Every business needs to be able to market itself – you might argue that every person needs to market themselves, to a certain extent, but that’s a philosophical debate for another time. For now, let’s think about how small business marketing differs from marketing for larger businesses, and how small businesses (be they B2B or B2C) can market themselves effectively in Calgary.
Under the Influence
Marketing is all about influence. Influence is kind of a tricky thing to define – it is, by its very nature, an intangible thing. You might think of influence as a type of strength or power, and there are a myriad of factors that can affect how much influence you have.
Large multinational corporations can literally buy influence – through marketing, lobbying, or other means. Directing all of that strength in an effort to affect the behaviours of a small number of buyers would be wasteful, like using dynamite to dig a flower bed. As such, they direct their efforts at wide-scale ad buys to not just influence behaviours, but attitudes. When you buy Prada, you’re not just buying a handbag – you’re buying a lifestyle.
You may not have dynamite, but there’s something to be said for carefully digging flower beds – you’ll create a space where some beautiful things can grow. Small businesses can leverage their much deeper understanding of their communities – multinationals don’t have the resources or the local presence to truly understand a hyper localized market.
For you, that means you should be focused on influencing behaviours, not attitudes. Barring some exceptions, you won’t be trying to create a lifestyle – showing your community that buying from you is a good choice will suffice. That means you can accelerate your growth by participating in local charity events, showing up at trade shows, and generally being involved in your community.
Marketing in Calgary
Any time you’re trying to market in a given region, it helps to take into consideration some facts about demographics and how the region is split up. For Calgary, there are quite a few things to consider. The population growth of the city is staggering, with double-digit growth over four year periods for the past two decades – quite high compared to most cities in Canada.
You’ll also want to consider the City of Calgary versus the Calgary region. People from Airdrie may be much more willing to drive to Coventry Hills than they are to Lake Bonavista.
What can we glean from demographic data? First, we can consider that Calgary is a very big city – you’re probably going to be better off targeting your marketing to specific neighbourhoods than to the whole city. Second, we can look at how population growth affects where to market. There are a lot of newcomers in any given year to Calgary, and newcomers aren’t often tapped into some traditional advertising mediums, like television and radio.
Digital Love & SEO
Online marketing is the way to go. You can have all kinds of other tactics and tools in your marketing arsenal, but if you’re not online, you’re missing out on huge opportunities.
To increase your local influence, make sure you have social media pages that are posting on a regular basis. You should also join local buy/sell/trade groups, general neighbourhood groups, and local groups dedicated to your trade. Don’t post just to advertise on these all the time – try to help people where you can. That’s great advertising in and of itself.
You absolutely need an online store, whether it’s for people to book your services or for product delivery/pick-up. There are so many advantages to online stores that it would be impossible to list them all here. You gather data through user accounts and their cart sizes. You give people a new way to interact with you and pay for the stuff you sell. You make things more convenient for your clients. You get incredible branding opportunities. The list goes on.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention SEO as a great tool for small businesses. That local presence we brought up? Absolutely essential for search engine optimization. Google and the other engines really like it when you have localized content that is industry-relevant. It helps them decide what to show to users when they search for terms like “plumber near me”. That gives you an advantage over larger corporations that may not have content that’s as specialized and localized.
Online content creation and search engine optimization will also cost you a lot less than a traditional advertising scheme. What’s more, newcomers may not use TV and radio, but they’ll definitely use Google. That gives you an opportunity to win them over when they first arrive in Calgary, which could mean gaining a customer for life.
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