10 Creative Digital Marketing Ideas For Local Businesses

How did you find your favorite coffee shop, restaurant, or antique shop?

Maybe your friends showed it to you. Maybe you just saw a nice sign and came in one time. Or maybe you saw one of their amazing marketing campaigns.

One social media ad or a blog post from an influencer can do wonders for a local business.

However, there is a problem: for local businesses, it’s often harder to find budgets for marketing activities.

They often don’t have the resources of huge commercial chains and corporations to pour them into advertising, celebrity collaborations, and so on.

Nonetheless, marketing doesn’t have to be expensive.

You’ll just have to get more creative with it.

In this article, we hope to inspire you with marketing ideas that local businesses can implement on a smaller budget – or even for free!

1. Collaborate With A Local Influencer

You might not have a budget to buy a promotional post from an Instagram blogger with 1 million followers, but micro-influencers can be just as (if not more) effective.

And who is a better candidate for collaboration than a blogger or an industry expert who lives in your area?

The problem is, how do you find such an influencer?

A simple Google search won’t do – it’ll likely show you bigger accounts and popular names and not micro-bloggers.

Besides, it’s difficult to make Google focus on a specific town for this task.

What you need here is social listening software.

Such tools are able to find accounts with any given number of followers that talk about particular topics.

In addition to that, you’re able to choose your town in the settings to make sure you only get relevant results.

You can filter your search results by the minimum and maximum amounts of followers and look through the profiles.

Choose the people you think will be a good fit and reach out to them!

You can invite them to your store and give them a tour or offer a free product.