During the difficult times of Covid 19 and the immediate aftermath, retailers and local businesses are facing difficulties of decreasing footfall, which may severely impact their bottom line. In this article, I will suggest some ideas for you to attract more prospective customers to your shop in 2022. These tried-and-test five marketing tips have helped many local businesses like yourself to overcome similar challenges; however, I will also outline the pros and cons to each marketing tips as well for you to consider.

1. Price Discounts

Price discounts are a popular method to attract customers among local shops. Local retailers like yourself can reduce the price to attract customers to pay for a new product in your shop. Besides the fact that this marketing tactic requires no upfront costs, such discounts are useful because it plays on customer psychology, which encourages impulse buys. However, you may consider the risks of devaluing your brand from discount code. This is because your consumers may rely on, and expect huge discounts from your shop even during non-discounting seasons.

2. Loyalty cards

Retailers use customer loyalty arrangements to record how many purchases and how much a customer has bought to reward them . This method is excellent because it incentivises your existing customers buy more to get the reward. Bigger companies often offer the loyalty scheme instead of physical cards to measure the loyalty of each consumer type. With such individual record, each customer can be offered different, tailored benefits. This also gamify the loyalty rewards as customers try buy more to upgrade their benefit levels. Small businesses, on the other hand, usually use printed or stamped cards to encourage more repeated purchases. Such local, small businesses frequently struggle to monitor customer loyalty because printed cards don’t offer a digital track record and are easily lost by consumers. Fortunately, SAPI can offer such digital track record at no costs to you.

3. Participating in a local market or special event

For small shops, participating in local exhibitions or local market is an opportunity to market their products to people in the same area. The local market offers a chance to connect with local customers to promote their products in person. After these events, customers will know more about the personal story of your local shops and likely to recommend to their friends, which bring even more customers to your business. On the other hand, it may be expensive to attend such events. You potentially may even not get any desired results. Some customers may attend these expos or local events only as a way to get special promotions. These are some risk factors to consider about your local trade fairs.

4. Engaging with local community

Engaging with local community can bring about several positive outcomes for your small businesses. When you do something to support their community, it creates a positive pay-it-forward atmosphere which lead more customers to your shop. Many small businesses had created such great impressions when they gave NHS and key workers discounts throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. A positive message has been spread by this form of generous community support, giving the community a sense of duty and willingness to support small businesses during this challenging period. To make this method even more effective, you may also want to consider publicising these activities on social media.

5. Engaging with the locals on social media platforms

Due to the current restrictions, people are online shoppers more of their time than going outside. Therefore, online presence by social media platforms is a must-do activity. You can use social media channels to promote your new products or to keep potential customers updated with any business news. In this way, customer can keep in contact with your social channels, even when they are not able to come over your physical stores. While some may believe that digital marketing is cheaper compared to traditional marketing channels such as radio ads or billboards, this approach might be challenging and expensive for you to run when you do not have the in-house expertise to run social media advertisings. That is the reason why most local shops resource to marketing agencies to perform social media advertising for them, which may be a consideration for you.

6. Using SAPI

SAPI offers small local businesses who are looking for revenue-based financing like you get more customers via our loan program. Click here to learn more about how SAPI could help you.