I participate on an email mailing list where other Internet company owners discuss local and national marketing strategies. Sometimes there are great ideas, sometimes not so much. Recently there was a post from someone in the industry about how a good local marketing strategy should contain marketing to not-for-profits and other good-natured word of mouth efforts locally that can help your reputation.
I used to believe that, but what I found is that they really don’t work all that well.
I am CONSTANTLY called (weekly, and sometimes almost daily) to sponsor a golf tournament, a luncheon, a baseball team, and on and on. If I did ALL of them I would probably go broke. 
I’ve done those long enough that now I can honestly say that they rarely (if ever) turn into tangible sales. They do help our local image, and it does get our name recognition out there, but that again is hard to quantify into actual sales.
Do I sponsor events knowing that I will never get a return? Absolutely. Especially when the person or organization asking me for a sponsorship handout is one of my better customers. To this day we still donate over $50,000 per year in services to many organizations. Even when a service is given away for free, there are still phone calls for support, guidance, etc. So that number may actually even be higher.
But there are MANY easy things that you can do to market locally inexpensively, even if you are not an Internet company.
With that in mind, I started to draft a response to the email list so that I could provide some alternative methods for marketing locally that REALLY add value directly to the bottom line.
Here are some that are off the top of my head. I could probably come up with 50 easy.
1. Offer free trials for services/applications
2. Make it easier to switch to you, or sign up with you
3. Offer service bundles that tie in trials on more expensive services
4. Try BNI (www.bni.com) or other marketing lunch groups
5. Create a NO-RISK, time limited offer (ie “no setup until August 1st”)
6. Attend chamber of commerce mixers (we are doing two of them tonight, actually)
7. Make generic business cards for your company that don’t have a person’s name on them. Put those at car washes and bulletin boards at the Gym and the YMCA.
8. Create another business card that has a cash value towards your services. Hand it to a prospect you meet that is sitting on the fence.
9. Create a blog and have your staff post helpful articles to it (we are only just now getting around to doing one company-wide – http://blog.delaware.net/)
10. Market to your own customer databases with email newsletters
11. Use analytics to find golden pages in your sites.
12. Cross-market services from within your applications and pages.
13. Embrace HTML email instead of fighting it – make nice email signatures for your staff that have links and graphics in them.
14. Put an article on your web site explaining how to move a site to you (http://www.delaware.net/support/gettingstarted.cfm)
15. Integrate asking for referrals from your customers into your process somehow (lots of gold here)
16. Use press release web site and local newspaper forums for press releases
17. Randomly follow-up with existing customers for feedback (asking for feedback usually exposes other problems that your customer has that you can help them solve.
18. Write articles for local newspapers
Have more local marketing ideas? Reply to this post and I will publish them!
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