The Pride Guides are popping up all over town and Capital City Pride is just three weeks away!
There isn’t much time left to prepare, but here are few things you need to think about in getting your business ready for Pride Season.
Branding your business
Branding a small business can be a challenge. Most businesses don’t have the budget of Coca-Cola or or Volkswagen.
Branding is about creating an image or message that is accessible and relateable to your target customers. You want your customers to identify you through this image or slogan.
This is where the challenge lies for small businesses, building their identity in a world inundated with competing information.
One of the best resources online with tips for helping small businesses brand themselves is Small Business Branding.com.
Pride is an ideal time to update and review your branding strategy or to start thinking about one if you haven’t yet.
For LGBT businesses or businesses serving the LGBT market, there is no better time of year to get your brand out and visible to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.
This is the one time a year the whole community is focused together on a single event and paying close attention to who and who isn’t there supporting and sponsoring the festivities.
Marketing your business
Marketing your business in the flood of information everyone is exposed to is another huge challenge.
Pride is a great time to develop and release targeted marketing. One of the better entries on Small Business Branding.com details 5 things a business can do to market to existing and potential customers. I’ll rework some of their ideas to fit in with Pride month.
Some simple and cheap Pride Season marketing:
Send out a reminder to your customers in June wishing them happy Pride month and reminding them of your products and services and what new products of services you’ve recently begun offering.
Target your LGBT customers with special Pride month discounts. Discounts are often the best way to encourage prospective customers to go ahead and try your products and services.
Reward your customers with Pride month referrals. LGBT customers can be amongst the most brand loyal of any customers. And, good word of mouth is the best way to viral market your services in the LGBT community.
Use your booth at Capital City Pride to do some simple market research. Folks love give-aways. Do a drawing or raffle for a product or service in exchange for folks answering a 2 or 3 key questions. The wording of the questions is important. Put some serious thought into what information you most want or need to know about your current or prospective customers.
Your business’ website
I rely almost exclusive on Google searches to find products and services. I recently visited Kansas City. I was heading down for business but knew I’d have some time for pleasure.
I tried to do a search for gay bars, events and businesses in Kansas City. All I found were dead links, out dated information or worse yet nothing at all. In my mind those places had gone out of businesses. Or if they didn’t show up on my search, they didn’t exist at all.
It is so important to have an up to date website and even more important that your website if searchable.
Global OUTage is, of course, a web development company. One of our specialty services is search engine optimization (SEO). We can get your website higher in the Google rankings in time for Pride month and catch all those out of town visitors looking for LGBT friendly services.
Your business’ blog
You want to communicate with your customers. One of the most cost effective ways and least intrusive ways to communicate with those customers is with a blog on your website. Blogging should be “10% sales pitch and 90% good content.â€
We often hear from our customers that they don’t have time or ability to maintain a blog. However, blogging is a powerful tool and the time and energy commitment is well worth the investment.
There are hundreds of tips online to help you refine your blogging technique and give you new blogging ideas.
These are just a few tips to get your started. If you don’t have time to get ready for Pride 2007, get a head start for Pride 2008 by setting up a meeting with us.