Okay, here goes, my first official post as a blogger!
I started this blog because at any given moment I have about a million ideas, tips, bits of advice etc. flying around my head about how to make local marketing more effective.
I'll explain...
Throughout most of my career (I am 41, in case you're wondering) I have been involved with or responsible for the marketing, promotion and or sales of whatever business employed me. Most of the products or services I worked with were targeted to a local market. So I have developed quite a few ideas and opinions about what makes for effective local marketing and what does not.
When I say "Local Marketing" I mean any marketing that is targeted toward people in a local, geographic community (a town, city or sub-region of a metro area).
A local community could be a town or city. It could be part of a city. It might be a whole county or a combination of towns, cities or counties. A "community" as I am writing about it here is a defined market area with it's own residential, commercial and community populations and these three populations tend to see a lot of each other through the course of an ordinary week.
(Okay, I'll work on a better definition, but for now that's what I'm going with!)
A local marketer would be any business or organization that seeks to serve all or part of this local community. Examples could be a church, a chiropractor, a grocery store, a restaurant, a lawyer, a realtor, a handyman or even a city or school district (you get the idea).
If you serve a local market, you need to approach your marketing in a completely different way than if you target a larger, regional or national audience. That may sound like I'm stating the obvious but I've seen plenty of marketing decisions that violated this "obvious" truth.
I have also discovered that the typical "local marketer" has barely a fraction of the resources available to him (or her) as does the larger regional and national marketers. Most small business owners or managers have very little time and energy for marketing. Their budgets are often based on what's in the checking account when the advertising salesperson walks through the door. They are so busy managing their business they don't take the time to get educated in the "hows" and "whys" of effective marketing. Or, in this case, effective LOCAL marketing.
So, what is Local Marketing? It's marketing that helps local organizations reach a local audience. Therefore what you'll see on this blog will be articles, posts, links and book reviews that help people understand and implement their local marketing better.
Please feel free to join the discussion by COMMENTING on anything you see here. Or, suggest a link, book, news item or article for me to include here. The best way to reach me is by clicking on the left side on the screen where it says CONTACT FORM.
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