Now that you have eaten like there was no tomorrow, camped out for hours, pushed and shoved for Black Friday deals at big-box stores, there’s one more special shopping day this weekend. It’s Small Business Saturday.
Frankly, during this time of year, it’s more difficult for small businesses to woo the American shopper from the big-box retailers. Small Business Saturday is a shopping day promoted by American Express to help stimulate growth for smaller companies between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It’s a collective, conscious effort to ‘Shop Small’ and pay closer attention to small businesses.
So, here are five ways you can get involved on Small Business Saturday:
- Patronize your local small businesses today. Spending more on local businesses helps stimulate the local economy. In an economic study conducted by Local First Arizona indicated that for every $100 spent locally, $73 of it stays local, instead of only $43 if spent at a non-local business. To find participating small businesses, check out this interactive map from American Express.
- Tweet about your favorite small businesses. When bigger brands sponsor notable hashtags on Twitter, small businesses need to fight even harder for more exposure. When Tweet about small businesses, it raises awareness and ultimately helps the cash register ring.
- ‘Like’ your favorite small business on Facebook. They would love to stay in touch and provide you updates about their activities. To show even more support for them, ‘Like’ on their recent posts to help them appear more often in the Facebook News Feed.
- Post a review on Yelp encouraging others to support local businesses. Yelp attracts 84 million monthly visitors to their site. Every second, a consumer calls or looks up directions to a business from their mobile app. Smaller companies thrive from your reviews!
- Help small businesses use social media. Since you’re reading this post, there’s a good chance you can help fellow entrepreneurs use social media to attract prospects and serve more customers. So, share what you know and bridge the social media knowledge gap.
If you run a small business or its marketing program, it’s not too late to get your marketing campaign off the ground in time for the holidays. Download our free holiday marketing guide and you can have a little more green or quality time with friends and family.
Read more about this post, 5 Ways to Support Small Business Saturday on The Infusionsoft Blog.