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Establishing your brand as a Connecticut staple is a critical part of building your brand and setting your business up for success. You don't want to be just another face in the crowd. Instead, you want to show interested consumers that you are a fantastic resource within your industry and a crucial part of Connecticut culture.
Now, more than ever, consumers are looking for ways to support local businesses and business owners. They understand the importance of those local businesses to their communities as a whole. As a result, when you establish yourself as a local business, residents are much more likely to connect with you over your competitors.
Is your brand established as a local Connecticut business and a part of the community? Try these strategies to help with your branding efforts.
1. Master Your Message
The style and colors of your brand are fundamental to establishing who you are and making you recognizable. The way you frame your message is even more critical to shaping your brand. You need a cohesive style guide that will shape your brand messaging based on your values and selling points.
Include the tone and benefits you want to present to your audience, what you want to focus on, and how you frame your message. A comprehensive style guide ensures that no matter who creates your content or what platform you're using, you're offering the same high-quality, branded content to your audience.
2. Create Local Partnerships
Working with local partners is a great way to integrate yourself into the local community, expand your reach, and bring in more business. Local partners can help provide feedback that may help you resolve common and issues and improve your service since they already have a strong understanding of your local customer base and what they need most. When you partner with local businesses, they can also refer business your way, which can help increase trust from customers who already believe in their business or brands and like the idea of working with a company recommended by a brand they already trust.
Look for other local brands that serve a similar target audience. You may find that they will enjoy the opportunity to work together on local events, share advertising, or partner in an initiative to give back to your local community.
3. Give Back to the Community
Finding a way to give back to the local community is a great way to establish yourself as a local presence and improve the overall opinion of your brand. By giving back to the local community, you show that you're committed to the local area, willing to go the extra mile for your clients, and care about the people throughout Connecticut, whether they're part of your customer base or not.
Often, community giving can help improve the overall customer opinion of your brand. Not only that, it takes you out of your bubble and allows you to directly interact with members of the community, putting a face on your brand and giving you a better idea of what those customers like and expect from your brand.
There are several strategies you can use to give back to the community. It could be as simple as donating to or partnering with a local charitable organization. You could choose to host philanthropic events that support the community as a whole. Further, you could choose to have staff members volunteer with local organizations on company time to help establish your presence in the community.
4. Establish a Local SEO Presence
Making your website mobile-friendly and locally optimized through your Google My Business profile can improve performance and make it easier for interested customers to find your business. Focus on link building to your site to help increase your website's authority since links to your content help show that you're an authoritative, trustworthy source in your industry.
SEO is particularly crucial for driving local traffic to your store or website and increasing overall awareness of your brand and your business. Around 72% of consumers that perform a local search will visit a store within five miles of their current location. If your website doesn't appear in those top search results for your local area, you may be missing out on large foot and website traffic that could otherwise come your way.
5. Run PPC Ad Campaigns
PPC ad campaigns can be targeted by interest and location to help reach the people who are most likely to become your customers. They also help improve your search engine marketing efforts, especially among local community members searching for things to do or places to visit. Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads are all ideal for helping to reach your target audience. These platforms each proceed slightly differently and with a different set of rules, which means they can help reach different segments of your target audience more quickly.
Developing your local brand and becoming a fixture within the community is crucial for establishing yourself as a local Connecticut business. By branding yourself as a local business and increasing your advertising efforts while focusing on those vital local elements, you'll find that it's easier to bring in the specific traffic you need for your brand while expanding your reach within the Connecticut community.
