reason why you can’t expand your radius to support initiatives in neighboring towns. Reach out to other businesses and keep your eyes open for calls for support to get started.

7. Team Up With Your Neighbors

If sponsoring an event isn’t really for you, consider going smaller scale and teaming up with a neighboring business to double your reach by cross-promoting. It can be as simple as giving another store your coupons, flyers or business cards to display on their counter while you do the same for them. Or you can create co-branded deals that reward customers for making a purchase at both locations: “Buy one from us, get one half off from them.” There are a lot of ways you can team up with other local small businesses to make a big impact on your customers. Check out this list of ways to cross-promote to get your creative juices flowing.

8. Empower Your Employees to Be Marketers

Your employees can become one of your best marketing methods when you have local business. After all, they are the ones who interface with your customers day in and day out. The key to empowering your employees to be marketers is two-fold. First, they must be trained so they are fully educated about your business, your products and your goals. They can’t promote you if they don’t understand what your business is about. Second, you can encourage front-of-store employees to become salespeople by offering them incentives. Not everything has to be monetary; consider these ideas for employee incentives that won’t break the bank.

9. Join a Referral Network (Or Start Your Own)

Referral networks pass leads back and forth among businesses, and can be a perfect marketing tool for a local business. Because referral networks rely on word of mouth marketing and customer reviews, you can leverage all of the work you’re doing on Yelp and other review platforms. The value comes from leveraging existing customer relationships to expand your reach by getting your business in front of the networks of each of your customers. If there isn’t a local referral network yet, consider creating your own. Read this guide to referral marketing on Shopify to get started.

10. Pitch to Local TV News and Other Media

Local media outlets are always looking for interesting and relevant news stories to share with readers and viewers. If you have an event coming up, a new product launching, or a special in-store event in the works, your local media may be interested and want to feature your business in an upcoming story. If you can tie a business event in with a local news story or hot topic, your small business can instantly become even more relevant and interesting. Follow these tips for getting the attention of local media before you pitch your story.

Try a few of these local marketing ideas, and see what kind of results you get. When you’re ready, visit this expanded and more general list of 101 marketing ideas and add a few new tactics to your list for a well-rounded marketing campaign.

Feature Image Credit: Michael H / DigitalVision / Getty Images

By Alyssa Gregory

Sourced from the balance

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