Kick Start Your Business With A Grass Roots Marketing Campaign

By Author: Bruce Tucker
Total Articles: 174
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Grass Roots marketing in its simplest definition is marketing to a specific community on an intricate level. Grass roots marketing is the ability to reach people on near personal level. Imagine for a moment that you are going to open up a sandwich shop. Would you run an ad in your local paper? Maybe. Would you run radio or television ads for the specific area you are in? Again, maybe. However the best way to market your business would be through a grass roots effort.

A friend of mine owns a barber shop. As you can imagine it doesn't get any more locally oriented then your neighborhood barber shop. Sure he could run ads in the paper or other media, but he implements a grass roots marketing effort. He picks one day out of the week where he and his employees will hang flyers on doors in the local neighborhood. Specifically they target a different neighborhood each week. On this flyer it might have a coupon or some kid of special for certain days. That is grass roots at the personal level.

Another friend of mine use to be president of a local youth sports organization. His grass roots effort was key to ...
... building the organization up. He targeted all of the local schools by getting the organization's information in their hands (with the permission of the school of course). He also worked with other local volunteer groups to pass along his information to the other organization's youth volunteers. He even went as far as obtaining a list of phone numbers and names and had his entire team of volunteers call each phone multiple times to get the word out.

Your grass roots effort might be similar to the examples above or may be completely different. It all depends on what your business is about and who it services. The best place to start is coming up with a plan. List 10 different ways to reach your local customers in a grass roots effort. Then decide how you are going to hit each item on your list and how often and make sure you determine whether or not it is the best way to spend your time, money and efforts.

Some ideas for grass roots marketing are going door to door hanging flyers, making phone calls, hanging posters on telephone polls, working with local schools, churches and charities, giving a discount to an existing customer if they bring a new customer in with them, and so on. You may come up with some others that work better for you. Whatever method you use, start reaching your customers on an intimate level through grass roots marketing.
About the Author:
Mr. Tucker is a regular contributor on Bukisa, an online community for writers that pay you for your articles. You can also follow him on Twitter.