Many starting entrepreneurs go out guns blazing, looking to expand as quickly as possible from their small and humble store into a nationwide brand. And while we’ve all heard about startups that went from a garage project to a billion-dollar company seemingly overnight, striving to grow your brand in its local market first and foremost provides invaluable entrepreneurial lessons. Here are a few reasons why you should secure your home market first.
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A US-based shopping holiday known as Small Business Saturday is put into action every 26th of November to support local businesses. This initiative alone generated a whopping $16 billion in sales for small businesses last year. If you can capture even a fraction of this targeted spending, your sales can dramatically increase with minimal effort required.
Strong Community Presence
Establishing a positive image and presence in your local neighborhood is a viable strategy to optimize your business’ reputation, build customer loyalty, and be lauded as a top employer in the area. With social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, enabling faster and wider coverage of business-related news, it’s increasingly becoming a necessity to paint a positive image of your brand locally.
Capital Reinvestment
If your local operations do not generate positive cash flow, expanding into nationwide territory will be impossible. Your local operations will be generating the revenues that you’ll then be able to reinvest into the business to expand. Secure your business’ local market by learning continuously the ins and outs of your industry. For instance, pursuing a technology program at a well-established campus, such as Interactive College of Technology, can improve your knowledge regarding IT systems and software management tools.
Focused Effort
It’s much better to start at one place rather than to scatter your efforts into different niches while trying to get rich quick. Chasing any and every audience you could think of only leads to loss of limited resources including manpower, time, and cash. To accommodate different types of clients and cultures in your area, employ multilingual employees who are technically trained and have strong interpersonal skills.
Brand Awareness
Local community members are typically more supportive of businesses that are rooted in their neighborhood. As such, they help the brand grow through word of mouth advertising, which needless to say is free for your business.
Securing your business’ local market is an imperative to business success. It feels slow to grow a business locally as the consumer base is smaller and so are the resulting revenues, but keep in mind that it’s a marathon rather than a sprint.
