How to Market a Computer Business in a Small Town

Starting up and managing a business in a small town can be a challenge. Small towns often have tight knit business and social networks that it can be hard to break into, as new businesses can often be seen as unwelcome competition for existing businesses.

This occurs even though new businesses are a sign of growth for the area, which ought to be welcomed in small towns. How can you succeed in a small town, or in a rural area with scattered small towns?

1. Reach Out

In smaller towns, people are less likely to just pick up a phone book and find the service they need. They’ve usually been there long enough that they have someone they call for A/C services, someone they call to fix their car, someone they call to work on their house, and so on. If they don’t know someone personally, they call a friend who recommends someone, and that’s who they call to do the work.

What you need to do is reach out in the community, and let people know what you do. Get into the business and social network of your area by meeting fellow business owners, finding out what they offer, and telling them what you offer. Most small towns have some sort of group meetings, festivals, or gatherings where you’ll find the socially active members of the town. If you attend them and mingle, you’ll make some acquaintances that may lead to some business.

Does your town have a program where you can volunteer your time on some project? If you have the time, why not try it? You want to reach out in your community, and by reaching out you’ll make business contacts which will lead to more business eventually. As your social network grows, the number of people who will call you for work will continue to grow, if you are a trusted and honest business person and perform quality work.

If your town has a Chamber of Commerce or there are BNI meetups nearby, take advantage of them. Of course, some chambers don’t offer much in the way of networking or advertising, and charge a disproportionate price for membership. If that’s the case in your area, print up some flyers, and go around and personally meet all the business owners in your area, and pass out your business cards. Take an interest in their services, and engage in some small talk, and build up some relationships.

Do you have a local Co-op? Some have corkboards where you can pin business cards and flyers. Look at the board and decide whether it would be better to put your name and number and what you do on an index card and pin it to the board, or pin up a professional looking business card. Depending on the style of everything else on the board, you might have better success mirroring that style rather than putting up a slick looking business card, I know that method has had success before. You can always come back later and change it if you need to, but definitely give it a shot.

If the newspaper is heavily read in your town, see if you can have an article written about your business. If the local radio station is really popular in your town, and the advertising isn’t expensive, have a commercial aired for your services, just to get your name out. Listen to some of the commercials for the successful local businesses, and mirror that style, for a better chance of success. When new businesses start up, be one of the first through the door to find out what they offer, and give them a discount on your services as a new start-up business. Get your foot in the door before your competition does.

2. Offer Remote Support & Service Call Options

Depending on how spread out the small towns in your area are, you could end up spending a lot of funds on transportation if you drive to every service call for simple fixes. Often in rural areas with small towns, the major businesses are in the largest central small town, and residents of the rural areas make frequent trips to check their P.O. boxes, get groceries, or fuel.

Instead of you coming to them, offer them a slight discount if they bring the machine to you rather than you coming to them. This isn’t always possible, especially if they aren’t able to reconnect the machine when they bring it home again. However, I find the majority of my clients are comfortable with disconnecting everything and reconnecting it when they bring it home, so it’s worth mentioning to those clients who are located far away from your shop.

Can you offer remote support? Often an issue can be fixed very easily with 10 minutes or so of work done remotely. This will save the client the extra cost of your travel time, and save you the time spent travelling when you could be finishing up another job for more profit. One problem of course is bandwidth isn’t always available in remote locations. Check out this list of remote support utilities here. .

Look around for businesses that are shops next to the owner’s house. See if they need internet service at their shop, or around their residence. If they do, you can either run cable to wherever they need connectivity, or you can put up a WiMAX system if they want service in a wide area around their house or ranch.

3. Word of Mouth and Referrals

In a small town, word of mouth is your most powerful asset, but it’s more or less a double edged sword. If you perform quality services and do good work, that good reputation will be multiplied by word of mouth in a small town. However, business people who perform half-heartedly on jobs and cut corners and rip people off to make easy money will find that word of mouth will cut their career in that small town short. Everyone who knows you will tell their friends and neighbors about you, whether it’s good or bad, so when you perform services in a small town, a good reputation will carry your advertising for you.

Because word of mouth is so powerful in small towns, you should make use of it with referrals. One way is to hand out a few extra business cards with 15% discount written on the back, and give them to your new clients. They’re more likely to hand out those cards if they can get their friends a discount, and in a small town, that’s more likely to happen. You could also put the new client’s name on the back of those cards, and when they come in, the initial new client who you gave the cards to could receive a discount for referring you to their friends. Of course, these are just a few ways you can take advantage of the social networks of small towns, but it should give you some ideas.

4. Be Persistent

Don’t give up! You may not see results for quite a while, especially with the smaller towns, until people start to get to know you. Word of mouth is the most important advertising method in the smaller towns, and it takes a little bit of time to get that going, but once it does, it really takes off, and you’ll get a lot of referral business.