Your local area has a customer base that wants to support your business—you just need to reach them. Connect with nearby prospects and customers in a unique and personal way by using SMS marketing. 

The Community app lets people subscribe to your audience so you can engage in real conversations with each one of them. Let customers and potential customers get to know you and the vision behind your business by connecting with them directly, at scale. 

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Promote Your Number to Grow Your Local Audience

The first step to reaching your local customer base is to promote your Community text number. Any business or individual can sign up with Community to get their very own number and instantly start promoting it to their prospective audience. 

Potential members will simply text that number or click on your custom sign-up URL to be added to your audience. Your Community custom URL makes it easy to promote your number anywhere that links can be embedded. Use your URL to add a clickable Sign-Up button on your business’s website, or you can even add it as a Swipe Uplink in your Instagram stories. 

Promote your phone number anywhere and everywhere you can—on your social media profiles, your website, your storefront signage, and even on your receipts.  Don’t leave any cracks for potential customers to slip through, capture as many as you can by making it easy for them to join your SMS marketing audience and stay connected to your company. 

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Target SMS Subscribers by Location

Once members sign up to join your audience, you can filter and organize them based on their location. Community’s Location Filter makes it quick and convenient to sort members within your app. Reach the customer base in your nearby area by sending messages specifically to your audience in a designated radius. The Filters feature also lets you sort by age, gender, and other characteristics to target specific content to the segments that would find it the most relevant and interact with them at scale.  

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Stay Connected with Nearby Customers

The longevity of any business comes down to the strength of its connection with its consumers. Using Community lets you keep the conversation going with your local customer base so you can increase their familiarity and, ultimately, their loyalty to your brand.

Although your account uses the Community app to send texts as a Leader, your recipients will receive your messages as regular SMS notifications. You’ll be able to have real, back-and-forth conversations at scale with all of your clients at no inconvenience to them. 

There’s no app your customers need to download—they can speak directly to you in the same personal way they interact with their friends.

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Partner with Other Local Businesses

To boost the promotion of your Community phone number and extend your reach even further within your area, form a partnership with other local businesses and have them promote your Community number (or cross-promote each other’s). Together you can get in front of more potential customers and increase the chances that people will sign up to join your audience. Look for local businesses that offer services or products that compliment your own and make sense for the patrons of one to be interested in the other.

Incentivize customers to sign up for SMS messages of both businesses by offering a special promotion. This is an easy way to encourage new prospects to try your product or service.

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Host a Local Event

Reach the customers in your area by hosting a local event. Use this event as a way to promote your Community phone number and show them why they’d want to continue to engage with and learn about your company. 

By hosting an event, prospective customers can meet you face to face and then opt-in to marketing notifications from your brand. It’s a great chance for people to know the mission behind your business and intrigue them to connect with you further by joining your SMS Community.

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Target Local Audiences After an Event with the Join Date Filter

More than half of the businesses surveyed in a recent marketing study said they had difficulty proving ROI from an event. Implementing the use of Community’s SMS marketing technology can provide visibility to the success of any event you host and help you organize your audience members by the date they joined. Use the Filter function of your Community app to sort your audience by Join Date and get a clear picture of any increase in subscribers you received. 

Reach out and connect to new members by sending them a custom greeting or notification after your local event. Community’s filters and segmenting functions help you strategize, plan, and promote your next event from the convenience of our app.

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Check Your Insights

The Insights feature in the Community app lets you track your text messages’ success and engagement. You can see which messages your local customers are frequently engaging with and which ones they’re not. Use this information to shape the way you word and time your future messages. 

Reach and connect with the customers in your area by analyzing the insights from their interactions. Keep local customers engaged, and retention rates high by using the Insights feature to influence the text conversations you initiate. 

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Hold a Local Flash Sale

With SMS marketing, holding a flash sale for local customers is super easy. There are flash sale studies that show the first hour of a flash sale is when 50% of the total sales will be made. This means that the sense of urgency created by a flash sale is what drives customers to your business almost immediately. 

Whether you host an in-store flash sale or an online one (or both), you can notify your audience members based on their location and create that sense of urgency needed for a successful flash sale for your nearby customers.

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Offer a Referral Program

One practical reason to focus on your nearby customers is this: Local customers will have local friends who share similar interests. Give these audience members an incentive to tell their friends about your business by setting up a referral program. You can multiply the reach of your business by providing deals and promotions to existing customers who help you bring in new ones. 

Promote your referral program through SMS marketing by providing a link or Keyword that the referred customer can use. The Keywords feature of Community lets you organize and sort audience members into their respective categories for more targeted notifications. Designate a Keyword for referred customers to text in so you can segment them and send them personalized text messages.

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Run a Locals Only Promo

Capitalize on the sense of unity that being a part of a local community gives your consumers. Do this by offering a “Locals Only” promotion or deal as a fun way to encourage them to visit and revisit your business. A locals-only promotion can be anything you think the nearby customer base may be interested in. Try offering a free trial, a continuous discount, or a free add-on to your service as ideas for your locals only promotion. 

Designate a Keyword to create a segment within your Community audience for those in the Locals Only program, then you’re able to send them curated content and connect with them in a unique way. 

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Ask the People What They Want

On average, only one out of 26 unhappy customers will speak up—the rest will simply leave to find another business. Allowing your customers to provide feedback directly to your brand via a convenient method like SMS is vital to retaining your local customer base. 

Learn the needs of the customers in your area and assess your performance in meeting those needs by connecting directly with the source—them. Community’s text marketing platform lets you survey and poll your audience in a way that gives little to no obstacles for members to answer your questionnaire. 

You can then easily sort and group together the similar responses you receive in order to see what the majority of your members are saying about your business. Utilize this feedback to see what drew your nearby customers to your business and where you can improve weaknesses in their experience.

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Summary

You have a unique opportunity to reach customers in your area with the technology of SMS marketing. Community lets you build lasting connections by engaging directly and instantly to your local customer base over text. Segment, filter, and organize your audience to offer better communications and content to them. 

Get to know what attracted them to your business and their needs with Community’s text polls and surveys. There are various ways you can market to the nearby customer base but above all, remember to connect with them personally to build lasting relationships and brand loyalty.  

Sources:

2021 Event Marketing Statistics, Trends, and Data | Bizzabo.com 

Flash Sales: When and When Not To Do an Ecommerce Flash Sale | Shipbob.com 

Only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers complain. The rest churn | CXM.co.uk