60+ Unique Ideas for Marketing Your Business Offline & Locally (Contd...)

Utilize Friendship Marketing

Find local businesses and co-market each other’s business. The idea is to include each others’ promotional material in outbound orders, such as flyers, coupons, business cards, or freebies. One site to help you find sites interested in such partnerships is Mom Packâ„¢ . However, if you want to use friendship marketing locally, you will most likely have to mail, phone, or visit potential marketing partners to create the partnership.

Another idea for friendship marketing would be to offer customer referrals in exchange for displaying your business cards. An example of a situation where this would work is with a graphic designer offering to sending all of their customers to a specific printing company in exchange for that printing company displaying that designer’s business cards. It is a win - win situation for both parties.

Research Local Businesses

It is important to focus your energy on where there is likely to be a need for your services. One way to find out which local business that you should focus your energy on, you will need to research. Uncovering a business opportunity often times requires broadening the range of your skills and services. Since you are targeting all sorts of different businesses you will often need to learn about different industries in order to be useful. You might find that you want to focus on one industry, for example, only targeting restaurants. For example, if you are a graphic designer and you wanted to target restaurants, you could create sample online menus, downloadable coupons, reservations, take out orders, and any other innovative ideas to draw in the prospect’s interest. In fact, imagination and creativity are your keys to success.

Excellent tools for researching local businesses are :

     1. Yellow Pages

     2. Chamber of Commerce

     3. Better Business Bureau

     4. Department of Small Business Development

     5. Trade Associations

     6. Search Engines

     7. Purchased Lists

Use Your Car as a Moving Advertisement

We have all seen the cars driving by with company names and contact information printed all over them. This is nothing new, plumbers and electricians have been doing it as long as I have been alive. There is no reason why you can’t employ this same tactic. You can either go the expensive route and have your company information imprinted on your car or you can go the inexpensive route and get a professionally printed magnet to stick on your car.

These magnets come in pretty large sizes and run about $35 to buy one.