Local Connections: An Introduction to Collaborative Marketing for Local Businesses

As a local business owner or manager, you're a very real part of your community and you likely refer friends, family, and clients to other local businesses on a regular basis. This word-of-mouth marketing has and always will be the most powerful marketing available. 

Unfortunately, word-of-mouth marketing in incredibly inefficient.

Collaborative Marketing is a way for local businesses to endorse the businesses, organizations, and nonprofits they truly care about but provide this endorsement in a more automated and scalable way. 

If you're a part of a local Chamber, BNI or LeTip group you participate in a more standardized and coordinated process.

In the image above, you see an offline example of collaborative Marketing from Backyard Customs Landscaping here in Folsom, CA - I took this picture while enjoying a walk with my family one morning in our neighborhood.

Collaborative marketing clearly benefits to businesses Backyard Customs is referring to, however, promoting others actually helps Backyard Customs as well.

See, it shows they're an active part of the community - they give and not just take.

Plus, if anyone loves any of the other businesses that are shown then they're going to implicitly think Backyard Customs is cool/nice/better/preferred simply because they also like that business.

Plus, if anyone loves any of the other businesses that are shown then they're going to implicitly think Backyard Customs is cool/nice/better/preferred simply because they also like that business.

We like people who like what we like.

Adding Automation to Collaborative Marketing for Local Businesses

As a local business, you're a critical part of your community and Collaborative Marketing is one way to participate. At Locable, we're developing tools to help you take this further and automate the process online - yep, set-it-and-forget-it Collaborative Online Marketing for local businesses.

Update - June 2017

We've introduced the free Local Connections™ & Community Tools in our Local Marketing Platform which makes it super simple to highlight your real-world relations and turn them into an online referral network.

More than that, you can highlight local causes and charities you support (it's good for you and good for them)...

Join Now to create your Local Connections™ in just a few minutes