As The Pandemic Lingers On, We Must Support Small Businesses

If 47.5% of your friends and family members suddenly lost their jobs, what would that do to the economy? It would crush it. Another question: how would your life be impacted if 99.9% of all businesses in your hometown suddenly shuttered their doors? You’d probably panic. Well, each of these scenarios would happen instantly if we lost all of our small businesses.

Prime Encode shares insight on how to support small businesses throughout the US.

That’s How Important Small Businesses Are

 Considering that the small businesses in and around your hometown employ your friends, support local schools, and bring money into the local economy, we must all prioritize supporting these businesses even when it’s not convenient. The pandemic, which is fortunately not as devastating as it was two years ago, shut many businesses down and created significant losses for many more. Now is not the time to spend your money at Walmart and Amazon. Instead, we need to keep our dollars where they belong: in our community.

How To Support Small Businesses

Whether you’re a small business owner or community leader, there are many things you can do to help foster an environment of local economic growth. A few suggestions here are:

• Highlight local businesses on social media. Do you have a growing social media presence? Great! You can use your followers to bring in business both to yourself and to other small business owners. Start by committing to highlighting a new business once each week. To do this, create a custom banner using a template. This way, you can change colors, images, and fonts each week to best represent your targeted brand. You might, for example, showcase local restaurants or wineries that buy their own merchandise from you.
• Partner with local businesses to show your appreciation for customers. A happy customer is a loyal customer. Look for local businesses that complement your own, and then brainstorm ways to show appreciation to your shared customer base. Spectrio explains that a smart way to do this is to host a customer appreciation day. You and your partner businesses may offer a discount on a certain day of the month or provide free refreshments for folks that visit your storefronts.
• Don’t ask for discounts. Small businesses set their prices to be as fair and equitable as possible. Even if you could save a dollar or two by going with the big guys, your money is best spent locally. Since most small businesses already have a narrow profit margin, slashing their prices will hurt them significantly.
• Leave reviews. A small gesture that will have a big impact is to leave an online review. US Digital Partners explains that 93% of consumers actually check what other people are saying before they visit or make a purchase from a business. Your kind words may bring in more business for a company that is struggling to pay the bills.
• Wear their gear. Many businesses offer logo gear, especially during community events. Proudly display your local business’s T-shirts, hats, and other apparel as you go about your day shopping, running errands, and picking children up from school. T-shirts are a great way to help create brand recognition, and the more that people see a business’s brand, the more likely they are to remember it when they need that specific type of product or service.

The pandemic hurt many businesses across the US. But, we can band together to ensure that as many small businesses as possible can keep the doors open, even if we have another wave of disaster. The above tips are just a few smart and compassionate ways to support the 99.9% of businesses that aren’t owned by a giant corporation.

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