We’re all using the same marketing theme this year: Shift Your Shopping. When we work together to spread the word, we’ll multiply how many customers we reach.
This week, we’re going to shine a spotlight on another local business near you. You can do this on Facebook or Instagram, or on your store’s own website.
Pick a great local business. You can choose a friend and fellow store owner you know well and want to feature. Or you can reach out to a store you really don’t know much about and get to know them better. Hey, you could even do both.
Stop in during their regular business hours. Look around. Ask them a few questions. You need to be able to write at least three sentences about why they are a great store and how they make the community stronger.
Shoot a photo of at least one gift item they are selling and maybe a photo showing how cute their store is.
Tell them you’ll be sharing it online. Tell them what you local hashtag is or #ShiftYourShopping so they can look for it.
Now, post your mini-story online. Include the photos, tell your three sentence story, and include the hashtag #ShiftYourShopping. Tag the business by name so they’ll be notified about it.
While you’re online, look up your fellow local stores. See if they have posted their mini-stories yet. When you find them, like and share them!
Next week, we’ll talk more about your community at large, and look at what some other communities are doing.
Shift Your Shopping is our group theme for holiday marketing this year. You have my permission to forward these articles to your local retailers, merchants association, chamber of commerce, downtown development group or any one else you think would benefit from them. All you need to do is list the author as Becky McCray of SmallBizSurvival.com and then let me know who you are sharing with.
Shift Your Shopping 2015 series:
- Picking your Holiday 2015 marketing theme
- Set your cover photos
- Spotlight a local business
- Spotlight on community
- Share the causes you care about
- Support your service providers
- Small Business Saturday
- Tell your founding story
- Zoom Towns: attracting and supporting remote workers in rural small towns - December 10, 2020
- In an economic crisis, spend your brainpower before your dollars - November 25, 2020
- Video: How to fill empty car dealership buildings for the holidays - November 6, 2020
- How has 2020 changed the challenges rural small towns face? Tell us here - October 20, 2020
- The Idea Friendly Method to surviving a business crisis - October 6, 2020
- Join me for the Rural Renewal Symposium online Oct 13 - September 26, 2020
- Cheap placemaking idea: instant murals - September 11, 2020
- Refilling the rural business pipeline - July 7, 2020
- Huge vacant buildings: grants to renovate? - June 9, 2020
- Economic self defense for small towns - June 7, 2020
[…] can improve your local business climate by promoting another local small business. The promotion requires only a few minutes of your time and a photograph you take and posted to […]