The Locavore trend refers to people who eat food grown locally whenever possible. You can use a similar sense of place in to indoctrinate cold prospects to either an Internet-based business or a bricks-and-mortar location.
Bricks-and-Mortar Business: Go Local Online
If people must come to you to get what you’re offering, then including your location on your website is essential. But you can go beyond a basic footer with your address and contact information. Include your location as part of the romance of your business identity.
Look at Celestial Seasonings tea, available worldwide. As part of their marketing and brand identity, every box proclaims “Blended in Boulder.” It also has a brief, Rocky Mountain company origin story.
And they don’t stop there. Online, the Celestial Seasonings home page invites visitors to come tour the tea factory in Boulder and try all 105 varieties of tea.
Even In Cyberspace, Place Matters
While the Worldwide Web smashes traditional borders, we still live in the real world. Place matters in the mind of the buyer.
While your global buyers may not care about where you’re located, the people in your community do. The folks in Los Gatos, California care about Netflix. People in Seattle care about Amazon.com and its impact on their community.
Amazon is the largest e-commerce retailer on the planet. Part of that success is their website, geared toward the user. They don’t get in your face about who they are, where they are, because they know most people don’t care.
But at the bottom of the marketplace page, under a heading “Get to Know Us,” you’ll find links to pages about the company.
Interested readers can see how Amazon reinvested in downtown Seattle instead of moving to the suburbs…
Discover the variety of programs they support in and outside of Seattle… Or that they sponsor the annual 4th of July fireworks in town.
Ignore the local community in which you do business at your peril.
Business and community are the building blocks of any place. The more you can blend the online presence of your business into your community, the better.
What can you do in your online marketing that celebrates your community and sense of place?
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