Sometimes, you just want to go where everybody knows your name.
The false success of followers
It’s easy to look at businesses with a large following and consider them successful. You may think they’re raking it in. You may be wondering how to get more followers on Instagram. But in a world where you can purchase Instagram followers, high social media numbers do not equal a winning business.
Local action over national attention
Local businesses sell mostly to locals. If you’re trading in a rural context, you have a much smaller pool of potential clients than city-based. Whilst growing your audience is important, it’s more important who you are targeting and how you are targeting them. The population of Oswestry is 17,509. The whole of Shropshire is 319,189. Only a segment of your local population will be interested in your product, so you need to identify and activate them. They need to be local and they need to be motivated. It’s all well and good having a massive online following, but it needs to be made up of people who will actually make a purchase. In reality, only a section of your followers are part of your client base. When someone interacts with your content and then buys your products, this is referred to as conversion. To increase sales, conversion rate is what you’re aiming for. If people enjoy your online content, but do not actually buy something, the content doesn’t work.
Community, not audience
So how do you motivate people to buy? Large companies like Microsoft and Porsche use aspects of gamified design to improve their conversion rate and interaction with their brand. There is no reason small rural businesses couldn’t benefit from this design strategy. Gamification deserves its own series of blogs, but one aspect which leads to strong and sustained action is the development of a community around the brand. We humans are social animals. Creating a space where people interact with each other around your brand gives them a reason to stay with your content and makes your brand a part of their day. Introduce customer interaction and customer-generated content to your marketing strategy. A good meme can go a long way. This is classic peer-pressure. If people you trust are using or supplying a product, you’re more likely to trust that product with your money.
Be a Face
People are more likely to trust a person than a logo. And they’ll trust someone they know over a stranger. Use short video to regularly highlight your team’s personality. It can humanise you and instil confidence in your brand. It helps people feel like they know you, as you would get to know the cashier in the corner shop. Personality-driven content creates the feeling of a social relationship with your business and makes people much more likely to purchase your products.
The Virtual Village
As country boys, we know the strength of rural communities lies in their close-knit, word-of-mouth connections. Everybody knows everybody. And a good reputation locally is worth a million likes or retweets. Rural people are often connected by local Facebook or Instagram groups in a sort of “virtual village”. Your local business can tap into these pre-built communities and become a trusted face within them. It also gives you a place where you can talk to your would-be customer base and learn about their needs. Better insight into customers’ needs allows you to target your products and marketing to meet them. This will lead to a higher conversion rate, as well as a sustainable customer base.
So, stop trying to buy Instagram followers for your local business and instead invest time in building your online community.
