Supporting local can have a world of impact in keeping small businesses in your community.
As a business owner or a customer, we can all play a role in helping Canadian small businesses manage not just survive, but thrive, in the market. Here are 6 of the ways we choose to show our support for our small business community:
- Write A Review or Recommendation: This is a no-cost way to help your favourite businesses continue to grow, and this applies to both consumer and commercial businesses. Love a product you’ve purchased in the past? Write a Google Review or a Facebook review (or both!). Impressed with the level of service you experienced? Provide a LinkedIn recommendation. Getting good value by working with another company? Offer to provide a testimonial or become case study. There are a lot of ways to share your positive feedback to help showcase the great work that that company does for future customers or clients.
- Share a Post: This one is easy to do and relatively low impact but can help boost your favourite businesses social presence. Engage with their social media posts, share them to your feed or stories, bookmark your favourites – it all helps improve that brand’s visibility and can help grow their business reach.
- Recommend To A Friend: A show of support doesn’t always have to be posted online. A simple introduction to an industry peer or a product recommendation to a friend can still help your favourite local business.
- Place An Order: At the end of the day, your local businesses will need your business in order to grow. Work with your favourite local businesses and shop from your favourite local shops. And of course all those reviews and recommendations are a great way to start looking for another local favourite.
- Give a Gift Certificate: If your favourite local businesses have gift cards, giving a local GC can become a double-whammy of support. Not only are you giving your business to a local company, you get to share (and maybe introduce) that company with someone else too!
- Encourage Your Friends & Family to Support Local: Mighty oaks from little acorns grow. Encouraging your network to seek out local products first can help create a groundswell of small business love in your community.
There are lots of way to support local. Find one or two that work for you, and pick two or three (or more!) of your favourite local businesses and show them some love.
How do you support local? Drop a comment below and let us know (we’d love to hear your favourite local brands, too!).
