Congrats! You’ve started a credit repair company and are ready to arm members of your local community with credit repair tools and tips that will help them turn their lives around. While serving your local community, you’re providing yourself with a rewarding source of income.
You may be wondering how to best showcase your credit repair company to potential customers in your local area. Growth strategies for local small businesses often differ in focus from those for a global company or national franchise, so it’s critical to sort out strategies for different goals and markets.
Follow these seven steps, and you’ll be well on your way to becoming one of the best local credit repair companies.
1. Identify the most cost-effective local marketing channels for your target customers
Every local community will have its preferred methods of mass communication, like:
- Neighborhood newsletters
- City newspapers
- Local magazines
- Regional radio stations
- Podcasts
- Online sites and portals like nextdoor.com
Identify the local marketing channels that your particular target customers might frequent. Your target customers and their preferred marketing channels could vary widely based on your credit repair company’s business plan.
Also ensure that these marketing channels are cost-effective in terms of the amount of time, money, and manpower you invest. Sometimes this will be by experimentation and trial and error, while others could be through local market research or talking to other professionals in finance and related industries.
2. Foster partnerships by offering discounts to local organizations
Partnerships with local organizations can take many forms and can be critical for the growth of your local credit repair business. You can provide discounted services, offer free consultations, mingle at local networking events, or even offer the organization an affiliate commission for every customer that the organization refers to your business.
Read the article Top 5 Ways to Make Your Affiliates Love You for tips on engaging local financial affiliates as vital business partners.
3. Co-host entertainment and/or networking events with other local organizations
Community outreach doesn’t have to be all about business; it can be fun too. Whether you work with local organizations you’ve developed partnerships with or other assorted local businesses, these events can be purely entertainment-based or more serious and networking-oriented. From happy hours and charity auctions to panels hosted at the neighborhood library, you have infinite ways to promote your credit repair business through these events.
4. Build and optimize your website to best target your local community
Your credit repair company’s website will be a vital asset as you both attract and convert local leads. Consider offering opt-in resources, such as ebooks and whitepapers, or free consultations to capture potential leads’ email addresses and establish yourself as a thought leader in the local community. Perform keyword searches for your particular local community, and optimize the SEO based on your findings—or hire someone to do it for you. These steps will solidify your website as a viable resource for residents and your customers.
5. Invest in targeted local search marketing
Paid advertisements target your ideal customer or even lookalike audiences to deliver your content to the people most likely to become potential customers. Targeting technology today has evolved with laser-like precision to generate higher quality leads. The drawback here? Paid advertisements can be a significant investment, so when you’re just starting out as a local credit repair business, you may not have the capital yet for this cost.
6. Utilize social media to increase reach and local advertising opportunities
Social media is why paid advertising has become more accurate in its targeting in recent years. These networks provide endless user data that can help you better find potential customers, local business partners, and other opportunities for your local credit repair business. Word-of-mouth also often happens via social media nowadays—another critical reason these marketing channels should be a part of your localized business plan.
Ask clients with whom you’ve recently had success to create a video testimonial that you can upload to your website, or a social media channel (like Facebook or Twitter). Social proof is really important to business success!
7. Get involved with the local community through outreach and volunteerism
Working with and within the local community can also involve outreach and volunteer projects. Your contribution to the greater good may also benefit your business through positive associations and word-of-mouth recommendations by residents and local media. These could be causes specific to your community and solving its unique needs and challenges, or you could stick within the credit or financial sectors.
Read How to Start a Credit Repair Business That is Profitable learn more about how you can build a best in class credit repair company serving your local area!
