Marketing for local businesses no-nonsense advice, personal experiences and lessons learnt

About me

Let’s start with a confession.  I owned a local business not too long ago.  It was a bar and restaurant in a reasonably large and affluent suburban town. It was fun and we had some success.  But it could have been better, a lot better.  

 I’m in my mid-thirties, married with a toddler and live in a leafy town in Surrey.  Am I claiming to be a guru in local marketing?  I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not I’m an expert, but I can promise you one thing.  In the years that my wife and I owned and ran our local business, we tried most things you can think of to grow our business.  We were constantly striving to increase loyalty, find new customers, increase spend and generally make more money.

Along the way, I learnt a great deal about what works and what doesn’t.  Having come from a corporate, big business background, I also learnt that the rules are different for local marketing.  The main reasons are:

• You have a small budget
• You are usually only interested in the people in your local area
• Taking your budget into account, you have very few cost-effective options

Do you want to know the most important thing that I learnt?  As someone who owns or runs a local business, when you get the marketing wrong, it is painful.  I know precisely how it feels to stare at blank pages in a reservations book or gaze longingly at your phone, willing it to ring.  If you run a local business, you probably know exactly what I mean and you will know too well how gut wrenching it can be.

And this leads to a much happier point.  Getting your local marketing right can actually improve your life immeasurably. Not only will it make you more money, it will make your everyday life happier by ridding you of those nausea-inducing feelings you get when you know that things are not going well.  This, in a nutshell, is why it should be at the top of your list of priorities.

Having started with a confession, I’m also going to end with one.  After selling my bar and restaurant, I went to work for a technology company where I built a new business for them from scratch – an online marketing business. It was during that process that I realised how my life as a local business owner could have been so much easier. Soon afterwards, I left that technology company to set up my own business yet again. 

This time, I was determined to build a company that could help local businesses – bars, restaurants, salons, retailers of various kinds, plumbers and many more.  It could help them to improve their lives by taking the stress out of local marketing.  That business is called Sendster and it is 100% focussed on helping local businesses to promote themselves in their area.  You can check it out at www.sendster.co.uk. 

Or just stay here on my blog and learn from the many mistakes I made when marketing my own local business!  

Carlo Platia
carlo@sendster.co.uk